(In which my last resort turned out to be a hit.)
***
Friday. It was the day when my students Mikey and Bangs will be going to Boracay with other students. They look happy and excited that Bangs even took her Friday test last Thursday in anticipation for the weekend hangover from Bora. Yet I doubt their decision of going on a trip on this kind of weather. With the doubt comes envy. I need a vacation too. So two students going away means several hours of additional sleep. That will do.
But the night before the trip, I received a text message saying that they cancelled their trip because of the weather. I bade goodbye to my several hours of additional sleep. That’s not a very big problem really. But the thing is I didn’t prepare an exam for Mikey since he asked to be given a test on Monday. And great thanks to my work schedule, I barely had time to enjoy dinner.
So I did something for Mikey first thing the next morning. I thought of giving him tongue twisters on the sounds he is having the most difficulty. His face twitched when he saw me with the papers, thinking that they were test papers.
“Exam? But you told me on Monday!” he said, trying hard to make me understand how important was the promise I broke.
“No. They’re tongue twisters.” I replied.
“Ahh.. Okay”
After some mouth stretching, we started off with… yeah, Peter Piper - our dear friend from the elementary school who never got tired of picking pickled peppers and packs of papers.
The student from the other room seemed so curious about our chants which are oozing with P’s and occasional F’s that she asked her teacher about it. A moment later, while we were chanting how the flea and the fly flew through the flaw in the flue, I heard her saying something about the girl who sells seashells by the seashore. When the bell rang, I went back to the room where I conduct phone classes to check on my e-mail. When I went out, I saw, much to my surprise and gladness, a bunch of students chanting where the pickled pepper Peter Piper picked was and that Laura and Larry rarely lull their rural roosters to sleep.
At least I did something interesting today.
