Just Whistle

I'll bet you're expecting a blog about my novel Just Whistle, right?

Wrong!

Yesterday was the last day of school before spring break. I had planned to read Chapter 24 of To Kill A Mockingbird with my students, but I just wasn't feeling it. I mean, I absolutely loooooooove that chapter (even though freakin' Grace Merriweather gets me all fired up and makes me so angry with her cryptic, narrow-minded, hypocritical comments) and really enjoy dissecting it with my students... but I just didn't have the energy to go there yesterday. So do you know what we did instead? We had a coloring competition. Every student received a To Kill A Mockingbird-releated coloring sheet that they were supposed to work on for about 35 minutes. At the end of the period, we would vote on the winning piece of art and the creator/colorer would receive eight points of extra credit (because eight is my favorite number... which sort of ties in beautifully with Just Whistle, but this blog isn't about that). In the event of a tie (there wasn't a tie), the score would be settled with a rousing round of rock-paper-scissors.

While the students colored, I played our Monday Melody Playlist, which enabled us to travel together down a Memory Lane of sorts. There were songs from the very start of the year and conversations centered around the article that song was paired with. I had a good time. But here's where the day got funny, right?

Period seven.

At the start of period seven, for whatever reason, I was REALLY whistling hard. Like, I was belting it out at top volume, not really following a tune or anything, and just basically trying to whistle as obnoxiously loud as possible while my students entered the room. Once they'd shown up, I said to them, "How about we all just whistle together for a minute and have a nice, enjoyable time?"

"No," they said.

I kept whistling.

Then someone asked what we were going to be doing in class. I answered, "Well, I thought we might have a nice time whistling and then transition into more fun with a coloring competition, but since no one would whistle with me, I guess we'll just read."

"No!" they said again, this time for a different reason. "We'll whistle. Everyone will whistle."

So we did! And even though I am fully aware that they think I'm zanier than ever, the experience was just weird enough to crack me up then... and to continue to crack me up now, more than twenty-four hours later! Isn't that wonderful?

Sometimes, a person's gotta just whistle, you know?