1. Scot . mischievous; often in trouble for mischief.
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Mrs. Harrison looked around the room. The students were oddly quiet. She had been a teacher long enough to know
what that meant. There was a problem
student at work here. One that she knew
would be a frequent thorn in her side.
She just needed to find said student.
She
scanned the room, trying to pick out the mischief maker. None of them stood out though. Mrs. Harrison knew better than to push the
issue though, and simply started her lesson for the day. She took every opportunity to peak over her
shoulder and see if the trouble maker was there, with no such luck.
That
could mean any number of things. It
could mean she was dealing with a clever clown.
One who knew when to behave for maximum effect of his pranks, jokes, or
other forms of trouble. Or, it could be
that the entire class knew about this person, and they were banding
together. It wouldn’t be the first time
she had seen that happen. As a
substitute teacher, she had seen everything in her 40 years o the job. She would find this problem student, no
matter what happened.
She
took a close look around the room, focusing on the eyes of those in the back
row. Those were the ones to watch. They’d give it away, even if they didn’t
intend to. Several of them looked dead
ahead, focusing with an almost unnatural attention to the board and her
lesson. They wouldn’t be of any
help. The rest of them, on the other
hand, were a veritable bold mine on nonverbal information. Their eyes darted all around the room,
looking at various places for mere seconds at a time. Those eyes didn’t help Mrs. Harrison identify
the rascal, but it did tell her one thing.
Whoever it was had already set his trap and was just waiting for her to
fall into it.
She had
already gone in through the door, so there was nothing there. The board was a whiteboard, not a chalkboard,
so it couldn’t be anything involving chalk either. Mrs. Harrison went to the desk and made to
pull out the chair. And there it
was. A reaction. A few students leaned forward slightly. It wasn’t much, but it was there. She glanced down at the seat and saw it
immediately. A small thumbtack was
resting there, just waiting for her to sit on it. One of the older and more commonly seen
tricks to play. Apparently, whatever
skills the mischief maker had in hiding his identity, he lacked in
creativity.
Mrs. Harrison
went to pluck the tack from the cushioned chair, and found it to be stuck. She pulled a bit before going in for a closer
look. Tape. He had used tape to hold the tack in
place. A bit more clever, but not by
much. She had seen worse. Still, the tack had been pushed through the
bottom of the tape, so it would need a bit more effort to remove. She tugged hard enough to overcome the
stickiness of the adhesive and finally removed the offending object.
As soon
as she did though, she heard a pop and not a moment later, her glasses and face
were covered with thin, red face paint.
She stepped back, more than a little startled and wiped her glasses of
to the sound of riotous laughter from the students. Part of the cushion had been forced apart,
and she could see it was much, much thinner than what she had expected. Apparently, the student had smarter than she
had given him credit for. He had rigged
a fake seat cushion with a small airbag like device followed by an equally
small paint bomb. She held the tack, and
found a fish line attached to the bottom of it that had acted as the trigger
for the whole thing. She had to give the
student some credit. This was a new one
by her, and it was quite clever. That
didn’t mean she could let whoever it was get away with it though.
She turned
to the class and scanned the room. Just
b looking, it was nearly impossible to pick out the culprit. She called out for the offending student to
come forward. None did, but that was to
be expected. They may not even have
heard her over the sound of their own laughter.
She bellowed out her instruction again.
This time, she got a reaction.
The
student who stood to take credit was not one she had been expecting. The student was not in the back, or even the
middle of the room, but the front. In fact,
the student sat in the exact middle of the front row of desks. The other unexpected trait the prankster had
was that it wasn’t a boy, but a girl. It
was one of the girls Mrs. Harrison had thought would be easy to handle due to
good behavior. The girl simply had that
small, studious look about her, and had even been in her seat before Mrs.
Harrison had arrived. That fact hit the
substitute like a ton of bricks. Of
course it would be her. This was not
something someone could do on short notice.
The reason this girl had been in class so early was because she was
setting up the elaborate trap.
The
class cheered as the girl took a bow before the class. She was clearly quite proud of her feat. The class cheered her name as Mrs. Harrison
demanded she report to the vice principal’s office. It took several tried to get any of them to
respond to her words. She very nearly
had to grab the girl and pull her away from her admirers. Once the girl was out of the room, it took
even longer for the rest of the class to settle down enough for Mrs. Harrison
to try and resume teaching. It wasn’t
easy due to the red splotches of paint covering her face, but she would
manage. Still, that girl was something
else. Judging from the set up, this
probably wasn’t the first time the girl had pulled something like this
off. She might have even been a regular
at the authority’s office. It was something
she had never encountered before in all the time she had been teaching. Apparently, Mrs. Harrison hadn’t seen
everything the job had to offer.
**************************Remember kids, doing things like this is bad, ok? Teachers work hard for what they get. Don't make their lives any harder with pranks of any kind. It's not as cool as you might think.
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