Part One: When my back and legs are feeling particularly bad, I take prescription pain medication. Usually, so I can sleep, but more and more, so I can make it through a school day without a constant cringe on my face. It worries the children. Anyway, Husband Styro decided that the pain meds should have a cooler name, and cited "horse" for heroin as his example. He selected "orangutan." (When I wanted to try an alternative for awhile to keep from building a resistance, we went the Monty Python route and called it "sloth." As in, "And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs, and the sloths, and the orangutans, and the fruit bats, and the breakfast cereals..." For the record, sloth was ineffective, as was fruit bat. "Skip ahead, brother...")
Part Two: Every morning, before school officially starts, the children work on Daily Language Review (DLR). Some teachers use DOL, which stands for Daily Oral Language, although, since it's written, not spoken, I don't get the name. In any case, one of our sentences that needed to be corrected was about Mexican tarantulas being very large insects. Insects was misspelled, among other corrections, but my first language arts class took issue with the term, and thought it should be "arachnids" instead, so we made that change. Maybe arachnids are insects. Entomology was never my strong suit. I don't even like the word spider (Imagine if it had boobs?).
Part Three: When the other class came in to make the same corrections, I asked them if spiders were insects. "Oh, wait!" One VERY LOUD GIRL called out, "Aren't they arachutans? Or something?" One of the other kids corrected her pronunciation.
And the whole class wondered why Mrs. Wyatt was laughing so much.
