Welcome back f***er

So I returned to school today after a too-exciting-for-words weekend in Vegas. I think I should have stayed an extra day. A boy in my class has been bringing a water bottle to school every day since the beginning of the school year. It's fine when it's 87 degrees outside. Not really necessary when sheets of ice are covering the playground. On Friday before I left I simply told him to take the water bottle home because it doesn't need to be at school any longer. Waiting on my desk when I returned today was a note from his mom which read, "Please allow Noah to keep his water bottle at school. I do not allow him to use the school drinking fountain because he has a history of contracting herpes from fountains." I'm hoping she means that he's getting blisters on his mouth and not on his genitals. If he's sticking his penis in the stream of water from a drinking fountain, I think we might have more problems than just the herpes.

Then towards the end of the day we were doing a seemingly harmless Christmas craft. The students traced their handprints several times, cut them out, and assembled them to form a wreath. Supposedly a boy said to another boy sitting beside him that his cutting was subpar and that his handprints looked more like monster claws. Like any good third grader would do he simply turned to him and called him a "f***er" which echoed all the way over to my desk on the other side of the room. In what seemed like a single bound I leaped over to him, grabbed his arm, and took him into the hall. I went through the typical conversation about how that wasn't appropriate to say at school or really anywhere else. I asked him why he said it and he said that he didn't really think it was a bad word. Rather than calling him a liar directly to his face, I simply said something to the effect of "You're too smart of a boy to not know that was inappropriate." He followed this up by stating his defense while in the process saying the word several more times: "My dad always calls our dog a f***er even though my mom tells him not to say f***er in front of us. She says that f***er is a bad word for kids to hear." It was like sitting through a elementary school production of "The Big Lebowski." Where's the $1 Vegas margaritas when you need them?