An R-rated morning

This morning one of the girls in my class was supposed to be getting her assignment notebook out of her backpack yet instead pulled out some handcuffs. Naturally she had the attention of everyone in the room. Before telling her to put them away, I asked her where she got them from. After initially responding that they were fake, I asked her the question again. She went on to explain that she found them in a box in her 16-year old sister's closet. Now really there's only two reasons why a 16-year would have hidden handcuffs. Either you're fighting crime as a superhero when the sun goes down or you're the most popular member of the pom squad for some not-hard-to-explain reason. I'm thinking positive and hoping that she's Wonder Woman.

Today one of the boys in my class came up to me in distress, holding the book he had been reading about an expedition to Antarctica. His eyes grew wide as wide as he shoved the book in my hand and stammered "There's a bad word in this book, Mr. Ritchason!" I instantly got nervous, thinking back to my first year of teaching when I had assigned two girls to read Bridge To Terabithia, completely forgetting that the author had thrown in a "damn" and "hell" for good measure. After listening to one of the mothers berate me over the phone and equate me with some Russian dictator (To this day, I still don't understand the connection), I've been very conscious of what books I add to my classroom library. So I asked the boy to show me where he came across the offending passage. He flipped to it and read aloud "Siegal quickly took readings with compass and sextant." It should be noted that he couldn't bring himself to say the last word. I soon realized that he thought it read "sex tent." I explained that it was simply an instrument used to track the location of something and that it was not a frosty love shack formed from blocks of ice for two hot-blooded Eskimo looking to get it on.