Do you remember that boredom montage from “The Breakfast Club,” right before the principal walked into the media center and asked his inmates if they wanted a bathroom break? It showed each of the five doing something to pass the time that was somehow indicative of their characters: The jock was playing with the string on his sweatshirt, the outcast was using her dandruff to make it snow on the picture she’d just drawn on her desk, and so on. I’m always reminded of that when I go through my run of proctoring tests. Procedure dictates the students are allowed as much time as necessary to complete these tests to their best of their ability. This inevitably means some people will finish long before others.
Even if testing goes on for hours and hours, it’s our job to be aware of all that’s happening in the room in case someone needs our help. On one hand, this is as boring as you might think. But on the other hand, you get to see a lot of the goofy things kids do to pass the time when they’re done with their tests and have to wait right along with you. Some will take naps, some will actually read the books they brought, some might decide to draw. Over the years I’ve also seen them do everything from coloring the teeth on a sweatshirt zipper with a highlighter to drawing faces on eraser caps to playing peek-a-boo across the room with a friend, to just so many nose picks.
One testing day many, many years ago I had a kid that absolutely took the cake on passing the time. Everyone had moved their desks apart, which is the usual thing we teachers will have the kids do on testing days to discourage cheating. One kid (we’ll call him Grant today; not his real name) pushed his desk into an unobtrusive kind of a nook created by the back counter and a bookshelf sticking out from the wall. One of his buddies (we’ll call him Timmy; not his real name either) sat closer to the front and pushed his desk against mine so we were practically sitting face to face. (There’s always at least one little wisenheimer who does this.) We got through the morning just fine, but when the afternoon session was done Grant finished pretty early. Somehow his ten-year-old brain arrived at the conclusion that his best option for passing time was to sit face down with his lips smashed against the surface of his desktop and push his head around in an ever-widening, saliva-lubricated ellipse. The motion soon caught my attention, and it was both so hypnotic and disgusting it was impossible not to look at. Normally I would have kept watching just to see how long he’d keep it up, but I was distracted by a repressed snort from right in front of my desk. I turned me head and saw Grant’s friend Timmy, watching me watch Grant.
We locked eyes for a brief moment, but that was all it took before we were both ready to explode in laughter. I had to look away to keep it together, and Timmy opened the book he’d finished that morning to a random page just so he’d have a reason to hide his face from me. We spent a good twenty minutes on the verge of blooper-reel levels of laughing fits. Any time for the rest of that session when I had to get up and walk around or even just scan the room from my desk, I had to make a point not to look at Timmy, even long after Grant had found something else to do. When the last person finished and I called time, Timmy began laughing so hard I thought he might break a blood vessel, and of course I started laughing too. Everyone wanted to know what was so funny but we couldn’t even talk. When things eventually calmed down and the other students stopped caring, Timmy went and told Grant what we’d been laughing about. When he was done telling the story, both boys looked over at me. All Grant could do was smile with amusement and laugh and shrug, as if to say, “Seriously. What else was I going to do?” All I could do was laugh and shake my head.
Knowing how boring tests are from the teacher point of view and remembering what they were like as a student, I couldn’t really blame him. I just hoped his desk was never the one the custodian would set the garbage can on in the evenings when he came through to sweep the floor.
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