A happy life is sent every day

Yesterday the loopy professor wafted into the teachers' room just after I arrived.

"Badaunt-sensei!" she cried. "I wanted to talk to you!"

The part-time teacher who had just been starting to tell me some scandalous gossip about the school melted away discreetly, and the rest of the room miraculously emptied as well.

"How are you today?" I asked.

"I'm very well, thank you!" she said. "I have some information for you. We have new classrooms. Today we are in these rooms . . . wait . . . I have the paper here . . ."

She rifled through some papers and most of them slid to the floor. As we were picking them up she suddenly remembered she had to make a phone call, and rushed off.

I finished picking up her papers and started sorting out my own. After a while she got off the phone and came back to where I was sitting.

"I want to tell you something," she confided. "Administration has told us about some disabled students we have in our classes. I don't have any, but you do. I have the names here."

"Thank you," I said, wondering how I could have missed disabled students last week. "It's good to know about things like that."

"Yes!" she said. "The teachers should be told! I'll make a copy for you."

She went to the lithograph machine and started pushing buttons. After a while of nothing happening I noticed what she was doing and suggested that since she was only making one copy she might want to use the copy machine instead.

She made the copy.

"Here you are!" she said, handing it to me. "Let me see . . . you have a deaf student in your Wednesday class."

"Oh," I said, staring at the paper. "Um . . . I don't have a Wednesday class this year."

"Oh, yes!" she said. "That's right!"

"But I appreciate the thought," I said. "It is important to know these things."

"Yes! It's VERY important! I don't know why they don't tell the teachers. Oh, and here are our classroom assignments for today's classes," she said. "I changed them. Now we have classrooms with DVD players!"

She giggled.

"That's good," I said, smiling at her, but she had gone off to make another phone call.

The bell rang, and I waited. Eventually she came back.

"I have the information here about our classrooms today," she said, and started going through her papers again.

"Here it is," I said, showing her the paper she had given me.

"Oh, yes!" she said. "And don't forget to take this one, with the information about the deaf student."

"Thank you," I said, taking it.

"Teachers should be told about the disabled students," she said, and I agreed thoroughly. We are not usually told, and telling us a week after classes have started is better than not telling us at all. Telling us about disabled students we don't actually have in our classes is perhaps a little less helpful, but never mind.

I got to my first class five minutes late yesterday. But that was all right, because my boss was even later. After talking to me she had to go up to her office to collect the teaching materials she'd forgotten.

Classes went well, though. One of my students was wearing a sweatshirt that said,

REAL HOT GET LOVE
milk love
IT APPLE SOME ONE
MOTER THAN
a happy life is sent every day