Waterlogged

As soon as the weather began to warm, a new inflection struck the middle schoolers. Every once in while a student walked passed with wet clothes clinging to him while his squeaky tennis shoes left little pools in his footprints.

Of course when questioned on the cause of his recent sogginess, the student always swears that he (it’s always a he) was sweating while playing basketball, spilled a drink, or fell in a puddle and rolled…repeatedly. The waterlogged students keep to the unspoken code of adolescence and would declare any farfetched possibility but never the truth.

I stumbled across near contamination in March. I typically return to the middle school early after lunch. As I cut through a small stripe of trees between the building and the basketball courts, I heard the distinct voice of a middle school boy saying, “Wait! It’s a teacher!”

The middle school students are near constantly planning, performing, or covering up some sort of devious activity; I just needed to figure out what they schemed this time.

I kept walking casually until I reached the corner of the sidewalk. I paused behind a tree and waited for the students to emerge from their hiding place. Before long I saw a middle schooler’s head peeking out from the third story window. Without warning, a red water balloon appeared cradled in his hand. It hung suspended for a second before plummeting to the sidewalk nearly taking a local school student out in the process.

I raced into the director’s office to inform the assistant director, who is the Mr. Wilson to the collective Middle School student body’s Dennis the Menace. I have never seen an administrator run that fast. His hatred for the water balloon skirmishes rank just a little below the teacher inspired rubber band war of earlier in the semester. By the time he reached the third floor, the culprits were gone.

Yesterday the scattering of spontaneous soakings turned pandemic. With only one period left to go in the week and all their monthly tests over, the boys of my larger English class decided to commandeer the garden hose behind the cafeteria for an all-out water war.

If Shanghai runs low on water in the next week, the officials just have to sop it out of my moderately submerged classroom after the teenage sponges decided to ring all their clothes out in the middle of English class.

One hyper-prepared and over-protected homeroom teacher brought clothes for her student to change into while two other students fought for the prime spot by the Aircon to dry off in the breeze. My British student begged to be allowed to stand for class in his thick British accent because his jeans were soaked and he couldn’t sit down. Friends lent jackets so their compatriots wouldn’t freeze in the air conditioning. Shirts, shorts, and boxers (yikes) were draped over chairs and empty desks. Combs came out so all the boys could fix their previously meticulously spiked and gelled hair.

Fortunately, since the students took their English monthly test the day before, we were just watching a movie. Still, my English class crumbled to summer camp status because of something as unassuming as water.