Say It Ain't So, Miss Oh

Miss Oh was getting ready to teach her English class when a monitor came to her door with the daily attendance. Included in her little folder. as is often the case, was a stack of papers. Miss Oh dutifully passed out the papers and proceeded to try and figure who was here and who was not. She had learned the hard way, as a new teacher, that administrators take attendance very seriously and was not about to have the same problem twice.

"What's this?" she heard, from her generally well-behaved class.

"You must be kidding me!" came another voice, even more agitated than the first.

"What's the matter?" she asked, looking up from the sacred attendance sheet.

"This paper says there's no February vacation, Miss Oh. How can you do this to us?"

"Well, it wasn't my idea," she responded, with great conviction.

A boy stood up and announced, "Well, I'm not coming. My dad said we were gonna go to Florida that week, and that's what we're gonna do."

"Well," offered Miss Oh, "It's a regular attendance day so please bring a note when you come back."

The comments and questions grew more heated. Miss Oh did not like this at all. She had not seen her class so out of control since she was a new teacher.

Later, in the teacher cafe, she told her friends, "It was only five minutes, but it felt like an eternity. I felt like they were all coming after me."

"You know," said her best friend Ms. Dawson, "You're lucky I wasn't in that class. I would've come after you too, and much harder than any of those kids did.