Flibbertigibbet?!? Seriously?!?

So this post has to be about the word flibbertigibbet. Up until yesterday, I had always thought that this was just a made-up, nonsensical word. I was wrong. It actually means "A silly, scatterbrained, or garrulous person."

I'm actually a big fan of silly and scatterbrained people, because it's just so easy to prank them or give them a hard time. What's even better is that most of the time, they don't even realize what you are doing to them either.

While I don't regard many of my students as being flibbergibbety (if that is a word), I still like to have fun with them, nonetheless. Over the years, I have played some pretty good pranks. Here is one of my favorites:

When I taught middle school, I shared a classroom with another business ed. teacher. We were both full-time teachers, but we only had one dedicated business classroom. So one of us was always teaching in a regular teacher's classroom, while the other was in the business ed. room. It wasn't ideal, but we made it work.

When either one of us was on our prep hour, though, we would hang out in the business classroom. So I got to watch Chris teach a lot, and he did the same to me. We were good friends, and we didn't mind this arrangement. We just had fun with it. One of the ways that we did that was by playing pranks on each either...and sometimes the kids.

One day, we each decided to casually mention to some students that our room, Room 150, was supposedly haunted. We even created a backstory and a a name for our spectre. Even though we each only mentioned the ghost to a few students, the rumor spread like wildfire right away.

We each had our own teacher desk and computer in the classroom, but we also had one desk and computer in our storage closet. So one day, I went into the storage closet immediately after teaching 2nd hour. Chris had the room next, so his students came in for 3rd hour.

While he was lecturing, I used my computer to tap into the computer of a particular student. I started by just casually messing around with her desktop. She called Chris over, and he dismissed it as being nothing, but he did plant the seed about the ghost.

As the hour progressed, I started to do more things with her computer. It all culminated into me opening up Word and "communicating" with her. She kept accusing Chris, but he was up in the front of the classroom, and she had no idea that I was sitting in the closet.

We kept this going at random times in the hour, but I scared her too much when I described what she was wearing that day. Chris actually supplied this information to me when he came into the closet to "get" a box of staples. Anyway, after I did that, she ended up letting out a scream, and she got scared.

I felt bad about that, so I came out of hiding, and we let her in on the prank. Fortunately she was a good sport about it. We actually had chosen her on purpose, because we both knew that she was a great kid, and she would see the humor in it.

Chris and I pulled a few other pranks during the five years that we worked together, but the ghost one will always be my favorite.