My son, Athos, collects things. He has always been that way. We have rocks, lego pieces, string, sticks, erasers, helmets, marbles, trains, movie quotes, dinosaurs, sketches, and even a collection of girl crushes. His latest collection is an ant farm. There are about thirty of "his girls," floating in a blue gelatinous mush, creating tunnels. He likes to watch them. He has to hurry home "because he is a father now." I don't mind the collections. However, the latest collection was just too much.
I got the phone call from school. It was his math teacher.
"Hello...Mrs..this is Mrs...from....school." (All personal info. deleted...fill in with whatever names you prefer). Now, Athos' math teacher is a friend and I really like her, so I was surprised by this.
"Hey, Sasha, you know to just call me Mel." (name changed to protect the innocent).
"Well, I can't call you Mel right now, I'm calling in an official capacity."
"Oh, crap."
"Well, yes...you see, today I caught Athos cheating on his Math test."
"What?!!!"
"He saw me looking at him and he hid a paper under his desk during the test. I went to him and had him pull out the paper. It had a whole bunch of math problems on it and the exact problem from the test."
"How is that possible? How can he have the exact problem from the test?"
"I don't know."
Hmm, I stewed for a moment.
"Did you ask him?"
"He was too emotional to answer. I took him back to the desk where Mr. R. (his main teacher) was and we discussed how what he did was cheating."
"You accused him of cheating?"
"Well, yes."
"I'm confused. What did he do that was cheating?"
"Pulling out any papers is considered cheating. We are giving him a zero on the test."
"I don't think that is cheating."
"But don't you see that having a paper out is cheating."
"No, not really. What did Athos say?"
"He said he wasn't cheating."
When Athos walked in the front door, I stopped him from running to check on his girls, put my arm around him and said, "So, tell me what happened in math today?"
"I wasn't cheating."
"No one said you were. (cough, cough) What happened?"
"I wanted to add the problem from the math test to my collection."
"What collection?"
"I'm collecting the 'what's the next number in the sequence problems.' I love them. I went through my whole math book and wrote them down. There was one on the test, so I pulled out my collection paper and added it to the bottom before I would forget it."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
Mystery solved. Lesson learned. Collecting can be fatal.
After three phone calls and much protestation, my son's honor is returned, trust rebuilt, his math score replenished, clarity is restored, and the ant girls and their father are at peace. And me? The mother of all this chaos? I'm just collecting....memories, that is.
4 comments:
Your poor little dude. I remember as a kid how frustrating it was to be accused to doing something I didn't do. Glad it got cleared up!
I have a son who is a collector as well but haven't run into this problem yet. Thanks for stopping by from SITS.
Spencer is the biggest collector. This morning I went down to his room and found 3 jars full of fuzz growing on who knows what bug collections. We have rocks and sticks and bugs and art and books (that he makes) everywhere. I'm glad you got it cleared up. I'll have to remember that certain collections can cause problems! :)
Something about boys and collections. Glad it all worked out in the end!
Post a Comment