Spring, when young minds turn to. . .

Spring comes early to the Sacramento region, and with it a change in young men’s and women’s focus of attention. This becomes comically evident if you try to teach them math. The last two weeks have been a festival of hormone-induced hilarity.

Two junior high kids melt down to giggling and throwing things at each other whenever they make eye contact. This is accompanied by cries of “He’s looking at me. . . But she looked first”. I suggested they sit side by side, so eye contact wouldn’t be a problem and so they could “discreetly hold hands under the table.” The girls responded with a loud “eeeuuuuwwww”, followed by the boy throwing his pencil at her. The boy came to class yesterday with a stunt carefully engineered to win the heart of his beloved: he had tucked a cardboard box of french fries in the back of his pants, so he could casually pull fries out of the back of his pants and eat them as he talked with the object of his affection. I thought this was a pretty good gag, but the young lady’s heart was not won over. I guess she’s just not into the copraphile scene. Bless her heart.

Aaaahhhh, young love. From now on, these lovebirds will sit at separate tables facing opposite walls, because I say so.

I saw the smoothest pick-up move I have ever seen in my admittedly somewhat dorky experience! While a very polite and quiet boy had his head buried in his homework (trust me that adolescent boys have the worst posture in the universe), an outgoing and pleasant girl seated next to him quietly grabbed his appointment book and wrote with a red pen and “femmy” handwriting, “call Jane at xxx-xxxx and ask her out”. Minutes later she politely asked “Can I look at your notebook?”

“Uh, sure”, responded the unsuspecting quarry. The shuffling of pages, and “Look, some girl wrote in your book! see?”

“Huh? let me look”, followed by increased male slouching and progressive reddening of the poor boy’s ears. His nose could not have been more than two inches above his papers. This shy boy had met more than his match. Every couple of minutes, when he would dare to look up, his suitor would turn and look at him, causing an immediate meltdown and redder ears. I was impressed. It’s sobering seeing a teenager come up with a ploy far beyond anything I could have dreamt up. This kid will go far.

Note - names have been changed to protect the innocent.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.