Here's some great writing...

The Origin of Festival Day

by J.A. Levine, M.Ed.


In the year of our Lord, 2007, it came to pass that there was a man named Smith. That would be MR. Smith to all of you. He taught Graphic Arts at a school known as “Eagles Peak: Creative Arts Academy.”
Granted he was enormously popular with the populace and his imagination led him to assign assignments that stretched at the imaginations of his pupils. Sometimes they got headaches and complained.
“Do we HAVE to?” They would ask.
“Yes,” Smith would reply.
“How long does it have to be?” They would ask, snouts and mouths forming perfectly formed pouts.
“Ten pages!” He would exclaim in mock rage.
“Ten pages!” The students would cower and slink back to their computers, suitably cowed by his good humor and fierce determination to get work out of them.
Mr. Smith also gloried in playing practical jokes on the students. Nobody ever forget the day that he replaced Demaris’ hair gel with translucent glue. Or the time when he served the children “popcorn” made out of Styrofoam. And then there were those who were at war with Mr. Smith.
One time Mr. Smith was particularly vexed with the antics one Ryan Dunahoe. Ryan had let the class in a chant demanding Oreo cookies to distract from the fact that he had failed to write a ten page paper on the fall of the Roman Empire.
That night, Smith gleefully licked the crème filling out of seven Oreos and then carefully, using the back of a spoon replaced the crème filling with toothpaste. The very next day, Oreos in a plastic baggie, he presented them to Ryan, who was extremely pleased that his demand for Oreos had been met. He took a bite and ate the first cookie in one gulp. By the time he had gotten to the third Oreo, he noticed that they tasted kind of funny. By the third, he was able to identify that the crème filling was NOT the normal crème filling. By the time he had eaten all of them, he managed to feebly discern that he had eaten not just six, but seven Oreos, with toothpaste crème filling.
“EW!!!!!” He cried.
Smith roared with laughter.
“Toothpaste Oreos!” Ryan’s face was contorted with disgust.

One day, one of the diligent students (who shall remain nameless) decided that despite the relative ease of the assignments, and despite her fondness and admiration that she felt for Mr. Smith, that something should be done for the poor fools unable to complete his assignments with any kind of alacrity, not to mention the victims of his practical jokes.
Student Number One, or SNO, as we shall refer to her to protect her privacy, was determined that justice should be brought about with a heinous joke to be played on Mr. Smith. The rest of the students agreed. They were tired of endless writing assignments of ten pages. It was bad enough that they should have to do papers for Mr. Parks, but to have to write ten page papers for Mr. Smith! Well it was simply beyond the pale!
Mr. Smith, unlike all of the other teachers at Eagles Peak had not been vaccinated for chicken pox. He also had never HAD chicken pox. As a result, he lived in mortal fear of ever contracting chicken pox, and, as the vaccine had only recently been perfected, his appointment to be vaccinated fell on April first, a.k.a. April Fool’s Day on the Gregorian Calendar.

At lunch one day, SNO overheard the teachers talking about Smith’s imminent vaccination. She immediately formed a plan.

The next day, every child came to school with “chicken pox”. Thomas scratched at his face, Eva scratched at her stomach and Issai made a production of taking off his shoes and socks and scratching his feet.

Naturally, Mr. Smith was horrified and ran screaming out of the room.

“Dr. Ghiora! Dr. Ghiora!” He screamed as he ran toward the office. “Take my class! Take my class!”

The good doctor peered up at him from her notes. She was accustomed to Smith’s outbursts, but she had never seen him so terrified.

“Very well,” she said curtly. “May I ask why?”

“Because! They all have chicken pox!”

“Oh dear!” She said and walked back to Smith’s room. She entered to the sound of raucous laughter, which ceased, once her presence was detected.

“Exactly what in the name of France is going on?” She demanded.

“It’s a joke,” Thomas explained.

“A joke?”

“More like a prank,” Eva Rapp explained.

“Have you all gone cuckoo?” Dr. Ghiora stood, hands on hips, glaring at the students. “This is not funny! Detention all around!”

SNO raised her hand and explained that she had engineered the whole joke and that she had been doing research on various myths and legends and that she had wanted to create one for the school. She explained that Eagles Peak should have a festival day to commemorate the day that the students put on over on Mr. Smith, since he was always putting one over on the students.

Dr. Ghiora was suitably mollified, as SNO was one of the best students. She brought Smith back to class and, as he was such a good sport, he laughed and promised to help plan the festival.

And that is how festival day came to be.