Brain Farts...

One of the hardest things to do in the classroom is to recover after committing an unintentional brain fart (...look it up). The older I get, the more frequently I find myself susceptible to occasional lapses. I sub in so many schools and grade levels that, while I recognize most teachers by sight, I sometimes blank on hard to remember names.

I have been in Mr. White's class several times these last couple of years. You would think that a name like 'White' would be easy enough to remember right?

I mean it's even printed on the bottom of THE LESSON PLAN!

So while dictating the instructions for the next lesson...

Me:  "Ok class, listen up! Mr. Brown would like you to take out your notebooks and turn to page ...."

Kid1: Who?

Me: Who what?

Kid1: Who is Mr. Brown?

Me: Mr. Brown, your teacher.

Kid1: You mean Mr. White?

Now forgetting the teacher's name once and being reminded isn't total devastation. I'm pretty sure associating a name to a color has contributed to similar lapses so we had a little laugh about it and went on with our day until....

I DID IT AGAIN!

Later in the day, I referred to Mr. White as Mr. Brown a second time!  That set off a chorus of laughter at my lapse, deservedly so.

Me: Ok, for the rest of the day your teacher's name is now "Mr. Brown or Mr. White", whichever one I screw up. Now let's get to work.....)

For the rest of the day, I intentionally continued to use 'Mr. Brown'.

Several days later, I ran into Mr. White on the playground and he said he had a good laugh about his new "name change"