Last Day of the Term

What happens when you teach in a private school, and a health class is taught in your room during your off periods, and that class is having a "condom party" as part of its review for the last unit test on contraception?

When you return to your classroom, the air is close with the cloying smells of bananas, latex, and teenage embarrassment. The trashcans are full of cut up pieces of condom, and on the tables smears of lube and ice cream glint in the late afternoon sunlight.


It has been a very long week, and I suddenly feed the impulse to teach some of James Joyce's very nasty letters to his wife, Nora Barnacle.

(pictured above, smeared lubricant)