By Jake Vest

Student hits teacher with makeshift blackjack. Two other students argue and trade insults before exchanging blows and wrestling each other to the floor. A 10-year-old girl throws a cup of hot tea into a teacher’s face. 

A “Blackboard Jungle” nightmare? 

Nope, just Christmas season in my fourth-grade classroom. There’s a lot I don’t miss about teaching, but if I had a chance to relive those weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I would do it in a heartbeat. 

That was when we put on our holiday play, titled “A Classmas Carol” and we had us a Dickens of a time.  

You can guess the plot. Mean, Scrooge-like teacher is visited by ghosts of his past, sees the error of his ways, reforms and has a happy ending. Simple enough – until the show takes on a life of its own. 

For instance, we opened with Sir Nigel Fussypants and Dame Prunella Amplebottom seated in front of a fireplace. They introduce the show, discuss it, disagree, and go from “Nigel, darling” and “Pruny old pal” to trading insults, ending with “you pompous Eurotrash nitwit” and “you frog-faced hillbilly!” He hits her with his derby hat, she pummels him with a plush Elf doll before putting him in a headlock and they roll to the floor. 

The kids loved it. Principals – well, not so much. 

Christmas Past is the ghost of the mean teacher’s own fourth-grade teacher, who arrives in the side-car of a motorcycle driven by a juvenile delinquent Elvis. Ms. McGillicuddy reviews the teacher’s report card – all F’s, including an F in ART.  

The report card is turned to show “F-ART” and the crowd goes wild. 

McGillicuddy reads off things the mean teacher did as a kid, punctuating each with a whomp up the side of the head with a sock rolled up in a sock – a “sap” provided by the juvenile delinquent. 

The Ghost of Christmas Present is Santa Claus, who takes the teacher to look through a window where kids are doing homework and singing lyrics like: 

“Other kids have a nice teacher, ours is like an evil creature. We don’t mind a little work, but does he have to be a jerk?” 

Final scene, Poor Old Obsolete Teacher home, (the POOT place…another big laugh). Kids portray the other fourth-grade teachers at the school as very old people. Other kids are grown-up versions of themselves coming to visit.  

But there’s one mean old teacher nobody visits. Two orderlies roll me out in a real wheelchair. I’m shivering, deaf, wearing a bald wig and am very crochety. The kids give me a blanket and “a cup of hot tea” (this is really just water). 

They feel very sorry for the poor old guy nobody likes, until they read the medical chart to see who I am. “THAT’S MISTER VEST! The guy who made kids do homework over the holidays!” One snatches the blanket away and says, “You don’t deserve to be warm, you cold-hearted creep!”  

And then we get to THE scene. The other orderly says, “You want some tea…well here’s some tea you old coot!” And she throws the cup of water into my face. 

There’s more – it was all a dream…teacher mends his ways – but who cared? For a kid to see another kid, one of his own kind, do something like that to a teacher, it was as good as it gets. The fulfillment of hopes and dreams. 

Putting that show together was exhausting, time-consuming, expensive and never much appreciated by anybody outside that room. And it was the most wonderful time of the year. 

It felt like Christmas.