Saturday, September 2, 2006

Kits

My 06-07 NCTE Professional Resources catalog arrived in the mail yesterday. I leafed through it, giving it a thorough looky-loo, and while I was curious to find more kits than ever before, here are a few of the literacy education kits I did not find. Maybe next year.

• Soup of Soups Recipe Writing Kit: Consists of 35 plastic spoons, a dried leg bone from an unidentified farm animal, a cube of bullion, dehydrated carrot flakes, and a stack of Country-classic Style Aunt Bonnie Recipe Cards (blank).
• What In the Heck Were You Thinking Kit: Inside you'll find a small glassine envelope filled with quick-forget dust, which, when you cast it into the air induces such raucous fits of sneezing that everyone in the class will fail to recall the wrong-headed lesson you danced through on the previous day. Includes a set of handouts for fill-in-the-blank haiku.
• Remove-A-Tongue Kit: Face it, during the winter months students sometimes put their tongues to the metal poles at recess. Minimize the trauma and embarrassment with this kit. Contents: a Dixie cup for filling with warm, salted water.
• Singing Aloud Absent Musical Inclination Kit: Cochlea-numbing eardrops.
• Graffiti Paintball Kit: Contains all of the makings for splattering miscellaneous verbiage on the school grounds. Also includes official-looking invitations to distract up to three administrators with a "lunch away," and two sets of stencils (12" and 28").
• Testing Your Shakespeare Professor's Coffee Mug Contents for Traces of Liquor Kit: Basically, it's a miniature chemistry lab. Results may take up to ten days to materialize; be patient and continue studying your Lear in the meantime.
• Whatnot and Detritus Kit: Ships overnight from the Jasper County Landfill. No two Mystery Kits are quite the same, guaranteed.
• Lame Skit Kit: Two peacock feathers and a Julie Andrews audition cassette tape. Cassette tape player not included.
• Time to Fill Friday Afternoon Roar For John Kitna Kit: One inflatable Lions fan helmet and a package of 1000 thumb tacks. (Available only in SE Michigan.) Going fast! The first fifty orders include a free autographed Charles Rogers poster.
• Retired Mobile Devices Sandbox Kit: One 60G iPod with a dead battery, a Nintendo Gameboy and two cell phones along with a twenty pound bag of Malibu sand, and an instructional guide.

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 2, 2006 7:20 PM to Unspecified