Ben Gillespie
Ben Gillespie is a kindergarten teacher at Roosevelt Elementary, a school in Franklin Heights.
Ben #Gillespie has an update on the school supply fight, and suggests his kindergartners put down their Lunchables and juice boxes to listen because it's WILD!
When he peeked into the classroom today, the crayons were attacking! Green Crayon, with staples stuck in her paper wrapper and triangle head, was advancing over the carpet, waving the other crayons forward. Orange and Brown and Magenta struggled to follow, rolling and cartwheeling and ducking the stapler's fire.
"Knock out his spring!" called Yellow, the smartest crayon by far. "Staplers can't fire without springs!"
Green finished crossing the carpet and looked up to Stapler, who was firing from on top the teachers desk. She felt ecstatic to be this close, but stopping the attack on her friends was still no cinch.
*How was she supposed to get that spring?*
Ben #Gillespie has shocking news for his Roosevelt Elementary kindergartners watching this feed on their parent's phone. He visited the classroom today — which was weird and sad, not seeing all your faces — and the school supplies were having a giant fight!!! More tomorrow...
On her first day as a fourth-grade teacher, Marie Knox walked into room 114 and found a man.
“Excuse me,” she said, laying her bag inside the door. “Are you in the wrong place, perhaps?”
The man, in his early twenties like Marie, had been bent over her desk, peering at her computer mouse. Now he was upright but still held the mouse.
“No — I, uh … heard a noise,” he said.
She nodded to his hand. “From the mouse?”
He squinted at first, seeming to think she meant a real mouse.
Then he said, “Right, yes. I mean no. Not from the mouse.”
They looked at each other. The tails of his chunky flannel shirt had come untucked, and already — it was just now 7:00 a.m. — his broad, friendly face shone with sweat.
Marie knew exactly who this was: Ben Gillespie, the new kindergarten teacher. In preparatory meetings, her fourth-grade colleagues had mentioned Roosevelt had just two other male teachers, neither young.
She asked, “Is something wrong with my computer?”
He turned the device around in his hand. The corners of his mouth stretched and rose and fell like he was deciding between embellishments.
Finally he admitted, “It was going to be a prank. A first-day-of-school prank, you know?”
Marie carried her bag to the desk and began unpacking supplies from home—name tags, extra folders, an icebreaker game she’d made last night with animal cartoons.
“I’m familiar with pranks,” she said. “But I can’t say I know of any involving a computer mouse.”
“Yeah, I don’t think it’s super popular.”
Ben explained he’d just gotten it off his phone. You stick part of a Post-It note on the underside of the mouse (which must be wireless) and it stops working.
Marie listened patiently. “Then what?”
Ben’s eyes went wide and wacky. “I dunno, you have to call tech support? It’s funny?”
As pranks went, it wasn’t especially imaginative — and for some reason, watching Ben Gillespie’s weight shift now from foot to foot, Marie didn’t think he would go sneaking into her classroom early, on the first day of both their teaching careers, with an unimaginative prank.
Then she noticed the jello.
#knox #gillespie
Ben Gillespie, a male kindergarten teacher at Roosevelt Elementary, didn’t generally compete in the realm of classroom decorations.
But Halloween.
Halloween was Mr. Gillespie’s thing.
On October 1, per custom, he drove to Roosevelt with the life-size skeleton riding shotgun. He carried the skeleton over his shoulder to his kindergarten classroom, then suspended it from the ceiling using eye-hooks he’d screwed in years ago and twine loops from the supply closet.
He knotted the bandanna around its skull. He applied the eye patch. He took five minutes perfecting the skeleton’s angle of descent and its articulation of joints — the evil clutching of fingers, realistic knee angles, et cetera.
Then Charlie Maldonado walked in.
“Ahh, Mr. Gillespie!” he cried, dropping his backpack. “That thing! That bony person’s *flying!*”
Ben grinned and slipped off the eye patch and fake-blood-streaked bandanna, which were admittedly — for six year olds — a lot.
“Mr. Scallywag T. Plast-a-bones?” he said. “He’s only a decoration, Charlie. That’s all.”
Charlie’s knuckles were white around his jacket cuffs.
Ben breathed and peacefully closed his eyes. With time, he knew, the boy would match his pose.
“You see, Mr. Plast-a-bones used to teach kindergarten in this very classroom,” Ben said, “years and years before I got to Roosevelt, before I was even born…”
Ava Hodge and Jayce McClain entered the classroom and drifted over to listen beside Charlie.
“…the thing was, he didn’t like kindergarten. He thought kindergartners smelled weird. They always talked at lunch instead of eating. He wanted to teach fourth grade instead like Ms. Knox. But the principal wouldn’t let him.”
One of the kids, maybe Ava, said, “Nuh-uh, Mr. Gillespie!”
Ben continued, “So Mr. Plast-a-bones kept on teaching kindergarten, even though he hated it. He made each student choose *one crayon* per day to do all their coloring with it. He put two glue sticks in his desk for the whole year, and if the class ran out in October? Too bad. The kids just had to hold their art projects together with their fingers…”
He wasn’t sure if the glue stick would’ve been invented. The story was never the same twice.
By the time he’d finished, all 28 students were standing on the carpet, quiet, many with their heads tipped ponderously to one side.
The bell rang.
“Up — here we go!” Ben said. He arched his back to see the calendar. “Day 23 of your kindergarten experience is officially underway.”
The students knew their post-bell routine, hanging their backpacks and depositing lunches in the purple crate.
Ben caught up with Charlie Maldonado at his table. The boy was beginning his morning journaling.
“Hey,” he whispered conspiratorially. “Would it be okay if I gave Scallywag T. Plast-a-bones back his eye patch and bandanna? He’s sad without them. He thinks the kindergartners will laugh at him, they won’t be scared enough.”
Charlie looked up at the flying skeleton with a squint. Then he glanced at Ava — what did *she* think?
They both nodded yes.
#gillespie