The Great Homework Blockade

Mr Abernathy was provided with an exquisite walnut veneer lectern and the power to silence an entire room with a single flick of his whiteboard marker, at thirty feet. The time was 2:50 PM on a Friday, and Mr. Abernathy’s Advanced Placement European History class was in the middle of a full-on battle with the clock. Mr. Abernathy stood motionless in front of his class, fully aware that he wielded the ultimate weapon in the psychological game of war against the adolescent brain, namely a forty-page packet regarding the economic principles behind the wood trade industry of seventeenth century Prussia. In all honesty, he was merely supplementing what he had already covered that week in class. He was the intended combatant in the civil war effort.

In the row three back from where I sat, Sarah performed what was called the “Chronological Stall.” Sarah had been sitting very straight, appearing to be the paragon of student behavior, until Abernathy’s hand hovered near his pile of papers. It was right then that Sarah raised her hand and posed an extremely complicated and wholly fictitious question regarding the effects of the potato on the psychology of the Irish peasantry. Abernathy assumed this to be genuine intellectual curiosity. In reality, it was a calculated delay that took up exactly four minutes of time.

Opposite to her, Kevin was waging a totally different kind of war: localized distraction using sound. Kevin had been working since morning on loosening the cap of his steel water bottle. Just when Abernathy was about to clear his throat and tell them their homework for the weekend, Kevin, "accidentally," knocked the bottle from his desk, creating a loud clang against the cinder block walls that reverberated across the room as if a helicopter were crashing in their class. Abernathy could not even form a sentence as he lost track of what he wanted to say. For Abernathy, Kevin was just another clumsy kid with a fiber problem. But for Kevin, this was ninety extra seconds of total chaos as he carefully crawled under three desks to get his cap.

But the most technologically sophisticated prank occurred with Ben, who was seated directly adjacent to the wall clock. Ben had been playing around with his smartwatch, which he had programmed to operate via an infrared blaster application all night. As soon as Abernathy turned his back to write down another vocabulary word on the chalkboard, Ben casually raised his hand and set the classroom wall clock ahead by precisely three minutes. The class bell sounded earlier than expected, emitting a loud electronic beep.

The real work of art came after Abernathy’s failed attempt to shout above the ringing of the bell to say that the packet was due on Monday. In an instant, the back row was flooded with a simultaneous barrage of heavy wet coughs. Each of six different students began coughing at the same time, and their sounds were loud enough to totally overpower any words the teacher could get out. Instead of hearing Abernathy say “Pages forty through eighty,” all the students heard were moans of medical despair.

It was 2:59 PM when the real school bell rang and thirty students raced outside the classroom door, never touching the packet on timber trading that sat there on the front desk. Mr. Abernathy remained alone in the now quiet room, absolutely delighted in the intense concentration in his educational environment, completely oblivious to the fact that he had just been utterly outsmarted by an agricultural riddle, a dropped water bottle, a manipulated alarm clock, and a deliberately arranged sore throat. It was true that the students learned nothing about seventeenth century economics, but they certainly discovered how to defend their time, sabotage industry, manipulate radio frequencies, and synchronize their voices—none of which would have been possible without the ultimate fear of having to do homework on Saturday.