By Scott Linscott

Yup. They got all kinds of fancy-shmancy new things for schoolin’ nowadays. My wife is a teacher so I get to see the newest stuff.

She brung this thingy home. You point it at your head and then pull the trigger. It beeps and, boom, there you have it! Your IQ is right there telling how smart you are. (Usually it’s a bad idea to point something at your head and pull the trigger.)

At first I didn’t know what it meant. My score was “9L6.” I just figured I needed one of them teaching degrees from a college to understand it. My wife has one of those. She’s wicked smart.

But then, when I set it down it said “97.6.” Woah! That means I got an A on my IQ. That’s pretty darn close to 100!

Them teachers got all kinds of gadgets now. Even the kindergardeners get themselves those Eyepads to bring home with them. They say they are for online learning over the Interwebs. The interwebs must make your eyes hurt so you need to have them eyepads.

You know what we had when I was a kid? We had chalk and blackboards and if I was good enough and didn’t cause Miss Saddleback no trouble, I might get picked to go outside and bang those chalk erasers together and make a big, white cloud of dust. The goody-goody kids have chalk-lung now because they got to do it so much.

One time, when I got to go out, I learnt that if you banged them on the brick wall, you could spell your whole name. I also learnt that if you did that you never got picked again until you got a new teacher.

We also had little white jars of paste for craft time. It was delicious. Miss Saddleback told me I wasn’t ‘sposed to eat it but I didn’t listen. I figured if they didn’t want you to eat it they wouldn’t have put that little, orange spoon in there attached to the cover.

When I was in kindergarden we only went for half a day and even had blue mats so we could take a rest. Today, they got them poor kids going all day, reading, taking tests and meeting something called “standards.” I don’t think we had any standards. If we did mine was probably “stop eating paste” and “stop pulling Mary-Jo’s ponytail.”

We definitely didn’t get no EyePads unless we got poked in the eye. I wore an eye patch for my lazy eye when I was a kid. I don’t think it worked. I think my lazy eye just spread to the rest of me. Now, I’m just altogether lazy.

In first grade, my teacher was Mrs. Walls. She had hair like a porcupine and was very funny. I’m pretty sure if she had one of these IQ measurers she would be at least a 98. She was a great teacher, but she stunk at kickball and tetherball and every type of game that had a ball.

I tried the IQ measurer on everybody in my house. It’s weird but we all got A grades. Mine was lowest though. That’s okay. I’m proud of my overachievers all getting 98 point something. Smarties!

They just announced that they are delaying starting school for another week because of The COVID messing everything up. That means my teacher wife is going to probably be a painter wife and get to paint her classroom. She and Darlene have wanted a decent paint job for years.

Have a great weekend. It’s Labor Day Weekend so that means lots of babies will be delivered. Come on by and I will tell you what your IQ is if this thingy works from 6 feet away.