Roommates

For those of you who may be out of the loop, I happen to share a classroom wall with our middle school Science teacher, Christian "Ike" Eikerman.

For the past year-and-a-half, I've endured the hijinx of my next door neighbor. He's a great guy, but a little off. As anybody who knows him can attest, he bounces down the hallway like a beach ball. When he teaches, he prowls around his room like a caged animal. In personal conversation, he'll stand only inches from your face. A self-proclaimed Obsessive-Compulsive, he takes no less than three showers a day, and spends those hours between them drinking pot after pot of coffee. He sleeps only four or five hours a night because, in his words, "sleep is boring."

In the time that I've known him, Ike has lost four of his classroom keys, and broken two of his laptops. 

Ike and I have convinced the students that we are, in fact, roommates. Supposedly, we own a plantation house in the "older part" of Kansas City, Kansas. Often times, we'll take turns barging into one another's classroom, mid-lesson, in order to discuss something that's going on at home. Today, I told him that "it was a nice surprise this morning, waking up to the smell of fresh-baking monkey bread." He, in return, reminded me that I need to close the garage door when I leave in the morning because "today was the third day in a row that you left it open."

But what about this stretch of unseasonably nice weather? We've told the students that we share a tandem bike that we ride into school. Students insist on seeing it, but we tell them it's locked up in our principal's office for the day.

These students who are fascinated with our "roommate" status are also quite aware that I'm married with a child.