When Fluency Practice Becomes So Much More

A supplemental program I use to build decoding and fluency skills has the section where you read common "parts" of words. These are generally chunks of words with common phonemes that contain no independent meaning. Today, one of these chunks was "duce." Because my students generally lack idiomatic and euphemistic understandings, the bathroom code implications that abound in my own social circle were lost on them, except for one kid, who noticed me trying to hold back my giggles everytime we repeated the word "duce," gave me a couple of knowing looks and then whispered, "I say, 'I gotta go chase a bear.' "

And for the remaining four minutes of the period, I was a completely ineffective educator.