Please, Don't Eat the Monkeys

It was a banana-shaped tin.
It rattled around when I shook it.

Holiday and End-of-Year gifts, which always coincide timing-wise with grades being submitted for report cards, really put the squeeze on teachers who try to write personal, thoughtful thank-you notes.

Time was of the essence.

Thank you for the banana candies, I wrote, I'm sure they will be delicious. Best wishes for a safe and wonderful summer.

Sometime later, when I had an opportunity to investigate further, I opened the tin and discovered that they were not candies at all. They were magnets shaped like monkeys.

Can you imagine what that student must have thought? That his teacher ATE the magnets?

PS-- Although the magnets were cute, I had a difficult time bringing myself to use them to hold up papers on the board. No matter how I tried to arrange them, I couldn't find harmony. When arranged facing each other, it seemed like they were about to fight. When I tried to correct for this, it seemed like they were checking out each other's rear ends. Eventually, I just put them away to avoid the conflict.

image from http://www.ingeniu.com/images/catalog/product.BANANA054.large.jpg

image from http://stoysnetcdn.com/hogw/hogw20270.jpg

Look! Russ received a mysterious gift this year that turned out to also be a magnet, but this one was much more deceptive, don't you think?

I didn't believe him when he told me it was a magnet.

Then, he stuck it to my filing cabinet and removed all doubt.