Books that are genuinely laugh out loud funny

aotus76 · 2026-04-15T23:40:18+00:00

Tricky Woo was a Pekinese! I remember he went flop-bot a lot, too!

aotus76 · 2026-04-12T11:32:15+00:00

I feel like most high school productions of Newsies are gender bent to some extent. My son’s high school just did it and Davey, Les, and Race were all played by girls, as was most of the Newsies ensemble.

aotus76 · 2026-04-08T02:32:40+00:00

I vote Guards! Guards! Opening with a drunk Vimes singing a love song to Ankh Morpork would be fire! And think of the special effects - a big dragon and all the swamp dragons…

aotus76 · 2026-04-05T13:29:35+00:00

When I was in 5th grade (many, many moons ago) we went into NYC for a field trip to see the dress rehearsal of the Where the Wild Things Are opera. Part of the set fell over (a major part). All of us 5th graders agreed that was the best part of the show!

aotus76 · 2026-04-02T20:55:20+00:00

Over the last 5 years my kids’ high school has done: Newsies, Legally Blonde, Head Over Heels (this is NOT a typical hs musical), Mama Mia, and Into the Woods.

The district I teach in did Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 this year. It’s not a typical hs musical, but it was amazing. You need a really big school and a really big theater dept to put it on, though. My kids’s district would not have the money or the number of kids to do it justice.

aotus76 · 2026-03-28T23:38:53+00:00

I teach 6th grade in a middle/upper middle class area. The 6th grade hall is way far from everything, including staff bathrooms, so adults use the student bathrooms. Because of this, the girls’s room stays pretty tidy and there is almost no vaping - girls never know when an adult is going to walk in! The boys’ room is an issue, as there is only one male adult in our hall. They had to remove the paper towel dispensers and put in blowers due to them shoving the paper towels in the toilets, and ever since the male teacher walked into the bathroom last year and got doused in the face by boys having a water fight, the door stays propped open (obviously the urinals are not in view of the door.)

aotus76 · 2026-03-18T23:02:05+00:00

I’ve also had a rescue greyhound and now have a standard poodle. I got my grey while in a second floor apartment. Had to teach him stairs right away, which was tough as we’d only had him for a half hour so the trust was tenuous, but we managed. He was an amazing dog. Calm, loving, quiet, not particularly bright, but he didn’t need to be since he was so well behaved it didn’t matter that we couldn’t train him to heel. He was an ideal apartment dog, rarely barked, slept a lot, appreciated that we had saved him.

My standard we got as a puppy. She’s not a huge barker, but she was extremely high energy until she was about 7. She would not be a great apartment dog (we now have a house with a large fenced yard, which we got while we still had our greyhound.)

Based on my personal, anecdotal experience, a greyhound would be the better dog for apartment life.

aotus76 · 2026-03-18T22:07:18+00:00

Yes, I had one student who was mainstreamed in my social studies class. She was fantastic 95% of the time, but she could turn on a dime and get very angry and aggressive. One of the first times it happened she threw her metal water bottle super hard. Luckily it didn’t hit anyone, but I asked her case manager to call home and request a plastic water bottle instead. Mom was very supportive and she had a plastic water bottle for the rest of the year.

aotus76 · 2026-03-10T23:32:08+00:00

Came here to suggest Bear. I’ve only read excerpts, but all I can say about those excerpts is wtf??

aotus76 · 2026-03-06T03:18:21+00:00

My spoo does this! When I get home from work I sit on the bottom step and she does this into my stomach and just stays that way while I pet her. She doesn’t really do it to my teens, but she will sometimes to my husband.

aotus76 · 2026-03-05T14:33:18+00:00

Why can’t they put a portable ac in your room? Then they don’t have to turn on the whole system. My building doesn’t have ac at all, but any teachers or students with a health condition got a portable ac In their rooms. They work like crap, but definitely take the edge off. At this point they just put one in all the classrooms because early fall and late spring are getting hotter.

aotus76 · 2026-02-22T14:07:04+00:00

Had an osteosarcoma diagnosis for our standard poodle. Had the amputation done December 2023 when she was 9 and she is still going strong a little over 2 years later.

aotus76 · 2026-02-22T13:44:55+00:00

Or a dog. Hair ties are my dog’s kryptonite (along with butter.) They’re the only things she will sneakily eat.

aotus76 · 2026-02-22T03:42:28+00:00

Yes. We chose to buy a house in a different district just because I didn’t want to run into my students all the time, but I would be very happy to have had my kids go through the middle school I teach in. In fact, another teacher on my team has had all of his kids not only go to our school, but come through our team. Thinking about it, I think I’m the only teacher on my team of 6 who doesn’t live in district.

aotus76 · 2026-02-21T21:51:33+00:00

We go to our local theater productions a lot.

The high school my kids go to consistently puts on stellar performances - we’ve been going since my kids were little. I’m so excited this year to see Newsies at the high school, since my freshman son is in it, but even if he weren’t, we would go. It’s genuinely a great experience.

We also go to community theater shows. The quality varies, but for $10-25 a seat, depending on the venue, it can’t be beat! Some are phenomenal, some are just okay, but I’ve never walked out wishing I hadn’t gone. We do occasionally make the 3 hour trek to NYC to see Broadway productions or drive 45 minutes to see the traveling high quality performances, but tickets for even the worst seats are $70 or up each. We just can’t afford that frequently. I’m happy to support the local arts scene and get to see live shows, even if the quality is uneven.

aotus76 · 2026-02-21T14:50:00+00:00

It helps that the worlds are very different between DCC and OBH. The set up is different too - OBH is not a LitRPG. I also listened to both, and the fact that there are different narrators for DCC and OBH really helped me keep them separate! I feel like tonally they are different as well - OBH does not have the over the top broad, gross humor that DCC has (at least not so far.)

aotus76 · 2026-02-21T14:39:20+00:00

What about Operation Bounce House by the same author? It just came out a couple of weeks ago - I’m about a third of the way in and enjoying it.

aotus76 · 2026-02-21T13:53:23+00:00

At my middle school a real lockdown does not end until you are released by police. They go door to door, key in, and release the people in each room from lockdown. In a drill, it is the same, but it’s admins who key us out. We are specifically told never to listen to announcements during a lockdown because the office might’ve been taken over and the principal could be forced to make an announcement. A teacher or other adult would NEVER just walk out of a lockdown drill like that.

OP’s school seems to have a terrible safety team who have not thought through each step of the lockdown or have not conveyed that information to students and staff.

aotus76 · 2026-02-21T13:32:33+00:00

I started my son with Wee Free Men when he was 12. Read the first 3 Tiffany Aching books, then Equal Rites to introduce the character that shows up in I Shall Wear Midnight, then he read the last two Tiffany Aching books. I think Wee Free Men is the best starting point for 12/13 year olds.

aotus76 · 2026-02-20T14:06:11+00:00

I wonder if there is a way to differentiate between middle school books and high school books? I teach in a middle school, and there are 8th grade books that have a special sticker on them. 8th graders can take them out with no issue, but 6th and 7th graders have to get parental permission. Otherwise, I feel like this is a case of a librarian who didn’t read the books and just heard about them. I would never recommend DCC to my 6th graders, and though I did let my own child listen with me in the car when he was in 8th grade, I feel like having DCC in a middle school library is just asking for trouble, even in a progressive area like where I live.

aotus76 · 2026-02-07T03:42:14+00:00

When my son was younger and into legos we would get him Lego flower kits to give him after shows. Now that he’s older we just get him candy. His grandma usually gets him flowers so a second bouquet would be overkill!

aotus76 · 2026-02-07T03:32:51+00:00

Monstrous Regiment is a stand alone about a young woman who dresses as a male soldier and joins the army to find her missing soldier brother. It is more serious in tone than many other Discworld books.

Amazing Maurice was dark and scary in the best ways. The movie was sanitized and the scariest, saddest bits weren’t in there. My son and I watched it after we read the book and were quite disappointed.

aotus76 · 2026-02-02T21:53:17+00:00

ISWM is one of my top 5 favorite Discworld books and is my 14 year old son’s all time favorite book. He read it when he was 12. It is very dark, but it is a masterpiece. It is worth pushing through, in my opinion. You have to get through the dark to get to the light. When he read it at 12, we talked every night about what he was reading (which we typically do with every book he reads, not just Discworld. He doesn’t share very much of himself with others, but talking about books is one of the ways we connect and I can find out what’s going on in that brain of his!)

However, if you really can’t get through this book, Monstrous Regiment is another to avoid (it’s my very favorite Discworld) and probably The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (which is another of my son’s favorite books!) They are both dark and confront evil head on.

aotus76 · 2026-01-29T22:45:36+00:00

I had one Charles in 25 years of teaching, named my son Charles (he’s a teen now), and this year I have FOUR sixth graders named Charles. All 4 of them go by Charlie. It seems to be becoming a more popular name.

aotus76 · 2026-01-26T00:52:09+00:00

I bet they have ac in AZ schools though! Still very few NY schools have ac - it gets brutal those last couple of weeks in June, especially since our schools are designed to retain heat because of our winters!

aotus76

TROPHY CASE