Joseph: The Time I Popped My Teacher’s Yoga Ball

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“Someone get some tape!” I ordered my reading group buddies, who were, along with me, sitting around a table, listening to an audiobook, The City of Ember, and following along in our own paperback versions.

A few seconds later, Malia, a blonde-haired girl who led the “popular girls” at my school, showed up with some scotch tape. Her face was covered with worry. I quickly did my best to patch up the giant hole that had caused the deflation of a perfectly fine, ocean-blue yoga ball that glinted in the bright lights of the classroom.

“It’ll be fine. No one will notice,” I assured my friends. Not that I was assured myself, but I had to make them feel better about the situation.

“Not even the teacher?” Max shuffled around. He was clearly scared and afraid of how our teacher might react.

“Not even the teacher,” I assured him.

“What’s going on here?” Mrs. Malave, my 3rd grade teacher, asked with the kind of tone and expression that said, I know perfectly well what happened here, but I’m just asking to see if you are willing to admit it. She was actually a very kind, beautiful, and well-known teacher among us students. She always gave us little benefits from being in her class. For example, she had this awesome air-hockey table that we were allowed to play with. She also gave us candies and treats at the end of the day depending on our participation. However, although it was rare, when she became angry, she was absolutely furious. She was, like many other adults, a master at guilt-tripping youngsters like me.

My entire table group, consisting of a few of my friends, stared at Mrs. Malave. They then turned to me and kept their mouths shut. Max’s face went pale.
“Well?” Mrs. Malave asked.

Now, I knew better than to lie to a teacher. My parents would punish me severely for something like that. So, I resorted to telling the truth, but not the whole truth:
“Um… well, the yoga ball popped.” Trying not to smile, I puckered my lips and bit my tongue.

“How?” The teacher further inquired. “This ball is made of tough rubber. I don’t see how it could have possibly popped on its own.”

Again, silence. I glanced at my friend, Tristan, with a look that I hoped he took as something like, Speak up. Am I all alone or something?

He gazed anxiously at me with his clear blue eyes that told me, Hey, I’m not the one who popped the stupid ball in the first place. You were sitting on it, and you stabbed it with a pencil like a total idiot.

To be fair, he had a point.

“Um, hello?” Mrs. Malave had lowered her tone of voice.

Oh, right. I thought. She’s still here.

With Mrs. Malave’s sharp, keen eyes staring into my soul, I sank back into a memory from not too long ago. I suddenly heard the sound of the car bumping along highway 280. When my family moved to San Jose from Palo Alto, I was shocked. First of all, the level of education was very low. Here, I was re-learning things in third grade that I already learned in first grade. So, as you can imagine, I rose up in the ranks and eventually became one of the “cool kids” because I gave all the other “cool kids” the answers to all the hard math problems. Another way that I became well-known was through humor. I was kind of like a jester; always making jokes and doing funny things that no one else would have the audacity to do. My popping of the yoga ball was a major turning point for my reputation as the smart but funny new kid in school.

The classroom’s schedule went something like this: we went over the agenda, began with math, went to recess, learned some English, ate lunch and played in the playground, finished with social studies, and went home. This particular catastrophe occurred during my English class. We were in our reading group time, so the “cool kids” and I, including Tristan’s “girlfriend” Malia, went over to our reading group table. Don’t ask how that happened. Now that I think back to it, is that even possible? A romance in 3rd grade? Anyway, we all sat down and began listening to the audiobook.

Around the middle of the audiobook, The City of Ember, I started to get bored. To be fair, there wasn’t much to do. All we did was sit around and listen to the dumb audiobook. I think that by now, I should let you know what the situation looked like. Basically, at each table, there is one yoga ball. We go in a rotation for the yoga balls: every day, the next person gets to sit on the yoga ball during the audiobook. That specific day, it was my turn to sit on the ball. I really loved the ball; it was bouncy and fun to sit on. But I started to get curious. How long until the rubber gave in and the ball popped? Surely, it will pop someday, I thought. But I didn’t stop there. How tough is this rubber? I was interested. Using my trusty #2 Ticonderoga pencil, I drove a hole straight through the ball like a chef stabbing and cleaving a slab of meat with great power. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s just say that there was a crap-ton of responsibility. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and, no, it did not just create a small little hole. The ball literally exploded. No, it didn’t break apart; there was just a giant, gaping hole the size of the Mariana Trench stuck right in the middle of it.

Oh god. It really hit me now that I was in trouble. I need to cover this up. My mind began to race. There were exactly 5 possible paths that I could take from here:

1. Say that it was an accident and that it would never happen again.
2. Blame it on a friend.
3. Blame it on the ground.
4. Suck it up and take the punishment. Curiosity kills the cat.
5. Say something absolutely illogical and stupid like Don Quixote’s self-justifications at the battle of the windmills.

“What the heck?” Tristan looked at what had happened to the ball. “What did you do?”

My mind was still processing the information on the 5 paths, so I was surprised when Tristan suddenly spoke up.

“What?” I whipped my head around to see everyone at the table staring at the ball. “Nothing! Nothing is happening. Absolutely nothing.”

“You…” Max stammered. “You popped Mrs. Malave’s yoga ball.” Max’s wording made me worry about my renown as the new kid in school.

My mind panicked. I had 5 options, and option 1, 2, and 4 were out. I had option 3 and 5 left, which were ‘blame it on the ground’ and say ‘something absolutely illogical and stupid.’ Out of pure panic, my mind automatically went with option 5.

“A bird popped it!” I exclaimed.

Mrs. Malave looked at me with a weird expression. “What? How… what? The front door is closed! There is no way a bird could have possibly come inside.”

Oh god. I screwed up. I realized that I would have to cover this up. “What? Oh…” I fake chuckled. “I was just joking.” Time to go with option 4. Option 3 won’t make sense, and it’s the only one that won’t make the teacher hate you.

“Well, what happened was that I got curious,” I said.

“Okay?” The teacher beckoned me to continue with her hands, as if she were slowly pulling a rabbit out of a magician’s hat.

“I wanted to see how tough the rubber was.”

“Oh.”

“So I-”

“So you stabbed the ball with all of your power with a sharp pencil,” she interrupted. “Tell me. How do you think that that would have ended?”
I looked down. “Badly.”

“So why did you do it?”

“I wanted to see how tough the rubber was,” I responded.

“Did you think it through before you actually did it?” She looked at me as if I was the dumbest person in the world.

This question kind of got me angry since she obviously knew the answer to that, but I reluctantly said, “No.”

“Okay. So now we see what you did wrong. Don’t do it again.” She picked up the flat, rubber ball and threw it in the trash can.

She looked at me one last time. “Oh, and by the way. You owe me a yoga ball.” She went to her desk.

I stared at the place where the ball was. All my reading group members watched me as if I were a deranged idiot.

After a few seconds, we all sat around the table. I stayed standing, due to the lack of a chair. We turned on the audio book and started listening to it again. Of course, the trauma of having a teacher getting that mad at you in that short a time distracted my mind.

The night before parent-teacher conferences was the most terrifying night of my third-grade year. I still hadn’t told my parents about the yoga ball issue, or that I had to get a new ball.

Just before I went to bed, I called my mom to come into my room. I was already crying, but I was determined to admit what I had done.

“Mom?” I asked.

“Yeah? What is it?” She hadn’t noticed that I was crying yet.

“I made a big mistake at school.” I told her all about what had happened, taking short breaks to cry in between every few sentences. Of course, she didn’t get mad at me. I was just a young 3rd-grader who got too curious. I got too close to the sun, like Dedalus and his son Icarus, and I paid for it. Or whatever the saying is. The next day, my parents talked to my teacher about the yoga-ball situation.

Apparently, the whole “you owe me a new yoga ball” thing was a big joke. Okay, I see that I deserve some kind of punishment for that, but putting a kid through trauma, making him think about something bad that he did every night for an entire month, just to realize that it’s just a sham? That’s pretty terrible. I wonder what Freud would say about this whole experience… But, as they say, curiosity kills the cat.

Contrary to popular belief, my popularity as a cool-kid, instead of falling drastically, skyrocketed! Kids would ask me, “Dude, I heard about that thing you did that one time where you blew up a perfectly fine yoga ball that belonged to a teacher and now she totally hates you! That’s insane!” And I would say something along the lines of, “Yeah, I’m just the coolest kid ever.” The moral of this story is to pop your teacher’s yoga ball whenever it’s possible, suck up the trauma, and live out the glory.