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Date Collected

Winter 12-2017

Place item was collected

North Logan, Utah

Informant

Doyle Geddes

Point of Discovery/Informant Bio

Doyle Geddes is a co-worker of my dad and family friend. He grew up in New Jersey and now he and his wife live in North Logan, Utah. He was the humanities teacher at Sky View High School for several years until moving to Green Canyon High School last year. He plays golf and loves to laugh and watch sitcoms with my dad and other teachers during lunch.

Context

I interviewed Doyle before school while he set up a few pictures in his classroom. There was some music playing in the background, but it wasn’t too loud. Doyle said that class bombing started just on a whim, that he wanted to do something random to shake things up a bit and add a little variety and excitement to people’s day. He mentioned how it was just going to be a one-time thing, until students started asking him when he’d bomb their classes, so he continued the prank to other teachers, depending on how many dots he had collected. At first, he class bombed people by himself, but then students began to ask to come along so he let them take part of it as well by having everyone take handfuls of punched holes and going into the victim’s classroom together. This prank lasted a couple of years at Sky View, but stopped when he moved to Green Canyon because all the classrooms have carpet and he thought that it would be harder to clean up after.

Text

What I do is when I make copies, and I make a lot of copies, I was in the habit of saving the punches, you know where you punch it- when you three-hole punch it so, uh, because I had kids put stuff in binders. So I ended up with a large collection of the holes from the three-hole punches. And then I would start- I would go to the copy center and I would collect theirs out of the copy machines. So I had this large bowl full of those little dots. And, uh, I don’t know, I just got the crazy idea one day of, uh, grabbing a couple of handfuls of those, walking into somebody else’s class and, uh, I didn’t care, I didn’t discriminate [against who would receive the prank]. If, uh- I would just, uh- I would walk into the room, walk into the center of the room, everybody would look at me funny and I would just start making a clicking sound like a time bomb, you know and, uh, with my tongue. And, uh, put my hands behind my back and then I would have a dramatic pause at the last click, I’d do about ten or twelve clicks and then I would, uh, just have a dramatic pause. And then I would explode, toss the, uh, toss the paper in to the air. At them, in front of me. [he demonstrated by clutching has hands at his chest and then flung them out like throwing imaginary confetti in to the air. Then I reminded him that he would also yell, “KABOOM!”] Kaboom! Ya, ya, kaboom. And, uh, so there would be an explosion of, uh, colored dots flying at them.

Texture

Doyle talked about Class Bombing with happy nostalgia. He described it as being a way to do something random and crazy to spice up the monotonous routine of the students’ day. He received different responses from teachers: some he could tell did not appreciate the interruptions while others thought it was a fun little surprise for the day. But overall, he enjoyed doing it to help brighten up the day.

Course

Intro to Folklore - ENGL 2210

Instructor

Lynne McNeil

Semester and year

Fall 2017

Theme

G6: Pranks

EAD Number

5.2.0.21

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