A New Medium for Wood Carving

Yesterday was Plotnik's first day volunteering in Mr. 543222's music classroom at Local Middle School. It's a really tough assignment for the poor teacher, a studied musician, whose job it is to teach, get this, violin to three classes of middle schoolers, none of whom is interested in learning violin. The school has no money, but it got a grant so it went out and bought 30 violins. They are cheap, so they go out of tune easily, plus none of the kids has the slightest idea how to tune them, or what tuning them means, or why they need to be in tune, or why violins shouldn't be used to push other kids out of the way, or to see what happens when pennies and quarters are dropped into the f-holes, or why they shouldn't have dueling contests with their bows, or, while they're at it, why they shouldn't carve gang grafitti into the faces of the violins with blunt knives, or why they shouldn't tell the teacher he's jacked, man, and storm out of the classroom, or why they shouldn't laugh constantly on their cellphone in class, or bring fried chicken into the middle of the class session, or else stare out into the street bored out of their minds.

Mr. 543222 tries concentrating on the girls in the front row who are vaguely trying to hold their violins correctly, but the noise level in the classroom soon escalates, so he shouts FIVE! FOUR! THREE! TWOOOOOOOOO....! Usually, by 'two' the screaming wanes slightly, but not always, so sometimes the teacher has to go all the way to ONE I'M WARNING YOU ONE COME ON ESTEBAN ONE MARIA PUT AWAY YOUR PHONE ONE....

What happens if he gets to ZERO is unclear. The last teacher lasted exactly one month and was fired after disintegrating into a raft of racial name calling. Mr. 543222 is the first teacher's midterm replacement, as if it weren't enough having to spend a full class period every day in every class doing nothing but tuning and retuning cheap violins and counting from five backwards down to two.