Shalampax Speaks

The teachers of the Shalampax School have asked me to let parents know that the start of the school term will be delayed by at least two weeks this year.

After careful study and analysis, the teachers and their psychiatrists have determined that the teachers couldn’t possibly be mentally ready to face those little brats again when the school term normally starts. The teachers’ mental states will be reexamined in two weeks. At that time, an announcement of a further delay to the start of the school year will be made if necessary.

In anticipation of parents’ desperate hunt for childcare services to accommodate this delay in the start of the school term, the owner Shalampax Hardware Store notes that she has a large supply of chains and padlocks in stock.

The Government of Shalampax has decided that, in the future, it won’t be picking pockets as frequently or deeply to cover the education portion of the government’s budget. As a result, the school board is forced to reduce spending on it’s programs.

Effective immediately, the Shalampax School’s sex education courses will suffer the following cutback: The school will no longer supply condoms for the in-depth workshop portions of the course. Students will be required to bring their own.

For public health reasons, male pupils who do not bring condoms will not be able to participate fully in the workshops, although they will be allowed to practice foreplay, up to a point. Female students get a free ride, but they may want to bring condoms anyway in case there are not enough males with condoms to go around.

Students who don’t supply their own condoms will also not be allowed to take the usual final practical exam with their sex education instructors. (Female students will have to provide a condom for their male examiner.) They will be required to take an oral exam instead.

Most of the students at The Shalampax School have taken to selling their used textbooks to an international market over the Internet at the end of the school term. They are asking for and getting close to the retail price because, in the case of Shalampax students, “used” is something of a euphemism when employed as a modifier of “textbooks.”

The harsh truth is that most students here rarely open their textbooks. In fact, the majority of the “used” books they are selling are still in their original shrink-wrap packaging.

The school board commends the students’ entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, it looks askance at these “like new” textbook sales by students because the books were bought, paid for, and owned by the school board, not the students. Then again, it’s not costing the school board much as they purchased the textbooks using stolen credit cards.

The Shalampax School Board has unanimously passed a motion put forward by Religco to teach Created Evolution, the Church of Infinitiaty’s doctrine concerning the origin of species, in science classes in all grades of the Shalampax School.

Starting in the next school year, the curriculum will include the truth of Created Evolution alongside the theories of creationism, intelligent design and uncreated evolution.

The new syllabus gives equal weight to Created Evolution and the other hypotheses. However, in practice, teachers will no doubt give greater weight to the truth of Created Evolution.

To ensure that there was no conflict of interest, all of the school board members signed affidavits swearing that the share in Religco that each board member received did not influence their vote on this motion.

I, for one, fully agree with and wholeheartedly support the decision of the school board. And, like the school board members, I can assure you that the shares I hold in Religco have in no way diminished my journalist integrity. I was already a journalistic slut long before this.

Shalampax School students can finally get their math grades. The marks were not available when report cards were issued a month ago because the Shalampax School head math teacher, Decapitatedbird, was having trouble adding up the scores from the tests she issued during the term and calculating final grades from them.

Eventually, she had to resort to the Internet to contract someone from outside Shalampax to help her with calculating the grades. The marks would have been available sooner, but the contractor wisely refused to turn over the scores until Decapitatedbird paid the agreed price.

Surprisingly for a Shalampaxian, Decapitatedbird had no intention of cheating the contractor, but she initially balked at making a payment because she didn’t know how to calculate the five percent sales tax and she thought that she was being cheated. It was only after she hired someone else to compute the tax for her that she learned that the first contractor had, indeed, billed her the correct amount. She then paid the fee.

Despite the students’ math scores now having been authorized and distributed by the school, there is some fear that there might be still a problem with them. Decapitatedbird calculated that the average math score for all students was 137 out of 100. This seems a tad high considering that most students at the Shalampax School have trouble counting, let alone solving math or even arithmetic problems. Then again, it’s doubtful that Decapitatedbird was capable of computing the average correctly.

Today is Nashonall Teetchars Dae, the day set aside for everyone in the tiny nation of Shalampax to commemorate the fine work done by the dedicated teachers employed by our school. Every year on this day we show all due appreciation of the superb job that our teachers have done in educating our students.

In answer to your questions:

• Yes, standard English is the language of Shalampax.
• Yes, Nashonall Teetchars Dae was named by a graduate of Shalampax’s school.
• No, the person who named the holiday was not trying to make a joke.
• Yes, most people here do ignore the holiday. How did you guess?