Posted on 11/30/2010 4:13:17 PM PST by naturalman1975
A Darwin school student received an unexpected shock yesterday when they opened their schoolbag to retrieve their lunch only to discover a snake slithering inside.
The student's quick-thinking teacher zipped up the bag and called in snake catcher Chris Peberdy to retrieve the reptile.
"I got a call from a concerned school in the Darwin area that one of the students had opened their school bag and much to their surprise realised they had brought with them more than lunch," he said.
"A snake had crawled in there, possibly the night before, and only showed itself in class.
"The teacher took the bag straight up to the office where it was secured and then rang me and I came straight away."
He says it is very lucky it turned out to be a non-venomous python.
"Lucky it was only a water python, just newly born.
"So it's non-venomous, but certainly a close call."
(Excerpt) Read more at abc.net.au ...
Yeah. I did that to my sister once, too.
/johnny
What was James Carville doing there?
Charming fellow.
My daughter carried snakes around all the time, LOL. My mother in law wouldn’t sit on our couch until she looked under the cushions first.
I don’t mind snakes, but as a teacher, I’d prefer not to have them in my classroom. :)
Soooooo, which House was he in?
Remionds me of an old story about an Afrikaner that caught a boomslang and didn’t know it was poinsonous. Big mistake.
What’s with the “they” and “their” in the first sentence of the article. I thought it was about a group of students, then read it’s about a boy. Does this newspaper require its writters to use the plural so they are PC?
For the life of me I can’t see anything in the article that says the student was a boy but I may be missing it.
But in Australian English (as taught in schools) ‘they’ (and its extension) is considered to be a singular generic pronoun to be used in cases where the sex of a person is unknown. It is considered correct Australian in English. It can be singular or plural in the same way ‘you’ can be.
(’He’ may be used generically in cases where you are talking about a theoretical person but should not be used in cases where you are talking about a real individual and simply do not know their sex.)
Thanks for the information, naturalman1975. It makes sense, now.
I glanced too quickly and read the pronoun “He” at the start of a sentence and didn’t connect it to the teacher in the previous sentence.
I wouldn’t have thought it hard for the reporter to find out the sex of the student, but maybe the school would not release that information.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.