I've sown the seeds of their doubt in authority.

I hate spoilers for anticipated movies or books. I've made that clear in a previous post. In my summer class, I mentioned that I had finished reading the latest Harry Potter book. They told me they were waiting for the translations of the book. They wanted to know what happened in the story. They were very curious but I refused to divulge any plot details to them no matter what they asked me.

I knew they were going to be asking me more questions about it if I told them anything true, so I went to the teachers room during the break and prepared a paper. I wrote "Harry Potter Spoilers" on it, then listed a few of the characters in the novel. That way they could easily see the English spelling for the characters names if they were confused. I posted it on the board and told them that if they knew what happened in the novel they should add it to the paper as well.

I went out of my way to write an elaborate, silly spoiler on the paper. I mentioned something about how Harry had fallen madly in love with Malfoy (WARNING: MIND SCARRING LINK) and used a potion to become Harriet Potter. I did this as a joke, knowing full well somewhere on the Internet somewhere has probably written that exact fan fiction 100 times already. (NOTE: I've dug those images up for this post only.)

The children, far less traveled on the disturbing Internet than I, got the idea, and started writing their own outlandish spoilers. The best part was when the students would question each other about who wrote what, and how they knew what "really" happened. They would simply continue to lie and make up more elaborate stories to explain how all that they had predicted was true. Everyone knew it was just a game to see who could get people to believe the strangest thing, but they kept playing along. They really wanted to know about the book, but by the end they were telling me, "Hey, I don't trust you. I don't think everything people are saying is true"

That's just too cool.