That Ridiculous Scavenger Hunt I Went on That I Forgot to Write About

At 9:00am in early September, classes hadn’t officially started for the students of the school at which I’m working. However, on this day in early September, the entire sophomore class was dragged to school to compete with each other in a half-day scavenger hunt, free to run free in NYC with only me and one other English Teacher to "not lose them."

Unbeknownst to us as teachers, the students cared less about this daily activity than we did. They were far more interested in the fact that we were suddenly surrounded by Starbucks on every corner, and that they were out of dress code, and I think they pitied the dorks in red hats and khaki shorts that enthusiastically handed us our assignments.

The scavenger hunt proved to be more ridiculous than we had anticipated. The “main idea” or the “real motivation” for our students to schlep their tired selves around New York was this:
JOHN WILKES BOOTH WANTS TO TRAVEL BACK IN TIME TO KILL ABRAHAM LINCOLN BEFORE HE BECOMES PRESIDENT. YOU, AS EXPERT SCAVENGERS, MUST FIND ALL THE CLUES TO STOP HIM.

Finding out that our mission was to stop some time-traveling dead guy made my unenthused tenth-graders even less enthused. We didn’t exactly race to stop him, as much as we sulked, complained, and in the true vein of Wilkes Booth himself, even cheated when we ran into another group that didn’t care either. I think Abraham Lincoln was turning in his grave from our apathy.

Eventually, after cheating (or “forming an alliance against Mr. Booth”) we finished “finding” all of the clues, all of which involved numbers in some way and ultimately gave us a phone number we had to call. When we called the number a message said:
THIS IS JOHN WILKES BOOTH, AND YOU’VE STOPPED ME FROM TRAVELING THROUGH TIME! Now go meet up with your friends near the NYU library.

But why would we listen to an assassin? I mean, we did and everything, but why would we?

So next to the NYU library we went. I was uncomfortable knowing that Mr. Booth was Mr. Aware of my Alma Mater. I mean, what if he looked me up in the NYU directory? Or even worse, on Facebook?

In the end, my team and another team got the top two highest scores, and there needed to be a tie-breaker question. The students were asked, “When is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday?” These poor private school kids don’t get a week off to celebrate this great leader’s day of birth, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when they guessed “4/20.”

In fact, the only reason we ended up winning was because the other team guessed “5/20” and we, though obscenely wrong, were the closer ones.

As far as I'm concerned, no one won. Not even John Wilkes Booth, (and HE has Time Traveling capabilities.)