Fredericton — Crocket Street in Marysville is often used as a shortcut for divers looking for a quick way from one side of the city to the other, or for those who simply want to bypass Devon due to safety concerns. The heavy traffic flow has recently prompted one concerned mother to put a sign on her front lawn reading, “Slow Children at Play.” Her child, however, is now concerned that he may in fact be the “slow child” the sign refers to.
“She think’s I’m so dumb that I’m just going to wander out in the middle of traffic?” asked a dejected Clifford Matthews, a sixth-grade student at Devon Middle School. “All because I failed that stupid math test last week, I bet. It’s no big deal, it’s not like I’m ever going to need to know how to do math when I grow up anyway — I’m going to be the Labour minister someday.”
The young Matthews told The Manatee that while his grades have slipped during his first year at the new school, he doesn’t think he’s that slow.
“I mean, I know I’m not the brightest knife in the tree,” he said, “but I know lots of stuff. It’s embarrassing to think of my friends seeing this sign on my lawn. Just because I’ve been struck by a car twice doesn’t mean that people need to be careful around my house — what about the three-strikes-and-you-get-to-try-again rule that we use at school?”
Matthews’ mother, Linda, claims the sign has nothing to do with her son’s grades.
“First of all, I’m surprised he could even read the sign,” she confessed. “But, no, it’s not about him. People need to be careful around here! They zoom up and down our street like it’s the Indy 500 or something and I just want them to slow down to keep people safe.”
Our reporter asked the mother whether she explained her intentions to her child to ease his concerns.
“No, and I don’t plan on it,” she expressed. “It’s probably not the worst thing in the world for the kid to use this as a little motivation to study more for his next test — if he’s going to work for the government, he’ll at least need to know to to properly increase people’s home assessments by certain percentages.”