The wall in the classroom of Katherine Evatt, second grade teacher at Charlotte Latin School, has the message “Look What We’re Learning.” One important step of that learning: understanding that “we’re” is a contraction that combines the words “we” and “are.” So a recent week of lessons about contractions culminated with an event guaranteed to make sure students remembered them: surgery on words, while dressed in scrubs.

“It’s a fun way to assess them,” Evatt said. “Do you get what we’ve been working on all week and understand how to put two words together?” Charlotte Latin isn’t the only school that does contraction surgery, Evatt was careful to point out — but what distinguished Latin was how fully the Lower School committed to the premise.

The second grade teachers greeted their students in full scrubs, including masks, gloves, caps, and booties. “I need you to scrub in for emergency surgery, doctor,” Evatt told the students entering her classroom. “It will be your responsibility to take the patient, use scissors and glue to do surgery, and make contractions.”

“What’s happening?” said one student, bewildered but delighted.

“Why do the bandages look like apostrophes?” asked another student. “Oh, right, they are.”

After the students suited up with caps and gloves, they went to work, suturing pieces of paper printed with “can” and “not” into “can’t” and pasting together “they” and “have” into “they’ve.” Meanwhile, the teachers patrolled their classrooms like attending physicians supervising first-year med students, periodically calling out “Stat!” or “Code Blue!”

“Your patient has fallen to the floor, doctor,” Evatt informed one student who had lost track of a slip of paper. “Don’t worry — they’ll never know. They’re asleep.”