never a good sign

So immediately after lunch I made a quick trip to the bathroom, since shortly after lunch "cleaning time" begins and the restrooms are unavailable for half an hour or so. Anyway, I walked in and a voice from a closed stall asked "Who's there?" in Japanese. I gave the name of some cartoon character, but I guess my voice gave me away, because the kid immediately said "Ah, gureggu da,"(oh, it's greg). As soon as he got that out, the poor kid just started saying "ouch, ouch, ouch" over and over again. When you hear that coming from the toilet, you know something's gone wrong.

The boy (a sixth grader, if you're wondering) then exited and confirmed my worst fears when he announced, in Japanese, to a packed hallway "Ouch, my butt hurts! That stuff was rock solid!"

Wow.

sometimes being the teacher is fun

I decided my fifth and sixth graders have been working awful hard lately. Following the curriculum, last month was devoted to a lot of verb conjugation and rote memorization. Important stuff, but not very interesting to the poor 11 year-olds. So for the next few weeks I'm just letting them do stuff like build cardboard skeletons and paint scary posters of zombies and haunted houses.

And today, I took a wild guess that sixth grade boys would enjoy whacking zombies on the head with shovels and killed 20 minutes of classtime by having the class play this. Who would have guessed that Ben & Jerry's website would be loaded with fun Halloween games and activities?

Heeeeeeeeeeeey

"Our school children should never fear safety when they enter their classroom," Bush said.

I am really upset that our children are terrified of safety. Smoke detectors give them panic attacks, to say nothing of seatbelts.