Friday, April 1, 2011

April Fool's Day

A really funny thing happened today. To paint a quick picture, I'm one of those teachers that start teaching 30 seconds before the tardy bell rings and teaches all the way through the dismissal bell. I always plan about 70 minutes' worth of material for a 50-minute class (or 90 minutes worth of material for a 75-minute class). When the tardy bell rings, the Do Now is already up on the board, as well as the Aim. I can't bear the thought of losing class time to even write things on the board at the beginning of a class, because I always feel like we are running out of learning time -- everyday, every week, and every year.

Today near the end of one of my morning prep periods, I was famished, so I decided to walk down to the cafeteria to buy a snack. While I was there, I heard the bell ring and I asked the cashier if that bell signaled that it was the start of the morning recess ("break"), since each day runs on a rotating schedule. He said in Spanish, "Oh no. That's still 10 minutes away." Figuring that the bells were probably off, I sat down and leisurely ate my pupusa and then got up to leisurely walk back to my classroom. I am a lightning-fast eater, so the whole thing took about 10 minutes. I stopped to chat with my department head in the hallway about the proof project I'm doing with the 9th-graders. I told him that I would love to show it to him at some point.

Then, upon entering my classroom, I was surprised to see a room full of kids seated and looking at me, all bright-eyed and excited! I was very confused. I asked them, "What are you guys doing here?" They were all smiling and they were turning their little heads to look at each other and I wasn't getting a straight answer. And then I immediately exclaimed: "Oh! I get it! Ha - ha, very funny!! It's April Fool's Day! That is very clever of you guys!!" The class was still smiling but looked a bit confused. So I became confused as well. "Wait, this is a trick, right? You guys aren't supposed to be here but you're all here because it's April Fool's, and you're trying to make me think that I'm late?" And then some of them got what was happening and started giggling; other kids shook their heads. I looked at the schedule posted on the wall and then looked at my clock. "Oh, no! You ARE supposed to be here. --Wait, I don't get it, the guy downstairs told me that there were still 10 minutes until break!" ...In the end, I finally figured out what had happened: I had gotten the schedule mixed up in my head. Morning break had already passed immediately following my first morning class, but for some reason I had thought in my head that it was still to come. The guy downstairs had given me a misleading answer to my misleading question about the time, because he had (reasonably) assumed I was asking about the middle-school morning recess (since we all share a cafeteria, each school level has its own morning recess time to keep the kids separate). In my goof, I was 4 minutes late to class -- for the first time ever! -- and all the kids were excited because they thought I was hiding in the closet because it was April Fool's Day, and they were in the middle of trying to figure out when I would jump out of the closet and say, "April Fools!" I can only imagine how hilarious it must have been to them when I arrived and started claiming that they were the ones playing a silly trick on me (and then proceeded to talk out loud to myself for a whole minute while I sorted out the confusion in my head).

In the end, once we cleared it all up, the kids were giggling randomly for about 5 minutes straight, clearly still thinking about my grand entrance. --And, let's be honest, I was randomly giggling as well. Oh, sillinesses!

Obviously, this was totally my bad, but it does make for a good April Fool's story. :)

No comments:

Post a Comment