Not your average school day...

I can admit it: one of the reasons that I love to teach is a full on addiction to variety. It sounds cliché but literally every day is different. You just don't know what you're going to get. Every once in a while; however, events come along that take even the daily dose of randomness by surprise. And I'll remind you that we have a high tolerance for randomness at my school...

• There's the father of the boy whose assigned sticker (it helps the children recognize their name) was a snail; he adamantly believed that we were sending the subliminal message that his child is "slow" so therefore all of his name tags were changed...
• The student intern who has been caught playing (by herself, not with the children) with the beading activity, coloring, the dress up clothes (admiring herself in the mirror with her foam tiara), and snoozing in the nap room while the children played beside her. 
• The child who throws up on average 3 times a day
• The 2 1/2 yr old who has quickly become the school bully...giving a boy twice her size and age permanent bite marks on his nose (please, don't ask!)...

And this is just from the beginning of this school year! But today, I've got to admit, really beat them all. All I can really think to describe it as was epic. I'm not sure I knew whether to laugh or scream really--and it's probably good that in the end I did neither. 

It started with a scheduled school visit by a committee of Thai teachers to come observe the school/classrooms/teachers/etc. We have parents and business VIPs come through all the time so when my boss told me about their upcoming visit, I thought 'random, but why not?' And by committee, in my head I was sure that was about 5 people...8 if you want to get really crazy. 

So when almost 30 Thai schoolteachers poured into our courtyard with white lab coats and cameras the size of the Eiffel Tower, I started rethinking random and opted more for Help me dear Lord. And within seconds we were swarmed. Just like that. A sea of neon visors, flash photography, and plenty of hands for cheek pinching. 

While some of my children ate up all that attention (literally everywhere I looked I saw more lab coats than children) others seemed terrified of the Asian ladies oohing, ahhing, and drooling over them. My small group teaching moment was probably the most random that I'll have all year. A midst explaining the difference between a square and a rectangle, I suddenly felt someone's arm around me. Next thing I know a camera flash is blinking in my face and I'm posing for round after round with this woman who has decided that she is my new best friend. Modeling session over I try and get back to business only to have a new one pose with me. 

And that's how it continued: alternating between teaching and posing... But posing for somewhere around 20 pictures wasn't the only random thing. Everywhere I looked, our classroom was infiltrated: I tried to put my small group's math journals up on our counters to dry only to discover giant suitcases  instead that had taken up residence. The counter was nowhere to be seen. Somewhere in the crowd the crazy Asian ladies were cheering on two of my boys who had decided to take up drumming as a career and were performing their first big hit on our classroom puzzle box. 5 of them swarmed around my table and exclaimed over one of my girls from Korea. They thought she was Chinese and seeing all of them staring at me my mind totally blanked and out blurted, "No, she's Japanese."  Oh well--Japan is closer than if I had blurted out that she's Dutch or something even more stupid like that. 

But hey, in the end I got to pose with the whole group and their banner (yes, they brought a banner with them), and have a lovely school flier and key chain to treasure as keepsakes after a very memorable morning...So it's all worth it, right? ;) 

Here's to Friday and then the weekend!