On Tour

Every year, our school board tours around and visits all of the schools in the district. They only get a spend a short time at each school becuase they have a lot of ground to cover. You see, our rural district is the size of the state of Delaware. Sure, Delaware is a small state, but a state nonetheless. And we think it is pretty awesome that our school board is willing to take the time to drive out to the four corners of the county to see how things are going down in the educational trenches.

But anyway...
When I found out that the school board would be visiting our school, I told the principal that he was welcome to bring them to my room to watch our dissection races.


Normally I would not be excited about having grown-up-type-people in my classroom (Have I mentioned on this blog how badly parents and parent-type people scare me?Because they do. A lot). This time, however, the big 'fraidy-cat chunk of my brain was overpowered by the much smaller proud-in-a-bad-way part of my brain. I wanted to show off the kidlets and their sentence slicing skills. I wanted the school board to be amazed at the level of student engagement in my classroom. I wanted them to think that I was cool.

Which should have been my first clue that it was a bad idea.


We have been dissecting in class for over a week, but I didn't notice some things until we had the board members, the principal, and the superintendent all pressed into the only free corner in my classroom.

It was at that point that I noticed...
1) The amount of noise that 30 7th graders can make when they are "engaged" in a learning activity.
2) The opportunity this particular learning activity provided for the children to run with scissors.
3) I look like a dork in a lab coat.

Things seemed to turn out ok though, as evidenced by the fact that I still had a job when I got to school this morning. And on a positive note, looking like a dork in front of the school board, my principal, and the superintendent may have silenced that obnoxious prideful part of my brain... for a little while, at least.