Dad on Duty Blog #125 – Save the Guinea Pig!

First grade is headed to recess from lunch. Many of them are still working on their ice cream.  It’s against the rules to take food outside, due to ants.  “You need to finish up; we don’t want that on the playground” I say to half a dozen kids as we walk out together.  I kinda feel sorry for them; lunch is social time and it’s often hard to finish eating in the time allotted when you spend most of the time visiting.  So I’m trying to enable this bad habit.  Yeah, I know.  Stop rolling your eyes at me. 

As the kids finish their ice cream, they come over and hand me the wrappers and empty cups.   I finish out my shift on the blacktop like this

while teachers smirk wrily at my inexperience.  “Sucker”, I imagine they’re saying. 

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I often water the office plants when I’m there.  Valerie, on the other hand, has given up; she claims that if she even glances at a plant, it will die.  Today, in addition to the usual ivies that I worry about, there is this sad specimen

I’m pretty sure Valerie spent a lot of quality time talking to this poor thing before I got here today.  I try my best to resuscitate it, but it’s condition is currently listed as “grave”.  Prayers are appreciated. 

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Designing engaging learning.  It’s hard.  But so rewarding.  Here some of our scholars have created different paper airplane designs after careful consideration of physics and aerodynamics.  And…..the planes went about four feet. 

But it was still worth it.

These were actually taken on Halloween, hence the rather unusual garb.  So if you’ve ever wondered “do they do any actual school stuff on those days?”  Well, here you go.  Yes, yes we do.

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It’s next week, and we are having a special event at the school.  Thanksgiving lunch with parents, grandparents and surrogates. 

Days like this are our version of the Lunar Launch.  Complicated, very busy and a little risky. 

We will have 300 visitors to our 600 kid school.  A sudden 50% surge in the population, mostly of folks who have no idea what the procedures are here.

And this is, in part, what that looks like.  This is just two grades eating, with another grade performing a brief musical salute to the first Thanksgiving (yeah, we largely avoided the uncomfortable parts…..)

I spend most of the event trying to match up kids and parents.  “Have you seen my mom?” some random kids asks me.  Truth is, I know very few of the kids that well, so I have no idea who this kid is, much less who his mom is. 

But that is not a viable answer to a teary-eyed second grader.

“No, but I’ll find her” I tell him.  And I do my best.  I find some, I fail at some.  But the kids feel like someone is trying, and I end up interacting with those kids a fair amount during the search, which helps in a surprising way.

Then there’s the kids who’s parents just didn’t make it.  For the most part, it’s because they can’t; they are working or taking care of other smaller siblings. 

The inequities are most starkly revealed on days like this.  The parents who have the flexibility and, honestly, luxury to be able to make it to events like this.  And the ones who do not.  It is hard stuff to face, and to talk about. 

I console those kids as best I can.  There’s not much that can be said, especially during the swirling melee of 900 people at lunch. 

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So, I’m totally confused now.  Do I store stuff here or not?

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On our Thanksgiving lunch day, because the extra 300 people and a few missing kids weren’t exciting enough (don’t worry….we found them…..but it took a while to figure out Grandma left without checking them out….), we decided to also have a fire drill.

Despite the general chaos of this particular day, we had everyone out and fully accounted for in record time.  Truly a testament to the professionalism and skill of these folks. 

Even the class Guinea Pig made it out perfectly safely.

She thought it was pretty exciting actually.  High point of her week.