180 days as a teacher

I was soooo excited 2 weeks ago when someone put the following notice in the teachers' lounge:

"November 22nd: all 9th graders are going to see a play so classes end at 12:30PM. They will be back at around 4PM".

I dashed to the bathroom for a private little victory dance - anticipating to have the afternoon off (remember that this is the day I teach non-stop for 7 periods).

I marked my agenda, and started planning which grading would have to be done on that afternoon to make the most of my time "alone".

As the days passed, I was no longer really thinking about this when the activities coordinator came by to see me last Friday to make sure "4PM would not be a problem on the 22nd".

She took me by surprise, but my brain was able to quickly access the information stored in the "TIME AWAY FROM THE STUDENTS" file in the lower left part of my brain - after all, as an engineer, I was fitted with 64 Megs of RAM when I graduated 10 years ago...

What came out of my mouth at that point sounded something like this:

"You're probably looking for someone else - I got a free pass on Tuesday - my students are going to a play while I try to catch up on a million things I need to grade."

I obviously didn't fight her too hard, because today, I was getting into a schoolbus with 36 girls and heading downtown to catch a play by Moliere.

This bus ride could have been the perfect opportunity to rest, maybe even nap since there were several rows between the girls and I (because the bus was not full, and old people tend to sit in the front row while all the young ones fight for the back rows).

Instead, I held on to dear life as this driver, clearly not in a good mood, was racing the 2 others buses to the theater.

Not only was she desperately trying to catch up to the first 2 buses, but she started hissing every time one of the girls would lift her buttock from the seat she was on. "EVERYONE - JUST SIT STILL ALREADY!" was heard plenty of times.

And she literally had a bird when she noticed a couple of kids writing with their fingers on the steamed windows. I thought she was going to stop the bus right there on the highway, pull the turkey out of her arse, and cut the girls' fingers off.

She was just as pleasant on the way home, except by then it was snowing pretty hard and the roads were slippery - all the more reasons for her to go even faster to beat the traffic.

The story has a happy ending though: we all made it back in one piece, and I didn't even have to think - or access any remote area of my brain - to come up with this post.