Wednesday, March 2, 2011

What a crazy day.

This morning I woke up to streams of light coming through our curtains.  Not good, not good...I bolted out of bed and looked at the clock:  6:47 a.m.  I should be 20 minutes down the road by now.  Somehow, my alarm's volume had been turned down to zero and I couldn't hear it.  I jumped into the shower and was out the door by 7:05.  Traffic was bad, but I managed to get to school by 7:50.  On the rare occasions that I've been late like that before, it usually messes me up for the whole day.  It just feels like I'm constantly behind no matter what I do.  Once the kids got into the classroom, though, things were so busy, I quickly forgot about my rushed morning.

Our busy morning gave way to a somewhat relaxed afternoon.  We discussed firefighters and fire safety in Social Studies, which of course, led to many questions regarding extremely specific circumstances.  Where kids come up with this stuff is a mystery for the ages.  At least they're thinking, I suppose.  Some kids were concerned about the possibility of a fire at school.  I explained that we would do what we always do during a fire drill.

"But what if the door is blocked by FIRE??"

I said we could go out the window.

"Will we have to smash the windows??"

No, I said, we could remove the screen and open the windows.  The glass is about 1/2" thick, so you could throw a chair against them all day and probably not do too much damage.

"How do you get the screens off?"

A demonstration of how to remove the screens and open the windows ensued.  I discovered that the space between the outside brick and the window was filled with spider nests and all kinds of nasty looking stuff.  The windows were quickly closed and the children returned to their seats.

"Mrs. Phillips?  What if, like, what if you lived in a mansion and you were way up high on part of the mansion and like, you couldn't jump out the windows because they were so high up??"

This question was quickly taken care of by asking if anyone lived in a mansion.  One boy insisted he did, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't.

We also discussed the reasons for calling 911.  I said it had to be a huge emergency (like a fire) for someone to call 911.  I stressed that if you called it and there wasn't really an emergency you could get in big trouble.  Then, I had someone ask this question:

"So...when should you call the FBI?"


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How do you even answer that? 

"Umm...well, you don't ever need to call the FBI.  That's not really what they're for."  I didn't mention that if the FBI is called in, the emergency is going to be way bigger than just a fire.  But since I didn't want to get into the history of the FBI, who works for the FBI, how you can be in the FBI, where the FBI lives, or stories about how someone's grandpa's cousin's brother was maybe they think at some point in the FBI, or any other such questions, I decided to drop my explanation at that and take the kids to recess.