Sunday was the 3rd quarterly voter's meeting at church. It was the first voter's meeting I've ever attended, and it was about what I expected. One thing that is different here (as opposed to my home church congregation) is that the women can vote. Since I haven't switched my church membership, I still couldn't vote because I'm not a church member.
At the meeting, I sat in the back (partly so no one would notice me and partly so I could see everything that was going on). It went along pretty much like you would expect a voter's meeting to go. And then came the school report. The principal reported that the new 5th and 6th grade teacher was doing a great job, fitting in well, and he threw out a couple of other interesting points about the school. Then asked, "Any questions?"
Some one's hand went up. "Am I correct that this year there are no 5th graders?"
"Yes."
"Well, it seems to me that if we're being good stewards, no offense to the current teacher, we shouldn't even have anyone teaching that age group. The students can go with another teacher."
There was a pause. Then he kept going, "How many students are in the upcoming class?"
I started feeling panicked; there are only four fourth graders who will be in fifth grade next year, even fewer students than my current six. If this guy was pitching a fit over paying me to teach six students, how was he going to react when he found out next year I'll only have four?
Thank the Lord, Mr. E figured out a way to sort of smooth things over, "I believe there are eleven students in third and fourth grade." Not a lie! But not really answering the question.
Then another voter raised his hand and said something along the lines of, "Isn't that a question for the Board of Education? And I think they're doing a fine job. Let's move on."
They did move on, and so did I. But then the principal's wife and the pastor's wife came and talked to me about it and that got me all worked up again. I tell you, it is the worst feeling in the world to realize that someone wants to take away your job. Later that afternoon, Mr. E called me to explain that this guy has been saying the same thing for the past five years and he's pretty much the only one. So I can rest assured I'll be okay for now. We'll cross next year's bridge when we come to it. But in the meantime, if you'd pray for a family with some 4th and 5th graders to move into the area...
In other news, one of my students got a splinter today during school. You'd never guess a little splinter could cause so much disruption, but man, we got derailed. First she tried to push it out. Didn't work. Then we dug around my first aid kit for a tweezers. Nothing. But we did find a splinter remover. She didn't know how to use it, so I had to dig around her hand. I felt so bad! I could tell the probing hurt. In the end, she ended up running to one of the other teacher's rooms to get a tweezers and I unearthed the splinter after a few minutes. Meanwhile, the other students had been calmly working on their spelling workbooks, waiting to begin their pretest.
All in all, the day was pretty calm. Calm that is, until we were supposed to switch for math. The 7th and 8th graders were on a field trip, so I was going to keep the 6th graders all afternoon. With our extra time, we were going to learn how to use features in Open Office. The best place to do this was the 7th and 8th grader's classroom. Unfortunately, about half of them forgot to log out of their accounts, so my sixth graders couldn't access their accounts. The passwords for the 7th and 8th graders weren't written down, so we were kind of stuck. Actually, we were really stuck. Finally, I ended up calling it a dud and we went back to our room.
There, we made posters for our upcoming election: Cats vs. Dogs. Which are the better pet? The 6th graders were pretty creative, trying to come up with a slogan and a bunch of pictures to put on their posters. On the dog side, the poster has a crazy/evil-looking cat and a cute, cuddly dog. "Which would you rather have? Vote for dogs!" was their slogan. On the cat side, the 6th graders wrote, "Are kittens cute? Vote for cats!" Then they drew some pictures of cats in the shape of a heart. I was hoping to get them finished sooner so we could work on our ice cream war: chocolate vs. vanilla, but it didn't happen.
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