The Smell of Basketball

I had a meeting after school with Mrs. E about National Lutheran Schools Week this year.  It is going to be really fun!  I'm in charge of setting up the afternoon games/activities for our school.  On my way back to my classroom, I walked past the bathrooms and caught a huge whiff of... cologne.  Strong cologne, or axe, or whatever it is these kids spray on themselves these days.  Heaven forbid they smell bad for a few minutes.  They have to spray extra JUST IN CASE.  The girls aren't as bad, but their bathroom has a particularly flowery scent.  My nose is tingling just thinking about it!

In other news, the 6th graders and I had some very mature conversations during reading today.  We read a picture book about the Holocaust today, so of course they had questions on that topic.  We also learned the interesting word "inalienable" and whipped out their old American history books to talk about inalienable rights.  This led to the right to bare arms, which led to the school shootings earlier in Connecticut, which led to our classroom lock down plan. 

My 6th graders were actually excited to come up with a plan.  They had all sorts of ideas about how to barricade themselves into our room and how to escape.  When we took down the Christmas decorations last Friday, one of the boys brought a baseball bat up from the basement with him.  He was swinging it around, so I confiscated it, but now I'm going to keep it behind my desk, just in case.

There's also a door hidden by some bookshelves in our reading corner.  The door doesn't open, but I'm guessing if we popped the hinges off, we could escape out that door if we ever needed to.  It's always good to be prepared.  There's going to be a meeting of the principal minds in a few days to talk about more safety precautions our area schools can take to protect the people who work and attend our schools.

In the meantime, my dad sent me this really good article about being prepared and protection strategies.  It's worth taking a look at:  Self-Defense in Non-Permissive Environments