Ah, Freak Out!

For the last ten or so years, I have worked on not looking stressed and frazzled while things get hectic at school. This was really put to the test today.

I went to school a little early today and with the ten or so minutes of extra time that I had, I decided to use the dipping chocolate that I received for teacher appreciation week last year. I brought some strawberries from home and thought that I would get them dipped before school started so that they would be ready for lunch later.

I was talking on the cell phone while I put the chocolate in my hidden microwave (even though all of the teachers have a microwave, there is a new policy at school this year that says we should not have one in our classroom). As I was talking on the phone I put the chocolate in for one minute instead of 10 seconds.

It's amazing what chocolate can do in the microwave in one minute. It was smoking and smelling pretty badly by the time I got it out. I opened up my classroom door to try to get rid of the bad smell and then I started cleaning things up. I was trying to salvage what little chocolate that I could to coat a few strawberries when I started to hear a bunch of third graders in the hall. They were saying things like, "what stinks?...It's coming from the music room! ....She must be burning something..." I tried to tell the kids to go line up outside and to stop lingering in the hall before school but no one really paid any attention to me.

I decided to start spraying air freshener in my room so that the 6th graders wouldn't give me a hard time when they came in. As I was spraying the classroom the custodian came in to see what was going on. It's a good thing we are pretty good friends. He just laughed about my cooking skills and left.

Just when I thought things were going to be okay, I heard an alarm go off. It didn't sound like the regular fire drill alarm, so I wasn't really sure what was going on. It was an alarm, of some sort, so I quickly cleaned up what little chocolate evidence was left and went into the hall to face the music. I was grateful for the years of practice of not freaking out, but I came pretty close to loosing it for a second or two.

The assistant principal and the school secretary were sniffing around outside my classroom when I came out. The office had a few calls from other teachers who smelled something burning, so the office decided to check it out.

I was grateful that the alarm had been turned off so that the entire school would not have to be evacuated during the snow storm. The ladies asked if I knew what the weird smell was, my reply was that it was my fault and that I was just trying to melt some chocolate for my strawberries.

It turns out that the alarm was not really a fire alarm but a coincidental accident. The PE teacher had accidentally set off her alarm on her megaphone. Because the PE teacher had never used her alarm on the megaphone she didn't know how to turn it off and it took her about a minute to figure it out.

As we stood around in the hall laughing about everything we decided to just open the doors for a few minutes to air out the hall. I was pretty nervous on the inside, but I think that I pulled off the calm, relaxed teacher on the outside.

When my 6th graders came in about 5 minutes later, the only comment I heard from them was that someone thought that my classroom smelled like good, kind of like cookies. I calmly told them to sit down so that we could start our Friday performances. I was grateful that I had trained myself to not freak out on the outside, but it did take me about an hour to really settle down.