Wherein I throw the school into chaos

Nothing happened this week except that I single handedly threw the students into revolt, made babies cry, and generally ruined the world. But it all started on Monday, as most things do for a teacher. Walking into my first class, of the day, I realized something was wrong. I start Monday at the third period, but I was the first teacher that day. Because the others decided not to come on account of a little...okay, a lot...of rain that was leaving from the lofty cerulean heights to visit our lowly green meadows and brown streets. So it was hard to get the students into the mood. But eventually I lured them out with fun reviews of the present and past continuous tenses. However, I noticed not everyone was taking notes, so at the end of class I stopped and went around to everyone's notebooks and put bright shiny stickers on the ones that displayed a command of the notes from that day. Now if there was ever an order I sent to America that succeeded, it was my commanding books of stickers from my mum. Ever since I began with them the students are out of control in their eagerness to gather them all. As a brief aside a propos of stickers. I am in the midst of collecting letters responding to American students who sent them, and my students have decorated their letters with the stickers I awarded them. It is rather touching because they are crazy out of control proud of earning stickers. But then the next day, to a crowd of students proudly showing me their notebooks and their noted, I said that such note taking was normal and I expected it of them everyday. But now their pretty good because they never know when sticker rewards will come by. And why is it so important rit now? Because next week is the last week of teaching. Then comes a week of students in testing levels taking mock exams, and then I give our cumulative final. It is all coming to a close, but I desperately want these students to have notebooks with clean and clear explanations of English grammar to which they can refer in the next years. And so the week passes with me eating djamba djamba, drinking shah with Alfred, and the occasional wine night at the house of canada, all the while reading reading reading. And we come to thursday. I don't have my quatrième on Thursdays, and so I was trying to think of something fun with the cinquième. Now I am sure there are few American students who went through elementary and middle school without playing a certain number of games. The most universal is probably Heads Up Seven Up, but others include fruit basket upset, around the world, and various other races of writing on the blackboard. So I decided to invent a game. It's rules were simple. Three teams would compete to write a sentence that I'd dictate on the board as quickly and as error-free as possible. Well it took a long time to divide into teams for some reason, as I don't think these students have ever in their lives numbered off. But once they figured it out they began to move to the rows that I singled out. There were, naturally, a few who tried switching teams, but when it became clear that I could tell it had happened simply by counting the number of people on each team, they shaped up on account of their awe for my magic. It's true, sometimes I feel like C-theepio on Endor. Okay, in the first class the first round went well. I said the sentence and the students tried to answer with hardly any help from their teammates. But as soon as I out the points on the board, the stakes changed. After each round fewer and fewer students were in their seats. Everyone was packing into the first rows to scream at their teammates the proper spelling/verb form/punctuation/pronoun by round seven, no one was standing and students were sprinting to the front to erase the sentences of their opponents, they were writing for their own teammates. They were writing the answers in notebooks and showing it to their teammates, the stakes were insane, but I had neglected to slaughter a cow, and so there were no steaks. But what I have not captured is the noise. From round six on, no one could hear my sentences. The screaming was out of control. Only one or two students from every team could hear and they would gather around me and hear the sentence and rush up to their teammate to repeat it before rushing back to hear me say it again. Well, I soon found this tiring and ended the game. Though it took me five minutes to settle the students. Then came the lunch break and the class I'd just had wad bombarded with the class I was about to have with questions of what had happened. And so I walked into my second class and the students began counting off as soon as I announced game. They divided easily into teams and even planned the order of writing. We got through five rounds pretty well and quickly on account of the sound level, but then it started getting loud at the same time as heavy storm clouds poured in. There are no lights in the classrooms at ColProt, and so I was standing in a storm-darkened classroom screaming sentences like "I have gone to the restaurant with my sister and her friends." or "Will you please call your grandmother on her birthday?" and "I drank juice and ate food while wearing a suit." and then class was over, we managed to play the whole period. And as all the students stood on the edge of the rain afraid of a bit of moisture I moseied forth and danced my Fred Astaire to their hoots and hollers. Friday I came up with a new game, correct the teacher, where I wrote a few dozen sentences with various errors and made the students correct them. But then I played the racing game with my quatrième. Now in the other games there were clear victors, but here we had to have s championship round. For this, I allowed each team to have two players each and said I would disqualify any that had aid from the outside. Remarkably this worked. I then gave my sentence, something like "Would you have ridden your bicycle to school if it had not been broken by your uncle's friend?" Both teams had errors, but as I circled them, I realized team one would lose by one point. And as I circled the error, the brouhaha began in force. Team three leaped up ensemble. They raced across the tops of tables, did flips off the walls, and one crashed into a desk causing it to break. And them the smack started being talked because the best student in the class had made the error that caused her team to lose. And so I put the regulations down on that. As I left the school the other teachers just sort of stared at me.