Blazing Candles

Lebanon celebrates Teachers’ Day as a national holiday. Really. There is a day off school and everything. Our parents put together a lovely luncheon for us, providing coverage in our rooms for an entire hour so that we were able to sit together and enjoy a scrumptious, relaxing lunch. There were table clothes, linen napkins, high water glasses, real china, a catered meal, and a cake.

The cake was where the afternoon got a bit crazy. Even though we don’t let kids have candles on birthday cakes in class, (anyone who has been in a school with touchy smoke detectors understands why,) they put the blazing, sparkler tubes on the cake this afternoon. And, if they had looked up, would have seen that it was placed DIRECTLY below the smoke detector.

(Blurry, but you get the idea.)

You guessed it. The fire alarm went off. First thought of every teacher in the room? Our kids are in the classroom with parents who don’t know ‘the drill’. Next thought? I hope all goes well. The head of school as well as all the lower school principals were in the room. They could take care of how ever they wanted to do the ‘all clear’.

I did call my husband, who works in the other building, to see if it was going off there too. Nope. Now I wonder if the alarms are building specific or if there is a glitch in the system. Either way, there was a glitch in the planning of the cake.

Just before we were heading back to our rooms the ES Principal informed us that if we thought our kids were riled up before, we should see them now. Great! What a relaxing way to start the long weekend – an hour of riled up kids. (I did find a way to focus them when I got back. I promised, and then gave, a quiz five minutes before school ended.)

Happy Teachers’ Day!