Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Not Ninja Day



There is a tournament at our school this weekend. One of the ways we are preparing is by having a spirit week. Sunday we all wore our pajamas, which is an added bonus on Mother's Day. Yesterday was Meme Monday, which elicited quite a bit of dialogue to figure out what the high schoolers meant. Today is Twin Tuesday.

As a teacher who is concerned about the community of people in my classroom, I never have a twin day in which I don't announce what I am wearing so anyone is free to join me. This alleviates people feeling left out because no one invited them to be a twin with them. In the last few years I have encouraged my classes to make it a whole class thing, which is fun. Last Thursday we discussed what each day would be and when we got to Twin Day. I let the class decide what we would wear. The consensus? All black.

"Fun! We can sneak around and have a ninja day."

"Oh! I can borrow the eye part from my mom."

It only took me one beat to realize that I had to put a kibosh on Ninja Day.

It isn't that I am a party pooper. It isn't that I am against added fun for our day, in fact I have a BreakoutEDU planned. If I lived in the States a Ninja Day could be really fun, but I don't. I live here. Ninja eye masks, borrowed from moms, could be seen as highly insensitive. So, we are all wearing all black. We are sneaking around. We are most certainly NOT having a Ninja Day.

4 comments:

  1. Good luck with Breakout (I still have that on my horizon to figure out)
    Kevin

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    1. Kevin, Jump in! You won't have any trouble getting it figured out. The students are SO engaged.

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  2. Sometimes I make errors in cultural sensitivity by not knowing (my toilet signal was apparently a rude gesture). Glad you caught the idea before it became an issue.

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    Replies
    1. Uh-oh! The things that should be covered for new hires.

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