I don’t indulge in it often. I think it’s mean. But every now and then, I just can’t help myself.
Baguette’s school has a school-wide assembly every Monday. These take place while the kids are lining up with their teachers, which means that particularly for the younger grades, the parents are still there for the tail end of drop-off. They say the Pledge of Allegiance and have announcements. Sometimes there are awards. This makes me late to work, which means Mondays are a hassle, even for Mondays.
Sometimes there are additional assemblies. Last week, they had one on Monday, one on Tuesday (to talk about Veterans Day) and another on Friday (for a presentation about Diwali). Mind you, school was closed on Veterans Day, so that week there were four days of school and three assemblies.
Apparently that wasn’t enough, because today was their first Character Day, focusing on “trustworthiness.” All the kids were asked to wear blue. And there was an assembly.
Turns out that the Character Day assemblies are run by one of the parents who has volunteered to teach the kids about character. She talked a little about friendship and kindness and honesty, and then a group of students came out to perform a dance that involved sitting in chairs, shaking hands, and something about waving flashlights around in the daytime.
She directed the dancing students to run over to a bucket, where they grabbed handfuls of something and threw them into the crowd of students.
The “something” was candy. The big idea was to throw candy into a crowd of elementary school students.
Pandemonium ensued.
She tried to get everyone back to their places, saying, “I got it, I got it.” One of the teachers came up to her, and she said, “I got it, everyone’s yelled at me already, I got it”–into the microphone she was holding.
And then, somehow, she found a way to blame the students for their lack of self-restraint and telepathy.
I kind of want to volunteer to teach the kids about critical thinking in daily life. My first lesson will be on “Predictable Disasters.”
It might even help with their telepathy.
I actually cringed at the “threw candy into the crowd” part — heck, I work amongst adults, and that would be a shitty, shitty idea during a meeting here.
I just cannot imagine why she thought that would work. And then to follow it up with a “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset” lecture? It was an astonishing event.
Presumably she has children, right? Given she’s a parent at the school and all. This makes me wonder if she has just never been around groups of children before somehow??
More importantly, does the school not vet these presentations in advance? If not, I bet they do now!
There are so many really good questions to be asked.
This is why I don’t do piñatas. Children, candy, and sticks? Really bad idea.
Whereas I don’t do piñatas because of my 6th birthday party, for which we made a piñata so strong that my father had to take a hammer to it.