Back in Middle School...

So I have to share this most embarassing story with anyone interested. I am teaching at a Charter School right now- halftime music. I teach Kindergarten-Second Grade and then two middle school music classes (choir and individual performance) and an advisory class for about 12 sixth graders. Today in choir I realized that of my thiry students, none of them know each other and I didn't even know all of them by name and it's four weeks into the semester, so I decided to play a name game. We were all having a grand time and in the middle of going around our circle and playing the game, a giant sneeze came on and so I cupped my hands over my mouth and sneezed a ginormous gob of snot onto my hands. I sort of left my hands there on my face for a minute because I knew if I took them away, I'd have a big line of snot sticking from my nose to my hands, but I didn't know what to do. Do I get up and draw attention to the fact that I have snot splattered everywhere or just leave my hands there? I decided to get up and grab a tissue and as the kids noticed, I just made a joke out of it "Sorry guys, gotta get the boogers off my hands!" (middle schoolers get a kick when a teacher uses a word like "boogers"). So now I had the classes attention. Here's the worst part. I blew my nose while walking to the trash can to make sure I got everything out and unfortunately also let out a very audible fart on my way. I usually have very good control of my flatulance, but for whatever reason, it just didn't work so much this time. I paused and for a brief desperate moment as a few giggles started to burst forth I thought maybe I could like try to drag my foot across the ground and get another "toot" sound out of it and pretend it was just my shoe, but it was too late for that- everyone heard it and as a few giggles slipped out, soon the whole class was roaring with laughter. So what do I do? Get stern with the kids for laughing at my most embarassing moment probably in history? Try to play it off on one of the kids? I ended up just going with it to save face and to try as hard as I could to NOT blush "Whoops! Well we all do it, don't we? I'm only human. Okay, get your laughs out and lets move on with class". That ended up being a bit of a mistake because once the students saw that I thought it was okay that I, a teacher, farted in class, soon it was schoolwide news. After the bell rang for school to get out, I stood outside my door to monitor the kids walking out in the hallway and I could hear it from the other end of the hall "DUDE! Mrs. Ellingson farted in class and it was HILARIOUS!" If I had gotten stern, they might have at least shared that morcel of news in private instead of rocketing it down the hallway. I even got high fives from a few eighth grade boys on their way out. I won't see that class again until Monday, so I'll just cross my fingers that they'll forget about it by then...

At least this morning was better- got a few more shots of my kids, although I'm still working on trying to get a good one of the both of them together. This first one was okay, but it's still just a little fuzzy. And it would have been nice to get one without my lamp in the background. But I guess something is better than nothing...and yes, by the way, Linus really is that big. I think one of these days he'll be beating up Chloe.