Elementary school !!!!

I started teaching at elementary schools last week. It was draining but so rewarding! All day, I had kids running after me, jumping on me, asking me to go play outside with them. When I was teaching, I had the most attentive crowd ever. I realised I’m getting used to the bored faces of the junior high school students who don’t really care about English. With elementary school children, there is a problem if they are not listening to you... which is exactly what happened to me last week, with one of my students.

So on my way to the elementary school last Friday, the dude that picked me up says something in Japanese... I understand the words ‘Influenza’, ‘very bad’, ‘lot of sick pupils’, ‘wash hands’... I stay composed and I look at my teaching plan and all 4 of my classes are based on greetings. Western greetings that is. So I’m thinking to myself: 'there is an Influenza epidemic, and I’m about to shake hands with 40x 4 children. Smart move P-Y'. I decide to go with the initial plan and spend the day shaking hands with snotty children. Half of them are wearing those masks, sometimes around their necks, sometimes on their head. A lot of them are coughing; I’m starting to imagine all the crap that’s floating in the air. But everything goes well. My last class, all the children are all ears while I’m miming an Eskimo that is shooting down a polar bear. 39 of them are saying stuff like ‘oooooh’ and ‘aaaaaah’ when I tell them the tale of the time I built an igloo, covered with polar bear fur, under the aurora near the North Pole. But this one girl seems phased out, she’s about to fall asleep in my face!!! What the hell? I’m like ‘whatever, she’s missing out on my story about the time I went fishing for seals between two icebergs’. But then, I see her shoulders jumping a little. ‘Is she crying?? Man, she must be moved by all my Canadianessss’. That’s when I smelt the characteristic odour of PUKE. She puked herself listening to me! She was so thrilled by my odyssey, she couldn’t bring herself to run to the bathroom and be sick in there. Me and the teacher, we put gloves on, picked up the vomit and the teacher brought the poor girl to the nurse (side story, none of the kids screamed and freaked out, they all acted as if nothing happened.... damn Japanese!). I never stopped my stories; I actually told them those gloves reminded me of the time I had to prepare fish for an entire tribe in Northern Quebec.

After the class, when the teacher came to apologize about the other victim of the Influenza, I told him I was apparently immune to puke. I was a flight attendant, I’ve seen a lot of it... Or maybe, just maybe, I’m ready to be a dad??? lol, probably not!

Now let’s just hope I’m immune to Influenza!

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J’enseigne dans quelques écoles primaires depuis deux semaines. L’histoire que je voulais vous raconter, vous devrez la traduire puisque je n’ai pas le temps de le faire moi-même. Cependant, j’ajouterai que de voir tous ces enfants, ça fait en sorte que je m’ennuie des deux plus beaux enfants sur la planète.

Vos cadeaux ne Noël s’en viennent mes chéris.

Je m’ennuie.

J’ai hâte de vous voir!

Uncle P-Y xoxoxox