Pouring Salt on a Wound

I admit... I am slightly jealous of Dallas always getting their snow days and Houston always getting their Hurricane days and all we get is the cold and sloppy weather.

And by slightly jealous, I mean, VERY jealous.

It didn't help matters when I fought through the cold wind at 7:30 and walked up to my school to find this:

Rolling blackouts. But this "rolling" blackout had been going on since 6:30.

(FYI... those are the emergency back-up lights that are on.)

Something I have heard of happening in the summer in places far, far away from me.

And like the actual perfect storm that came through and brought us this mess, we created a perfect storm at our school with the kicking off of a new program at our school just yesterday. This program is to feed ALL STUDENTS breakfast for free.

So imagine what happens when you give every student a sack breakfast and a pitch dark cafeteria to eat it in.

Well, the apples become projectiles.

The milk and juice gets spilled everywhere.

The trash doesn't make it to the garbage, but more like the floor.

Here's a good idea, lets give all of you guys something most of you probably don't want, turn off the lights and then see what you do with it!

And that was just the scratch of the surface.

At about 7:50 the lights came on. At about 7:55 the lights went out again. At 8:05 we dismissed the students to class like normal.

Except not normal. Because normally I can see what kids are standing in front of me or read my board or the papers on my students desks. Luckily I thought fast and went to the science lab and dug out some old, barely working flashlights. And that is how we spent the rest of first period. Kids huddled around flashlights doing their schoolwork like the days of yore.

Except they used candles then rather than flashlights.

But it's the same difference.

The lights finally came back on about 8:45.

Then they went out again third period for another 30 minutes or so.

THEN, we were good to go for the rest of the day.

After all my plans of doing labs involving heat lamps in a room without windows was long thrown out the window.

But we got to do something just as great as that, listen to kids whine about wanting to go home, how cold it was, how they couldn't see, and how such-and-such teacher didn't make them do work today.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......

But the funny part of all of this was listening to the rumors from kids about why they thought the power went out. I heard everything from new power lines going up, to hospitals "stealing" our power, to this being the beginning of the 2012 ending.

I am prepared for tomorrow though. We are going to talk about the different types of weather fronts because I feel now will be a good time for that.

And we are going to do this with power or without. Apples flying or not. With heat or cold.

Cause we don't do snow days.