The Cutest Damn Thing

The cutest damn thing happened today.

As most of you know, or have heard, my middle school isn't the easiest place to work at. It's stressful in ways I wish I never had to be stressed, but it is what it is, and so I'm trying to do everything I can to make the best of it.

Today, however, was oddly peaceful, and since I only had two classes, I took it upon myself to finally finish another posting to the English Board that I've been working on a bit over the past two weeks. It's about school lunches from around the world, so I posted pictures from school lunches from 8 or so different countries with information about the ingredients, the country's flag, and the country's population. I color coded everything (following the ROYGBIV rule to make a nice rainbow).

Finally, after two hows of work the thing is finally ready to go up, and our school lunch hits. I go off to eat, and afterwards it's lunch break, and all the students are running around the school going crazy and having fun.

I wander over to where my English board is to post it up and there are some girls milling around just hanging out. I start to put it up and one of them bravely asks "What's this?" as I'm posting the first picture. The rest of her crew gathers around, and I tell them "This is school lunch!"

"Ooooh" they say, looking at the picture. "For Korea!"

"Yes!" I say beaming. They talk about how it's similar to their school lunch, and giggle about the Kim-Chi (because all my students think Kim-Chi is funny for some reason), and I keep tacking up all the different pictures of all the different countries, and we talk about each one as I put it up, looking at the flag and the different foods. Sometimes they shout out things like "Cracker!" or "Olives!" or "Grilled fish!" and I beam and say "Yeah!" with a great, big impressed look on my face, which would make them smile like they accomplished a great feat of excellence (which as far as I'm concerned, they had).

You girls all get an A for the day.

Finally, the last one goes up. We stand back, take a look at it, I ask them which one they think looks the tastiest, and they choose Germany's (mostly because it involved lots of yogurt, fruit, and ice cream), I put in some final tacks to make sure everything sticks, I stand back, the girls say "Yosh~!" (All right!) and then all the girls turn to me and suddenly burst into applause.

Talk about warming my heart on a cold autumn day.

Cue me turning beet red, denying that it's any good (although on the inside I'm really rather proud of it), and we walk off talking about how the girls have science next, and they all like science.

I sat back down at my desk, super pumped about what just happened and really just happy that I managed to have a bit of a connection with some students at one of my most difficult schools.

It was a good day.