Independence Day! - 9/21/06

Happy Independence Day! Again? Really? I did this already this year. Oh, what? I get the day off for it? Awesome! Belize rocks! Yay, Belize! *waving miniature Belizean flag*

I have a three day weekend now…

We were told however at the last staff meeting that the responsibility for organizing the festivities for the Independence Day Celebration would fall on the school. Each class was to come up with a skit, song, poem, or game to perform in front of the community. Oh, my students. Bless ‘em. They are SO JUNIOR HIGH! The ideas they came up with! They didn’t exactly fit in with the tone of the evening. The first graders wanted to recite their memory verse for everyone, the 3-5 graders got together to sing a sweet song, the high schoolers had a quiz game about Belizean facts and history. Then there’s my class...

They wanted to paint a large cardboard bus. They wanted to make paper mache birds to have flying over the bus. Then they wanted to paint the birds black. They wanted them to be the large vultures you always see around here. Then they wanted to act out a tragic bus ride (rolling over dogs and other animals) with kids falling out of the bus and getting hit, dying on the road, and the vultures (the “oss aka“) feasting on the junior high students in their one-act tragedy.

Hmmm……no. Creative, but, no.

We ended up keeping the bus idea because for the life of me I could not get them to let it go. “This is an Independence Day Celebration. We don’t need a bus.” Really, when all was said and done, I think they just wanted to paint a big bus somewhere. (Did I ever tell you about the clinical study proving that adolescents have the same brain patterns as the clinically insane? I work with crazy people).

In the end, they wrote a song about the road to Orange Walk, which they sang to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus.” Here are some lyrical highlights of what we came up with as a class for your reading pleasure:

The road to Orange Walk goes BUMP BUMP BUMP [all jumping]
BUMP BUMP BUMP
BUMP BUMP BUMP
The road to Orange Walk goes BUMP BUMP BUMP, all the way to town.
The kids on the bus go OW OW OW [all swaying back and forth]
OW OW OW
OW OW OW
The kids on the bus go OW OW OW, all the way to town.
The road to Orange Walk NEEDS TO BE PAVED
NEEDS TO BE PAVED
NEEDS TO BE PAVED
The road to Orange Walk NEEDS TO BE PAVED, so our bus won’t break!

And, well, you get the picture. These kids are as funny as they are crazy. They act like their brains are broken, but then they show a very proactive, very mature side. They all want to write “social action” letters to the people in charge of making the road-paving decision. Then they want to send them all - one student’s letter each week - until everyone’s voice is heard. I love my job!