Tuesday 4 September 2012

Oh, that's very different. Nevermind.

Do you remember the character of Emily Litella played by Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live? Well I had a moment like that yesterday.

Some background information:
Swimming is on the national curriculum for PE in the UK. You have to take your class to the swimming pool once a week for lessons in year 3 for two terms and in, I think, year 5 for one term. We are lucky as our school is just over the road from the pool, but other schools have to get a coach to take them.

Anyway, I was reading the minutes from the staff meeting yesterday and I saw the words SHARK SWIM in the diary.

What??? I completely had a freak out. What kind of people take children to a shark swim??? I'm sure it is educational and what not--but SHARKS and CHILDREN are a bad match. And then I realized I work in year 3 this year. Usually, the teaching assistant for that year group is required to go on trips with their class. Was I going to go on a SHARK SWIM? Not no but hell no. There is no way I was going to do that. Someone else was going to have to go in my place. I went to find my line manager to excuse myself from this nightmare and it turns out what the diary *actually* said was START SWIM. As in, we start swimming lessons for year 3 on that date, not that we are going to go swimming with sharks on that date.

Oh, that's very different. Nevermind.

And to make it worse, I was laughing so hard that I ended up falling over one of those yellow caution the floor is wet signs that someone had carelessly left on the floor after mopping.



So that was my first day back at school then.

3 comments:

  1. LOL!!!! Oh yeah....I would say "only you" but crap like that happens to me all the time!

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  2. Oh, how I loved this article. I smiled and laughed all by myself.

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  3. A poor parenting decision on the part of GLT and me when you were just a little thing still comes back to haunt us. Why or why did we ever think you could watch "Jaws" and it not imprint itself on your psyche? I have to admit your arguments were persuasive and we bought the line you gave us------but we knew your nature and we definitely should have stood our ground. Sigh. Alas. Too late.

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