Thursday, April 03, 2008

a poorly chosen april fool's joke

Stéph ended up staying home sick on Tuesday. Today, just before Stéph went back to work from his lunch break, he told me that his replacement on Tuesday played a very nasty April Fool's (or Poisson d'avril) joke on Stéph's students. Apparently his replacement was a very young guy and thought his prank would be innocent enough. Basically he told the kids that Stéph wasn't coming back for the rest of the year.

Now, Stéph's class is made up of eleven CM1 kids (fourth year, around eight and nine years old) and twelve CE2 kids (third year, around seven and eight years old). The older kids eventually figured out it was an April Fool's joke, and one or two heard Stéph's name mentioned in the hallways in reference to something that would be taken care of today.

But the smaller kids, well, they took it as fact. Some of them became so upset that they went home crying! A couple of parents even called to school to see if Stéph was ok because their children told them that their teacher was dying! In the end, the director of the school had to visit the children this morning before class started to let them know that Stéph was ok as they were still upset!

Though I have to admit that I'm proud of the fact that Stéph is the kind of teacher that his students would be driven to tears if anything happened to him, I felt awful for those children, and would like to smack around that replacement for his poor taste.

In other news, Stéph and I ended up making the apple pie together last night. I always enjoy working with him the kitchen, plus it makes the work go much faster!

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