Miss Teacher: TEN MEN

I love those last few days of school before a break, Christmas, Spring, or Summer. The kids are excited for time off school, and well, I’ll be honest, so am I. And you get to have a bit of fun in anticipation of the holiday. Today we made Christmas crafts, specifically cut-out gingerbread men, the ones where they all link together and fan out. To ensure my grade four students achieved success and did not end up with four individually-cut men, I folded all their brown papers beforehand and made cardboard men for them to trace. Afterwards, I was constantly yelling out, “Who has my cardboard men? I need my men back. There are ten of them. I need all ten.” Well, the students thought this was the perfect opportunity to say things like, “Why do you need ten men Mme. Deitcher? Isn’t ten men a lot? You can’t have ten men, only one!” So then I idealized why I would need ten men, and sprung into listing what each of those ten men could provide me with. “Well, one could have a great job, and one could know how to cook, and one would have seasons tickets to the Canucks, and one would have a nice car (at which point many of the boys in my class put up their hands to be the “man” with the nice car, I don’t think they quite understood...)”

Hopefully when their parents ask them what they learned in class, they don’t say that they know what kind of man Mme. Deitcher wants.

At the end of gingerbread men making, one boy came up to me and said, “If you had ten men Mme. Deitcher, you’d really have to watch out for the bad ones”.