What school kids all over the world dreams about finally happened today.  My school caught on fire, and with only two days before final exams.  Today was a mess.  The details were slow in coming to me as you might imagine, and were sketchy at best.  

What I understand is the fire started shortly before 9am in an air-conditioning unit in an empty, locked classroom on the 4th floor.  Some kids smelled the burning plastic and electrical components and notified a teacher, who shut off the main breaker and ordered the school evacuated.  No fire alarm was ever sounded by the way.  

I went out once, not fully understanding what was going on until I got outside and saw the smoke, then bravely cast my personal fears aside to go back into the building to save…my laptop and ipod.  Guess I won’t be getting the “Hero” award today.  

All the students were sent to one corner of the school yard to give the fire trucks room.  The drama was over in about 10-15 minutes, and then everyone just milled about for nearly two hours while the administrators made grim faces and argued about whether it was safe to resume classes.  More than a few students made a break for it.  I knew this because I myself had snuck out to the corner shop to get a coffee and smoke a cigarette, so I saw pairs of students running down the street.  

The school day finally began at 11:05.  Each class was cut to 35 minutes, and students were restricted from going into the section of the building where the fire had occurred. That meant I got bumped out of my own classroom and had to hold my classes in other random rooms instead.  The whole day was a confused fiasco, but it was the kind of deal where everyone knows the day is in the shitter, so everyone just shuts up and gets on with it.  Those are good days.

The upshot of all of this was I have my worst class of the week on Wednesdays, so I only had to teach them for 35 minutes today, and got put in the music room with them, which has A/C.  Which I think I deserve quite frankly, as a reward for the all selfless acts of service I give my school, as you can see from the many examples in the preceding paragraphs.  

Oh yeah, the fire broke out in the computer classroom it turns out.  Oops.  No idea what the damage assessment is.  I hope they didn’t go in and hose down an entire computer classroom.  That woudda sucked.

I snapped some pictures with my camera phone, but it’s a pain to transfer them to my computer.  I’ll work on getting some pics uploaded tomorrow.