Shaving Cream

I have decided that if I never see shaving cream again for the rest of my life, that will be all right with me.

Last Friday night was Fall Festival at our school, a night of mayhem, screaming children, and shaving cream. We just had a half day of school, but the kids stayed all afternoon to set up for the festival. It is one of the biggest fundraisers our school does each year, with games, bake sales, and food selling. Each class comes up with a game and has to advertise it, set up, and run it. I'm assigned to the 8th grade class because I have them for study hall, so I had to supervise them all evening. One teacher coined the phrase "Soul Suckers" as a fitting description. Their game was balloon shaving, which I agreed to on the basis that they would only use plastic knifes to shave with and that they would cover every square inch of my classroom with plastic. They did a great job working together to run it and they had a great time, but everyone and everything ended up covered in shaving cream anyway. I spent half the evening wiping shaving cream from little girls' hair.

Other classes had some pretty creative games too. 7th grade did "Hand in a Hole" where you had to stick your hand in a hole and feel whatever slime they had put in a bowl, hoping that you would pick the bowl with candy in it. One of them stood behind the divider to make sure you didn't. 9th grade did skee ball, and 11th did "Wack a Teen," a variation on "Wack a Mole." Mine was by far the messiest, and after cleaning up I no longer liked the smell of shaving cream.

That was kind of too bad... because at the end of the evening, everyone came together for a short meeting, the climax of which occured when a few teachers get pied in the face. They had it set up so that when the kids had played all the games for each class, they could put their ticket in a bowl for a teacher to vote for who would get pied in the face. We paired up in teams, and I was with Aftan, the athletic director. And we won, along with the 3rd and 4th grade teachers who are married to each other. I kind of figured we had a good chance to win the pies, so I brought a change of clothes. Both Aftan and I are evidently teachers that students want to pie in the face... and it didn't help that I had had to give out 7 detentions the day before! I was actually looking forward to a good pie, until the girl who brought them out whispered to me, "Don't open your mouth... it's shaving cream." Evidently they decided at the last minute that whipped cream or even real pies are too precious here to waste by throwing in someone's face, so they turned to the alternate of using the leftover shaving cream and hair mousse from my class. It was nasty, but it did leave a nice tingling sensation when I wiped it off... They drew names to determine which kids would get to pie the teachers. The 4th grade teacher got off lucky... the elementary girl completely missed her face, and the cream grazed her head on it's way to splatter the kid sitting behind her.

So I can't decide if I like fall festival or not. It was kind of fun, but we had to be at school until 9pm, which I am never a fan of. So the next day I escaped to go to Seoul again, but I'll write about that in a different post!