西洋오랑캐

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Originally uploaded by wdunn.

To be totally honest with you all, I hate Halloween. It’s loud, kids are all jacked up on crappy food, teenagers act even dumber than normal, and bars will inact cover charges under the guise of a “Halloween party.” The only thing I enjoy about Halloween are the specials about ghosts or which that appear on the History Channel, but since those don’t exist here, Halloween has no real redeeming value to me.

So I was a tad annoyed when my boss proclaimed, “Let’s have Halloween parties for the classes at the end of the week.” Fortunately she holds a similar view on Halloween and added, “They can decorate pumpkins, wear costumes if they want, get candy on the way out and we’ll be done with it.”

So on Monday and Tuesday they kids had their end of the semester exams, and on Wednesday the Halloween madness began. Wednesday and Thursday saw the students decorating pumpkins. Since it would have been truly insane to allow kids who come to blows at the drop of a hat to carve pumpkins with knives, the students instead used paint, glue, yarn, googley eyes, and other assorted nonsense to create jack o’ lanterns.

During this process I learned a valuable sociological lesson: girls make better leaders and work together better than boys. Larger classes would be divided into a boy group and a girl group. The girls would talk about what looked good or not on their pumpkin, and would help each other in attempting to impliment their plans. The boys on the other hand would spend half the time attempting to wrestle each other and then when they did try to make a jack o’ lantern, they all had their own vision which they were unwilling to change (if it differed from others in the group) so their jack o’ lanterns looked like complete shit more often than not.

With pumpkins all decorated, Friday was the Halloween party…the worst Halloween party ever. You want to wear a costume? Fine. You don’t? That’s cool too. Special events? Well, we’re going to do a Halloween themed worksheet about some grammar we covered earlier in the week, and then play some pin the nose on the jack o’ lantern game I crafted a year ago…oh and there will be snacks. After that it’s time to get some candy and kick them out of the school.

So thankfully today marks the end of Halloween and the end of kids acting like morons and the end of all frustration.