Sorry for the long vent This just happened a few minutes ago and I’m still pissed.
Saturday, I have to have my kids ready for a play we’re doing for all the parents. Every class has to do it.
Knowing this was coming up, I looked through some children’s plays, found one that was called “Are You My Mother?” and started teaching it to the children. They were bored with it immediately. So…
Like any good teacher, I pitched the script, but got ideas from the children about what should be in the play. I made some edits to make it run smoothly, but the basic plot is the same thing the children made up as is most of the dialog. A dog and cat find a duck egg. It hatches and tries to find its mother, but it keeps running into all sorts of animals that want to have him for lunch.
The kids have this down perfectly. It’s a pretty funny play. Today, they said they wanted me to think of a better way to lead into the ending where all the children are out on stage dancing/singing and I introduce them. I figured that was a good idea since it is choppy at the end.
Ok…now the part that makes me want to go psycho.
I worked with a kid today to give him a new part to make the show run more smoothly at the end. He finally got it down perfectly and the Chinese Teacher came out and said, “Oh…he won’t be at the show on Saturday.” She knew about it for a while, but decided it wouldn’t be helpful for me to know that information before spending the time to practice with him.
We then started practicing the play like we always did it as I tried to figure out a new way to get to the closing. In the last scene before the music/dancing starts, all the animals appear to try to get the baby duck and the mom duck chases them off. The baby duck goes to look for her again. One of the teachers, who I did ask for advice on something ELSE in the play and am thankful for her help in that, rudely shouts “WAIT!” I figured she noticed they did something incorrectly and needed to try it again, but instead she says, “Now you must pretend like you’re a daddy duck and come out with them and say it’s time to play with them.”
Now…I’m sure there are dads that do stupid mistakes. But why in the world would a dad bring over several guests that tried to eat his baby and say, “Let’s play?”
Being the only foreigner here, I got outvoted. The change stays. I just told them to give me no credit for the play, calmly left, and walked to the office to write this post.
Please tell me I’m not retarded for being pissed about this. I feel more upset because of how much time the kids put into this, how much time they had to try to change everything, and now it’s going to be a cluster f**k for the 1 day we have left to practice this play. Or tell me they’re right…I don’t know.
Matt