day 359

all of the fifth grade lined up outside post-quake!

Never in a million years did I think my second day of student teaching was going to end up the way it did. The day went according to plan, until just before 2 p.m. while the kids were all taking a diagnostic math test and the infamous "East Coast Earthquake" rumbled beneath us.

I'd never felt an earthquake before, but after the first 7 or 8 seconds, I was pretty sure that's what it was. The kids stayed relatively calm (especially compared to me, who was freaking out) and we all went outside with the rest of the school. We stayed outside for the rest of the day while they checked the school for structural damage, and did dismissal from there at 3:25. To say it was chaos would be an understatement, but I think (I hope!) every kid ended up at home where they were supposed to be. The kids were pretty funny about it...5th graders are too old to believe any kind of sugar coating about what happened, and they were asking things like,

"What do you think that registered on the Richter Scale?" and "When will the afterschock be?"

I guess those are the consequences of growing up during natural disasters like the ones in Haiti and Japan. I don't think I knew what the Richter Scale or aftershocks were until the earthquake in Haiti happened!

Remember my friend "D" from day one? He looked at me at one point today and said, "Ya know what Miss Levine? It's a good thing this wasn't a 9.5 earthquake. 'Cause we'd all be goners."

Well put, D...thank goodness for that :)