You're Our Hero

Thursday started off like any other day. A typical school day. I arrive at school early as usual. I start my work and finish some business from the previous day. There were a few things that I had to take to our secretary so I head down the hall to her office. I meet her outside her office and I try to hand her the papers that I had for her but she didn't seem interested in taking them. "You need to go to the basement!" She shouts at me. I was thoroughly confused. "What? Why?" I asked. "There's a fire down there!" She responds. I dropped the papers and immediately headed to the basement. Once I got there I saw all of the smoke, it filled the hallway. I arrive at the room where it was coming from, the Home Ec room (Family and Consumer Science for all you "new age" people). One of the members of our staff was there already. Someone had placed a large Rubbermaid container on one of the stoves. They didn't realize one of the burners was on. The container had melted and the contents of it, (towels, paper plates, cooking oil), were igniting. The staff member took the container off the burner and moved it to a nearby table and left the room. However, the contents were still burning! By now the room was filled with smoke and the pungent smell of burnt plastic. The fire alarms were sounding and I was hoping that all the students were out of the building. I managed to carry all of the smoldering/flaming items to a sink and hose them off. Once everything was safely saturated I was able to open windows and start searching for fans. Once that was all taken care of I was able to go outside and get some fresh air. It was at this time the fire department decided to show up! They made sure everything was safe and vented all of the smoke out of the building. My classroom is near the room where the fire was so I had quite a bit of smoke to content with. So knowing my students as I do, I knew they would never be able to focus after such an event like this, let alone with the distracting smell of burnt plastic and smoke lingering in my room. So I made an executive decision to hold class outside all day, and instead of math we were going to study softball with the PE classes! So a near disaster turned into a day of fun with the kids. (In case you are wondering, my math kids went 6-1 against the PE classes. Go Mathletes!) I did pay the price however, I managed to get a tad sunburned :( It made it all worth it when some students of mine made me a poster in recognition of my efforts that morning. It read: You're Our Hero.

Matt