[caption id="attachment_570" align="alignright" width="500" caption="Nevski Square in the Snow "]<img class="size-full wp-image-570" title="Snowy Sofia" src="http://www.karolinkabulgaria.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/dsc05312.jpg" alt="Nevski Square in the Snow " width="500" height="666" />[/caption]

I've been meaning to post about this funny run in I had with my students at school last week for days but then there were the protests and a couple of things took priority so what follows is a summary of my day teaching last week and the fun I had getting to give my students some official advice.  (Ha, ha).

On Wednesday, I had to walk to school while navigating a sheet of ice--you might call it ice skating.  In covered everything--cars, sidewalks and even piles of snow.  It was a mess.  I walked slowly and carefully and I got to school in one piece.

I had a couple of students who where late to my 8am class but given the fact that I was nearly late, I let it slide.  It was gross outside.  If I didn't have to come to school that day, I might have considered not going outside that day.

So at the end of my final class, which is the last class of the morning block, I let the students out and while they put their notebooks away they didn't leave.  They milled around the classroom.  I wondered if they had something to ask me (or if something was going on) because normally they can't wait to get out of my class.<!--more-->

At this point, one of the students came up to me and asked me if I would be giving the safety talk.  What? I thought that he was joking.  His English is among the best in the class and it's clear that he pays close attention to American culture through movies and music.  He goes on to tell me that their regular English teacher told them that an official was going to come and give them instructions on how to get home in bad weather after the last class.

Still I thought that he was teasing me or testing me--so I decide that the thing I should do is sing them a little song/rhyme that I learned when I was five or six at summer camp.  It goes like this: Stop look and listen before you cross the street. Use your eyes, use your ears before you use your feet.  As it turns out, this song didn't go over very well because everyone was serious about waiting around for instructions on how to get home from the official.

After five or so minutes, it was pretty clear to me that no one was going to come but that my students were not going to leave the school without some instruction.  So they all wait like the good ex-communist kids they've been raised to be.

I figure that I can give them the talk.  I am not sure what makes me qualified to give a talk on road safety aside from the fact that I started driving at 16 and by age 22 I was living in Washington DC and walking all the time no matter what the weather was like.  So I give the them the basics I can remember from my traffic safety education class.  I tell them not to stand directly on the corner but to stand back from the corner.  I tell them to make sure that the car is stopped before they enter the intersection.  I tell them that it takes longer in bad weather for a car to stop so don't cross a street until a car is completely stopped.  I also told them they should walk closer to the building side of the sidewalk than the street side of the side walk if they can.

Given the fact that I was completely unprepared to give this talk, I thought I did a pretty good job.  The students were happy enough with what I told them and they put on their coats and backpacks and left.  To the best of my knowledge they all made it home in one piece.  Oh and now's probably a good time to add that after the sun came out and warmed things up 90% of the sidewalks were wet and not icy by the time we left school.  The 10% that were still icy were in the shadows of buildings and had not had a chance to melt yet.

However on my walk home, I did realize that I left out the very best piece of advice I ever received about navigating inclement weather in the winter. Don't walk with your hands in your coat pockets.  This is of course the thing you want to do when you are cold but you want to have your hands out so that if you fall you can catch yourself before you break a tooth or something.  Hope my kids didn't break a tooth or anything on the way home.

Then again, it's not like I've been trained to dispense advice like this.  It just surprises me how many times I've found myself dispensing advice like this to my students.   I guess that teachers do it all the time (as do parents) but I've never thought of myself as a reliable authority on well anything before.  But my students apparently do--they're even willing to take instruction from me on crossing the street in icy weather.  Funny though, if you say what you think with a straight face and a strong voice nobody doubts you at all.