Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray...

Once again, it’s been far too long since I’ve updated. So sue me. In any case, it suffices to say that my life in school and with SecondLaw at home has settled into a nice groove. The students at school are good enough that I haven’t had to bust out Mr. Angry Eyes more than once or twice and SecondLaw and I are now so domestic that we actually spent last Saturday night book shopping around Union Square. Seriously.

But finally, something happened today that was truly worthy of a blog entry. It all started just before noon, when the 10th grade was in Advisory period. Now, Advisory is a 50 minute block just before lunch on Wednesdays, when all my advisees sit in my room and we get a chance to chat about whatever’s happening in their lives, gossip about other students, discuss music and/or movies, and generally waste time getting to know each other.

Some of my advisees had been roaming around the halls, posting flyers for the candy cane fundraiser they organized to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. (I mean it: they thought it up, voted on the charity the money would go to, designed the flyers and organized the candy cane donation and distribution. Sometimes I get a little teary-eyed just thinking about it.) Anyway, a group of them came back into my room saying that there was a weird smell down the end of the corridor that smelled like smoke. Not cigarette smoke, mind you, but smoke smoke. Like a campfire. “It’s probably nothing,” I said. Then two security guards came running down to the spot where the students had said the smell originated. The students began leaning and tiptoeing towards the door to look down the hallway. Though I calmly bade them to return to their seats, I couldn’t help being just a little curious myself. Okay, and just a little worried too.

A couple minutes later, the word leaked out across the school. Everything’s fine, it’s just welders downstairs working on the stairwell. That’s what the funny smell is. The building’s fire system clicked on, announcing that there was a “smoke situation” in Stairwell A and that it was nothing to worry about. The students started to calm down and things got back to normal. Not two minutes later, the announcement came over the loudspeakers that we were to evacuate the building.

For all the fire drills that we’ve done over the years, you’d think the students would be good at exiting the building in a calm, quiet, timely manner. Then again, you’d be wrong. The noise as we evacuated was deafening. Teachers and administrators alike tried to maintain order, but it was largely in vain. Our principal finally managed to restore some semblance of calm by handing out suspensions like Halloween candy as the students exited the building.

I was among the last people out of the building, joining a group of teachers who were shepherding students down from the third floor and keeping them moving through the cafeteria and out the front stairs. When I emerged onto 22nd St., a crowd of people from the upper floors of our building had already joined our 400 students in effectively blocking the sidewalk from our front door all the way out to 6th Ave. Students of the Culinary Institute from the floors above us were milling about in their chef’s whites. Office workers were lighting up cigarettes and bemoaning the weather. Oh, that’s right. Did I mention that this whole affair took place on the coldest day of the year so far?

So began the waiting game, with our entire school standing in the freezing cold, many students without coats since they had been rushed out of the school without being able to go to their lockers. I lent my scarf to a student who was braving the 30-degree weather with little more than a button-down shirt. Students attempted to find warmth in Best Buy, but we had to get them out before hundreds of them start to inundate the consumer electronics store.

Twenty minutes of frigid hell and it was eventually decided to simply let the kids go out to lunch. Frankly, I was ready to go to a bar. Everyone dispersed to the various restaurants, bodegas and fast-food places within walking distance. By some miraculous chance, every last one of the little angels returned on time at 1:10 to go to the gym, so we had two full buses of kids nice and riled up just in time to let them run around like maniacs.

So in the end, the school didn’t burn down and there wasn’t even any damage to the building. We just stood outside for long enough to freeze our toes, ate lunch, and came back inside. What’s really weird is that in all my years of being a student in school, I didn’t see so much as a flaming garbage can. But it only took four years of teaching to get my first actual fire.