Fourth Grade Olympics or How Teaching is a Contact Sport

Fourth Grade can be rough. It's competitive and it's hard on the self-esteem. Especially on the teachers.
The first week of school we decided to have a Fourth Grade Olympics. We study Asia in fourth grade so it was timely.
Here's the reason we will never do this again.

One of the other fourth grade teachers is an athlete. She swims, plays water polo, and runs marathons. She is VERY competitive. I witnessed this last year during our softball world series. Which she will never umpire again if I can help it.
So, you can imagine, things got really . . . interesting.
When we planned this I "called" India as our country to represent. I worked with a teacher from India in the second grade for four years. I still work across the hall from her. I had access to some great stuff. A few days later, our overly competitive fourth grade teacher came into my room while I was teaching and said "We picked India, is that OK?"
My choices here are to be a poor example to my kids and say no way, or be a wuss and say okay. I chose to be a wuss. We hadn't even discussed the country issue in my class so they didn't know what they were missing.
I told the class that we would be Japan. Because I knew that the flag was easy to draw. And we spent an afternoon drawing red circles on white paper. I have talented children.

My overly competitive colleague got her hands on an Indian flag and then told me I couldn't get a Japanese one because she wanted to be the only one with a flag. It was one of those times when people say something and then they say "Just kidding." But you know they weren't. So I didn't plan on anything more than the paper flags we all made. I hate conflict. Besides. I am not an athlete. This is all about fun. Right?

All week, this other teacher was practicing the events with her kids. I kept forgetting. Oh well. I told them to practice at home. No biggie. I talked a lot about being good winners and good losers. I have a really sweet class.

What I forgot was that I have a Japanese student, and a student who visits Japan every other year with her family. And they came through on the day of the Olympics. Our class not only had a flag, we had Japanese treats and origami. My fellow teacher was not happy. I am not joking. She was really ticked off that my class looked as good as hers. It wasn't me trying. My class did everything.

That's what made it so awesome.

It was a mess to organize. She took it all a little too seriously. I did Olympics for four years when I taught sixth grade and you just need to play with the kids and realize that most of them are not athletes. She was yelling and getting mad because they weren't listening. I wasn't listening. Especially when she started trying to motivate them with the spirit of athletics and stuff. I motivate with candy.

So, I designated myself picture taker. That's how I got in trouble the first time. I took o finish line picture of the boys 100 yard dash. I showed it to her when I heard her results and knew she had the wrong kids. she said "That's why I hate those photos. They mess everything up." Before I showed her, the winners were all from her class. HMMMM.

Then I got in trouble because I only had 28 students that day and the other classes had 30 and I refused to run in the class relay. My fellow teacher ran with her kids. (yep. 30 kids ran one relay race. talk about chaos). I just asked if some of mine could run double legs. We hadn't practiced and I have a student who speaks French so I had to take time to explain to the students what a relay was. I was getting looks for not being prepared.

And then we won.

Oops. Didn't know we weren't supposed to do that.

In front of the entire fourth grade . . . that's 100 students . . . my fellow teacher says "You know you didn't really win that gold fairly, beacause you didn't have to pass off the baton as much."
Nice sportsmanship.

My class went back to our room, ate our Popsicles and danced to the "cars" sound track. Her class did yoga.