Friday, April 1

poisson d'avril

i had over sixty fish taped on me today.

for this is how the frence celebrate APRIL FOOL'S DAY at least the under-11 set.

you walk up to your "unsuspecting victim" and tape a fish on their back. the idea, of course, is to be (as i heard one student say) 'discrete'. uh. yeah. when your victim discovers the fish - you yell "Poisson d'Avril". apparently, they also do jokes/pranks aside from this, like we do in the states - but i haven't seen/heard any evidence of this.

i played my own little prank today - i have one class that had been on a class holiday for three weeks (that is school sponsored holiday for three weeks folks - NINE YEAR OLDS i'm talking here! on a three week CLASS SKI HOLIDAY!!) and today when i walked into class i announced that due to their three week holiday, and the fact that they missed three weeks of english, that they were going to have a 100 question english test that they would have only 10 minutes to complete.

i will treasure the looks they had on their faces.

::snickers::

of course, then i say "April Fool", and explain that we don't (as a far more civilized society) tape Fishies on each other's back. (ok, so i neglected to mention that this type of thing may have been done in school at any time of the year...)

i've included "le plus jolie" fishie of the bunch. most of them were hastily drawn fishies, or more specifically, barely identifiable scribblings, done by kids who just didn't want to be left out of taping something on the english teacher. ain't it perty?

4 comments:

Vivi said...

Aw, it is very pretty indeed! :)

Anonymous said...

dammit, that fish looks like fat albert. No wait... it's him !

Anonymous said...

You know, after your explained the whole April Fool's gag to your class, I would have said "Double April Fools", and given them the test!

Anonymous said...

I thought this was just for kids too but then my SO came home and told me how one of the researchers at the university where he works had pinned fishies to his boss's back. His fish were decorated too, with the graphs of the results of their physics experiments...

Hello, btw, we met at the expat blogmeet. I was the one who was also a fan of Neil Gaiman and Tori Amos. June 13 seems a long time away!