In which Sapphire and Ezio's teacher is ill

Sapphire and Ezio's teacher missed all of last week because he was sick. (At least, we were told that he was sick. Blaise is convinced that he has quit due to the stress of dealing with Nabil all the time.) In any case, he wasn't there last week.

Monday, they were unable to find a substitute, and so the kids in the CLIN class were all farmed out to the other classrooms in the building, two by two. Sapphire and one of the other boys in the class ended up in a 4th grade class, though not in the one that Sapphire goes to for mathematics each day. She still went to the other building for her math class. Ezio and Jonas, who is so new that he probably had absolutely no idea what was going on, spent the day in Ezio's regular 1st grade class. Both of them came out after school very excited about having gotten to spend the entire day in a French school class instead of in CLIN.

Tuesday they were able to find a substitute. On the plus side, that meant that the kids did get to go to the pool for swimming lessons. On the minus side, it meant that instead of spending the day in a French class, they watched a very long movie about dinosaurs, and then the teacher lead a class discussion about it. Unfortunately, only about half of the kids in the class have good enough French to have anything like a discussion about anything, so that didn't go very far.

Wednesday is a no school day here in France.

Thursday we were hoping that their teacher would be back. Unfortunately, we had no such luck. They had a different substitute, who earned praise from Sapphire for being very aggressive about trying to figure out who had taken her markers. (Disappearing school supplies seem to be endemic in their classroom, but they haven't yet figured out who is making the supplies disappear.)

We got a note sent home on Thursday evening, requesting that we keep our kids home from school if at all possible, because they already knew that the teacher would still be sick, and they'd been unable to find a sub. They would again have to handle the kids that were there by farming them out to the other classes. I suggested that perhaps that would be a good thing, but Sapphire pointed out that it wasn't exactly fair to the other teachers, and that it would just make their (the teachers') lives more difficult. Since she was right, and since I could keep Sapphire and Ezio home Friday, I did so. Sapphire and I went shopping together while Ezio played his DS, and Ezio and I spent a hour playing cards while Sapphire read.