Airplanes

Today we got a new student in our grade 3-6 drama class. I don't know what his name is yet because he doesn't speak English or respond to Vietnamese, Korean, Taiwanese or any other language that we tried today. We found out later that he is Vietnamese but that he is also special needs. He sat quietly through the first 20 minutes of our rehearsal and then he began to giggle and talk to himself. Kim tried to shush him and Ms. Thuy sat next to him and tried to get him to listen but there was no stopping him. The topper was in the midst of Ms. Kim's production of Robert Munsch's seminal work I have to go he stood up with a high pitched giggle and started dancing around the auditorium like an airplane. For a moment none of us knew what to do. He wasn't responding to anything anybody said and he had this irrepressible giggle and he just kept dancing and ducking around like an airplane. Then we started laughing, and laughing, and laughing and laughing some more. Kim was doubled over on herself and I had tears running down my cheeks.  We were trying to be professional but in the face of such oddity we were at a loss. One of the students asked me "Ms. Naomi why he crazy?" So when he was finally calmed down and removed from the classroom we had to have a talk about how it isn't nice to call someone crazy and how we have to accept people with differences. We can't keep him in the class because we need everyone else to focus on their performance which is 3 days away. Also three of our leads announced today that they would not be here for the performance so we were also trying to train our understudies. Anyway here in honour of our new friend Airplane, is, well, airplanes.