Lockdown

About two weeks ago I experienced the two extremes of the human experience.

It's 1:30pm. Everyone's happy because in 4 minutes we will be free. The bell will ring and we'll be on our way home. 1:33pm. An announcement is made that we will not be dismissed at 1:34 because an incident has occured. At 1:40 I allow the students to put up their seats, because I know we are about to leave. 2:00pm- After 20 minutes of craziness, another announcement is made. We have no idea what is said because my students are way too loud. They run out of the room and are chased back in by the administrators. At 3:15pm we realize we are not going anywhere anytime soon. I start allowing students to use my cell phone to call their parents. There is general pandemonium in my room because we don't know what's going on. The police come by to see if any strangers have entered the room. Now we know that something really major is going down but we don't know what. At 4:35 pm we are released. I have just experienced my first lockdown and I was totally unprepared. Why was the school on lockdown? Some parents saw 4 people run into the school. One of them was armed. The school called the Police department and they spent hours searching. I don't understand why you would choose to hide from the police in a school. I guess it happens regularly even though I'd never experienced it before.
Then Saturday I volunteered for the Toy Giveaway at church. I showed up late because I really, really like sleeping in(especially on weekends). I expected there to be about 100 people receiving gifts. Boy was I wrong. This Giveaway was a massive event. When I showed up there were thousands of people waiting to get into the church. Because there were so many people, the church's parking lot (about the size of two football fields) had been converted into a carnival. There were tons of games and food vendors to occupy you while you were waiting for your turn to go pick up gifts. Everything was free! I figure there were about 500 volunteers helping out. Later I found out, that 2800 people received gifts. I guess that's the advantage of going to a megachurch. You can do gigantic outreaches.