Fly on the Wall

"Fly on the Wall" was the last event of the Homeroom Challenge because it was the most anticipated. The rules were that you had 5 minutes to use 3 rolls of duct tape to secure one member of your class to the wall. The "fly" that stayed up the longest won.
Albert was the "fly" for 9A and shown here was the general strategy for most teams, our strategy (once again noticed by Eca) to come later...

8B thought it was necessary to secure Dipra's head to the wall... :)

This was the other fly that stayed up the longest.

So now on the 9B (can you tell my bias? :) lol) Initially we were in the "first heat" because there were only 5 spots to tape people to the walls and there are 10 classes. About a minute into the taping process, Eca noticed there were some nails sticking out of the wall just above Nada. Consequently, we used the nails to create a sling to support under her arm-pits. Most flies fell between 20 and 50 seconds up on the wall with the 3rd place fly falling at 1:40. The picture below is of Nada 4 minutes in. In watching it, I was convinced Nada would stay up until the nails came out (and at the four minute mark you could see they were showing signs of stress) and so in the interest of getting the second heat started Matt called for Nada to get pulled down.

After the first heat, the rule that you couldn't use any nails or other aspects of the wall was added for "fairness," and so I told 9B that I would proud that they had re-written the rules, it was like the invention of the forward pass in football :)

However, the ingenuity of 9B was not appreciated by all and there was talk of our class getting disqualified. Like I said in other posts, throughout the Homeroom Challenge I gave my full support to student-driven ideas while offering minimal input, but at word of this I did speak up to Matt and the principal that it would be exceedingly unfair to 9B because they didn't violate any of the previously stipulated rules and it would send a terrible message to the kids that intellectual progress could be stunted if it created an "unfair advantage" as determined by the powers at be. Well, the argument for entrepreneurialism at least allowed us to reach a compromise where 9B would do it again, but this time without use of nails. Since some of my students weren't exactly pleased with this compromise, I decided to take a significantly more active role in the second taping to ensure that Nada would be able to stay up for at least 1:40.

The second time around, even without using the nails, Nada stayed up for over 4 minutes again and was taken down before she fell down. This experience has been a good lesson in how to respond to seemingly unfair adversity though I don't think Nada's skin appreciated it :)

You have to show your team spirit for your homeroom:

Bro.