The ROM

The Royal Ontario Museum is the Ontario’s most preastigious museum. There is an elegance with high ceilings. The ROM (the museum’s nickname) has a variety of exhibits: huge dinosaurs, armor in the Medieval se ction and a bat cave to name just a few.

But the exhibit that attracts me the most is the Egyptian exhibit. Specifically I have a morbid attraction to the Mummy. The poor mummy whose body is exposed for everyone to see with the missing toes.

Every time I see the mummy; it scares me. It has haunted me from age ten when I first saw the mummy. I have been haunted yet fascinated by the mummy ever since. One time I believed I was cursed by the mummy. I was sick after going to see the mummy. But it could have been food poisoning.

There was only one thing at the ROM that would scare me more. That is the prospecting of supervising up to thirty children on a field trip as a student teacher.

First getting to the ROM was a challenge. I came from a small city outside of Toronto. We usually had to take a yellow school bus. That was torture enough.

Then there was the trial of the museum.

There wasn’t just our thirty students. There were thirty students times thirty schools. Wall to wall children. Wall to wall noise. There were masses of little, pint sized people.

My fear was I would lose one of my students. I constantly counted heads. The children were all over the place.

Two, four, six, eight, ten.

There was the fear that a student would destroy one of the artifacts. Fortunately I was lucky.

After my brief stint as a teacher, I wasn’t so afraid of the mummy.