You Know You're an Art Teacher When

 You know you're an art teacher when you take a selfie with a huge papier mache sarcophagus and send it to friends.  Seriously, this thing is BIG:

And it "lives" in the basement art room of my second school.  The art teacher who put it there bought it at a garage sale.  I really want someone to hide in it and jump out.  Not to scare me, of course, but scaring someone else would be hilarious!
You also know you're an art teacher when things go horribly, disasterly wrong, and you keep on truckin' right through that lesson even though you want to cry.  Laughing at this point is recommended.
Remember this video? And my plan to have students make their own gelli plates?  Well, we did it:

Aren't you so impressed?  Yeah, me either.  But I'd already poured a million dollars into this (ok, so really only about $175, and PTA paid for it + my generous principal reimbursed me for my out of pocket expense, but STILL) so I was bound and determined to make it work.
We started with the lids from tempera cakes:

And used the 7 packets-gelatin-11/2 cups-glycerin-1 1/2 cups-boiling-water recipe and got this:

But for some reason they didn't set up well like when I did them at home:

And did I check them before whipping them out of the cafeteria refrigerator to have a class of 28 use them??? Of course not! Ain't nobody got time for that! So we ended up with a GIANT mess of gelatin, glycerin, acrylic paint and brayers:

AND my classes are back-to-back, so I had fourth grade and third grade after this disaster.

But NO WAY was I going to let anything like a lesson/experiment going horribly awry stop me!  So I scooped what I could of the faux gelli plates back into the tempera cake lids and microwaved them for 2 minutes (one lid melted a bit, and then I knew to more closely monitor the microwaves) and got this:

See how all the paint mixed in?  So what?  They still work!

There's six like this.  All different colors.  They kind of look like
some sort of coral reef/ocean thing.

Then I decided to actually learn from my mistakes and try it out before having the students do it, and this is what I got:

Totally happy with it.  And if students produce quality work it's all worth it, right art teachers????