There’s a good chance you’ve seen a few April Fools gags, but a pair of teachers at a West Island elementary school attempted to pull one off that only they could.
Emma and Rose Annett are identical twins. They’re both Grade 3 teachers at St. Edmund Elementary in Beaconsfield, Que. It can be hard to tell the difference between them, and people get it wrong often.
“Whether it’s staff or students or parents, it happens every single day,” said Emma.
“In a store, if people say Emma to me, I will turn around. I’ll turn around for either name,” said Rose.
This is Rose’s first school year at St. Edmund, but Emma has been teaching there for eight years.
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“I had often joked with her ahead of time, actually, about how I wished I could clone her,” St. Edmund principal Melissa Hunter said of Emma. “When I found out that she had an identical twin who was also a teacher who was interested in the open position, I was thrilled.”
Hunter said it must be extremely rare to have identical twins teaching the same grade at the same school.
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Emma and Rose often wear necklaces bearing their names, or pins to make sure people know who’s who.
“At the start of the year, I was kind of confused,” said eight-year-old Abigail Plimer, adding it took a while to be able to tell them apart.
“At the beginning of the year I went in the wrong line, then realized it was not my class,” said nine-year-old Cale Robinson.
For April Fools’ Day, the twins decided to dress the same from head to toe and see if they could trick the kids.
“I think since I started here, everybody says, ‘you have to do an April Fools when it’s April Fools,” said Rose. “It’s kind of inevitable. I think we had to do it.”
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The sisters said about half of the students were able to tell the difference, and half were not sure.
“Some kids caught on, some kids were just questioning,” said Emma.
Our test group was full of very astute observers.
“The hair is way different,” said student Kiera Quach.
“The eyes are different. The eyelashes are different,” noticed Gideon Aldred. Multiple students remarked that only one of the twins had applied mascara.
Others noticed that one of the sisters has a small beauty mark on her forehead and that the sisters have slightly different voices.
The twins now know they have a few items to work on for next time. Just to keep the kids on their toes, they say they might not wait until next April 1st to attempt the prank again.
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