Short Week

If we had been forced to have children for a full 5 days this week, I think I would have quit.

Monday was an awesome day instructionally. We reviewed scientific notation, and I found out that a bunch of the kids had been taught incorrectly how to do it at some earlier point in life (the just counting zeroes type thing). It was one of those glorious days spent mostly practicing and without me talking much. They had their first "prove it," the daily-quiz sort of thing, and that also went well. Lovely day. Until the bell rang to end 6th period and a huge fight broke out in my room. It went from peaceful learning to two boys trying to beat the shit out of each otheri in mere seconds. They don't even talk to each other, so I have no idea what it was about. I started yelling at the other kids to get out of the room, and even shoved some of them out the door, but they wouldn't budge. Of course, now it was passing period, so all the other kids were trying to get IN to see what was happening. Tom was standing in my doorway to block them out, so they just went through his room instead. Not cool. Finally, James W. (one of my pretty big boys) got one of the ones who was fighting (I won't use their names...) pinned into a corner to stop him, while Teddy, Jerome, and Kenneth dragged the other kid out of the room.

In this whole process, the boys had moved from the back of the room up the side, knocking over several desks. They would have smashed my computer if they hadn't already pushed several other desks up against mine. They knocked over the overhead projector and it busted into pieces (luckily it was a cheap plastic one, so the only thing that couldn't be put back together was the light bulb, which I replaced). It was absolutely absurd. The one boy who was still in my room hobbled around for a little while trying to pick some stuff up, and digging for sympathy and forgiveness too, I think. Darvin saw the mess and came in to help me clean up too, but I sent him out so I could deal with everything. Mrs. Stokes came in to get the write up and take the fighting kid away. I was so extremely pissed off at these two boys that I could hardly contain myself. When I finally finished writing up the incident and went to take it downstairs, I ran into one of the special educators who had just talked to the kid who had stayed in my room. She said "not to take up for him or anything, but blah blah blah (fill in details of personal life here) he's had this and that going on with other kids and family and yadda yadda. He feels really bad for messing up your room and he has been taking anger management and all that..." To which I replied, "He should feel bad, and he will continue to feel bad, because that is absolutely unacceptable behavior." I talked to Jenn, my TFA program director, about the whole thing, and I am working on some classroom-based consequences for when they get back from the 5 days suspension. It seems like they should get worse than kids would get for fighting in the hallway since they chose to do it in the classroom. I don't know what the deal was that day...two other kids from that class had been suspended earlier that day for fighting too!

Anyway, the rest of the week was ok, except that my lesson sucked on Wednesday. Matt and I went over to some friends' house for dinner, and I got a substantial migraine while we were there (at that time, if you'd told me that pounding a rusty pitchfork through my head repeatedly would relieve the pain, I'd have tried it). By the time we got home, my plan to write a lesson was completely shot, and I woke up the next morning ready to fly by the seat of my pants. Turns out they were right..."Fail to plan and you plan to fail."

Thursday and Friday were glorious self-directed professional development days where I cut up cardstock into 8000 pieces and hung out, wrote worksheets, and relaxed. If only we got two days a week to do that regularly....But no. We're heading into two straight weeks of teaching full 5 day weeks. Then, after Presidents' day, we teach for 5 full weeks. It is going to blow goats. Big ones. Lots of horns. Stay tuned.