Seriously?

Monday morning, 9a.m.: Myron comes through to our side of the building from the freshman hall, yelling "they scrappin'!" The immediate thought that rolls through my head..."oooooh no, it is much too early for this." This leads to a full day of fights, one per passing period. 12 suspensions, 5 proposed for permanent transfer, all my kids. Yippee. Mr. Sullivan's shirt got soaked in blood because he was in the way when a girl's hair got ripped out. Makes for a pretty exciting day! In my class I did demos to illustrate the difference between observation and inference, and they loved it. Behaved, too.

Wednesday morning, 8a.m.: Matt calls. "I just thought you might want to know that the crack house 2 doors down is on fire." I made him repeat himself to make sure I understood what he was saying. Sure enough, it was all-out up in flames. I ran upstairs to share with Jeremy...figured I shouldn't be the only one to teach my 1st period flabbergasted. We don't know what happened yet...the million people who lived there moved out a few weeks ago, and the house was emptied out about 2 days before the fire. 8am doesn't seem like prime time for arson, but it's hard to say. In the picture below you'll see the burned house on the right, and my blue door on the left.



Tuesday and Thursday proceeded without incident. I made an interesting discovery in lab, and I'll just leave it to you to do this little experiment at home - mix sugar and baking soda in equal amounts and light it on fire. You'll be entertained.



We played Jeopardy to review - any other teachers reading this, here's a great idea. Instead of competing in class and dealing with all the cheating accusations and other crap, have your classes compete against each other. In each class give them 3 chances to get each question right and then keep track of how much they earn, and give the class that gets the highest amount at the end of the day a prize. It made for a much more productive Jeopardy day!

I gave my kids their first test on Friday, and really thought they were ready. Sadly, we will be re-taking the test this week as they did really really poorly. I find that they can explain things to me verbally, but can't put it in writing. That's such a hard and frustrating thing to deal with! But we'll plug on through...

A low-key weekend of napping, cleaning, playing games, etc. brings me to today. A stack of ungraded tests (because I'm making them re-take it, so why do I need to grade it?), some half-heartedly graded junk, and laundry that needs finished while I watch the special features of Lost. Ugh. The good news is that I'm going on a field trip on Tuesday to Coppin State with my kiddos...the 36 "best" ones. Should be exciting! Look forward to news.