The week at school was fairly low-key, so there's nothing to report. We had professional development last Friday, where I became eternally more grateful for my new principal. She only made us sit through about 45 minutes of a meeting, and the whole time we were there, she didn't yell at us at all. We talked about things we could do to improve attendance, and then we talked about the merge with 412. The 412 teachers were understandably unhappy, and when Simpson-Marcus mentioned that I have over 50 kids in one class (and I added it was actually 2 classes), they jumped all over me with the "yeah, but they don't all come" and the "but 35 is an average class size" routine. She stepped in to defend me, saying, "but the whole point of the small learning community that we are supposed to be is that the average class size will be small, and you all have classes that are very small while we have classes that are very large. And it's a done deal." She doesn't mess around. We also had professional development on Saturday (we got paid extra), and she had very much the same attitude there. "I don't care what the system says, I care what's good for our kids." Plus, Jeremy sat by her at a football game, and she didn't hesitate to call Marcus a fat ass. She calls it like it is.
Last weekend was full of endless fun. Carla's birthday was on Saturday, and we had a surprise party for her. The best part of the surprise was that she was home and in her bedroom with Megan while we all showed up and went in to the living room. She wandered out eventually and was like "what the...?" Fun party! Aya and I were in charge of providing ice cream cake. I had a dream about making a strawberry shortcake ice cream cake, and we made it happen. It was delicious! Here is Carla, pleased with one of her gifts:
On Sunday, Rachel (my college roommmate) came down from NY to visit with me and her friend Jimmy, who is a med student at Hopkins. We went to the Science Center (my favorite place) and for lunch in the Harbor, then back to our place where we walked up to the book festival that was going on at the monument. We were just cruising along, minding our own business, when Matt noticed KAL (the political cartoonist we saw at the Walter's Art Museum) was selling and signing books, so being the outstanding boyfriend that he is, he bought me the book for KAL to sign. It was sweet, expecially since there was really no one in line behind us so we just stood and chatted with him for a good long while. Quite a fortuitous afternoon. After some delicious frozen lemonade and a side-excursion to Red Emma's for Rach to look for a shirt and Beadazzled for some earrings, we headed home. That evening we introduced Rach to the wonder that is the fabulous Papermoon Diner. It was really nice to see her, even if it did put me behind for this week. Here are some pictures of us enjoying our adventure at the Science Center:
This week was one of those weeks where the kids totally take you by surprise. My kids are still awesome, with very few behavior problems. Even all the fighters, who are finally back from suspension, are not too bad...they've been gone too long to be caught up in all the drama yet (thank you, Ms. Simpson-Marcus). We made marshmallow atoms, and me saying "if you eat the marshmallows, I'm going to have to call your house and tell your parents you are eating school supplies and might need to go back to kindergarten" was enough to get them to behave. Here's the large colony of atoms growing in my prep room right now:
On Wednesday, I went with Matt, Carla, and Malcolm, my student from last year, to see David Sedaris live at the Meyerhoff. It was totally entertaining and a great time. I love him more now than I did before. The best part was he told this story about a guy who was trying to get rid of some mice by burning them in a pile of leaves, and one of them ran back inside and lit his house on fire. It turned out that the story happened in New Mexico. I told my mom about it, and she said, "oh yeah, that guy was my patient last week." I wish I'd known that in advance; then I would have had my chance to talk to David Sedaris and become best friends, as I just know we would be! Anyway, here's me and Malcolm in our absolutely awesome seats:
Like I said, this was a surprising week from the kids. On Thursday, I had two of my kids from last year wait all through lunch to be able to talk to me privately. One of them was having his typical pre-grade reporting freak out, and needed me to talk him out of dropping out of high school. It's the same thing that always happened last year, but I guess it was nice that he would still come to me. The other was a bit more serious...he'd overheard his mother talking about losing the house if she didn't make a payment by next Wednesday, and he needed help with it because he knew she couldn't afford it. I was able to take it to Mrs. Stokes without using his name and refer them to an agency that is set up to take care of just those types of situations. He was so upset, though...the next day, he said he'd talked about it with his mother, and she wasn't too happy that he told a teacher about it. He said he'd tried to explain that it wasn't just any teacher. It made me feel pretty good. The other interesting thing that happened was that one of my students in my third period asked me after class if I liked poetry, and he left a few of his poems for me to read. The first one I read was about having your soul saved, and was very good. The next was about his life in Jamaica, and told about living in bad neighborhoods and his dad losing his job and things like that. The third was about things you do in life catching up to you and him stabbing a kid and also getting stabbed himself...and the fourth was about juvenile detention. I was flabbergasted. He came back after school to talk and let me read some more, and I offered to take him home. He basically told me his whole life story, about being involved in a bunch of stuff, and stealing bikes and cars with his brother, and then about essentially being exorcised at his church and being saved. It was pretty amazing. I also started to hear the Jamaican accent coming out the closer we got to his house. It was nice to get to know him better...but I couldn't help but wonder what it was that made him decide to tell me all that stuff. Did he just wake up and say, "I know. I'll tell Ms. McCants my life story today. That'll really freak her out." I'm not sure I'll ever figure my kids out completely....
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