Tomorrow is the last day before Winter Break.  I let my kids know on Tuesday that there were two ways Friday could go; they could behave well (or at least reasonably) throughout the week and we could watch a movie while I did one-on-one test talks in the back of the room, or I could give them an enormous stack of worksheets that they could do in silence while I did one-on-one test talks in the back of the room and periodically sent someone to ISS for catching my attention at the wrong moment.

My seventh graders chose… poorly.  They will not be enjoying tomorrow very much.  My 8th graders will be watching The Avengers during fifth and sixth hour.  They’ll likely be obnoxious about it but at least that group is fun.  It should go fine.

Then it becomes Actually Time to Deal with the Bathroom Time, which is redundant on purpose because Yes Really Dammit It’s Time Now.  Which is its own entire set of things and by the way I still have no damn idea what the hell I’m doing.

Whee.

So, remember when Jihad got expelled and I was down to one of the Kids Who Are Always Suspended left in my room?   The end of the day Monday featured a gym-clearing brawl that I’m half-convinced wouldn’t have happened had I been there, and now both of them are expelled.  You would think that this would lead to my classroom becoming functional; evidence from the rest of this week suggests that to not be the case, but the week before Winter Break is always gonna be more chaotic than usual, so we’ll see if they’ve settled down at all once we get back in January.

Jihad, surprisingly, decided to go the Defiant Asshole route at his expulsion hearing, which was this week– I figured he’d go for Poor Maligned Misunderstood Little Boy– and while we only asked for a semester away they may actually expel him for the entire school year based on his attitude at the hearing, or at least mandate that he attend another school when he’s allowed to return.  Apparently the reading of my statement was a high point of the hearing; the chair of the committee was my principal in fourth grade, and apparently told Jihad that if he’d pissed me off that much there wasn’t any way she was taking anything he said seriously after that.  What makes me especially awesome is that I actually predicted in my statement the exact line of defense that he would attempt at the hearing and stomped it to rubble.  There was apparently laughter among the committee members when they got to the “Jihad will probably insist that…” portion of the statement.  I’d nailed it, practically word-for-word.

Which kinda entertains me.

One more day.  I can do this.  Honest.

Really.

I swear.