I left the house ten minutes early today, wanting to get to work a few minutes in advance of the morning’s staff meeting, and promptly encountered a car accident on the highway that slowed me to a complete stop and got me to work at pretty much exactly the same time I usually get there– ie, a minute or two late, but not enough that anyone will ever notice or say anything. But God damn if it hasn’t led to me feeling half an hour behind on everything, for the entire day. I ran some errands after work and picked the boy up from school after a club meeting, so I didn’t get home until after 6, and then we ate dinner, and now somehow it’s 8:15 and I’m working on this blog post. I’m completely convinced it’s going to be 9:30 when I finish, no matter how long the post ends up being, and if you can’t tell it’s not like I have a ton of material to work with today.
(A brief digression, where I attempt to find a picture for this post, and find one that keeps getting more bizarre the longer I look at it until l realize that two different girls in the picture have extra knees and therefore the picture is AI. I’m not posting it, but feel free to Google “quiet kids sitting in rows” and see what comes up.)
(Also, Adobe, if something is AI-generated it cannot, by definition, be a stock photo.)
(I type “classrooms” into GIS looking for something generic and the first picture I see also turns out to be AI.)
(Fuck, and I mean that with every ounce of disrespect in my body, generative AI.)
Anyway.
Yesterday was not a bad day at school by any means but all of my classes have been wilder the last couple of days than previously, so I decided to pull back on the reins a little bit today and made everybody stay in their seats for the entire class period. Typically my move this year is that everyone stays in assigned seats for the instruction portion of class, and after that I don’t really care where you sit so long as you’re in the room and you pick a spot and more or less stay there. I wasn’t mad and didn’t act mad in class, I just said that they’d been a little rowdy so we were doing to dial back for a couple of class periods and then things would probably go back to normal.
Here’s how good my classes are: you could have heard a pin drop in my fifth and third hour classes during work time, and my sixth hour was quiet until 90% of them were done with their work, at which point a class discussion erupted that was entirely my fault and made it nearly impossible to keep everyone quiet. Which, again, wasn’t my goal anyway— I wanted to limit movement and chaos a little more than usual and cut down on the noise, but I’m rarely interested in silent classrooms unless I’m teaching or they’re taking a test. Silent classrooms full of kids creep me out, to be completely honest.
All that said, my honeymoon may be coming to an end, as the counselor pulled me aside this afternoon to tell me that a currently homeschooled student would be visiting my classroom on Friday (??) so that she could decide (???) whether she wanted to attend our school part-time (????) or go to the district’s alternative school instead. (?????) As none of this is usually the child’s decision– you have to have made some serious mistakes for part time or alternative school to be an option, and at that point the “option” is not usually your option, it’s the district’s– but I look forward to seeing what sort of bomb this is going to drop into my lovely, peaceful day.
I can only assume that I should have put homeschooled in quotation marks up there.