Tag: discipline

In which I get what I want (and it sucks)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching5 Comments

555265_527287527291946_1870688268_nAll told, this was actually a pretty good week, in a year that has been lighter on good weeks than I had hoped it would be back in August.  As I’ve said before (skip down a bit if you’re a regular reader; this ain’t nothin’ new) my day generally gets easier as it goes on; my largest and most poorly behaved class is first, followed by a better-behaved, smaller class (one that is still challenging, mind you, as it’s packed full of special education students) and then finally followed by my honors Algebra class, who are my darling wonderful angels even when they’re not.

First and second hour, in a lot of ways, determines how most of my day goes.  If first hour pisses me off enough, the three minutes in between them leaving and the class dominated by special ed students generally does not result in enough time to shed my mood, and my special ed kids’… well, foibles, we’ll call them, start wearing on me.  Exactly how many times must you be told, child, how decimals work before you actually hear it?  You spent so much time at your locker, which is directly outside my classroom, that you were late to class; you’re telling me you brought colored pencils, markers, crayons, glue and three different colors of paper… but don’t have your math book or your workbook or a goddamn regular pencil?

Is there any chance, any chance at all, that your 60-IQ ass is going to make even the remotest attempt to do any math of any kind today?  One problem, perhaps?  Just add something.  Here, seven plus two; we spent five solid minutes arguing a few weeks ago about whether it was reasonable for you to be expected to know that, and you insisted repeatedly that it was too hard and that you didn’t understand and that you’d never done addition before in class (note: I am not exaggerating), right before switching to insisting that you’d been telling me the answer was nine for the whole time.

If first and second hour are reasonable, I’m able to react to these sorts of things with equanimity, to remember that most of these kids really are doing the best they can, and that all I can hope for is progress, not mastery– and that progress is going to be slow and is going to involve setbacks.  If first an second hour are not reasonable… well, sadly, frequently neither am I.  Throw in a heavy dose of seventh grade literally being the worst year of anyone’s entire life in terms of your interest in and ability to pay attention to academics and frequently I am not the kind and caring individual I wish to be by the time these kids get into my room.

If I also have issues with third and fourth hour, I can even be savage with my Algebra kids; however, they are empathetic enough and smart enough that they recognize when I am not to be trifled with and they are capable of working in silence until I can get my shit back in order and deal with them like they are people.  I rarely end fifth and sixth hour in a bad mood.  It happens, but not often.

Anyway.

One of the determining factors of whether my forebrain or my id are in control of my actions at the end of first and second hour is whether the Two Kids Who Are Always Suspended are in my room or not.  Now, the first of the two Kids was in my room last year.  We’ll call him Darryl.  Darryl, by himself, is generally manageable.  He also likes math more than most of the rest of his classes; last year he also had math first thing in the morning, and I generally didn’t have much in the way of behavior issues with him until later on in the day.  In addition, he’s smart: he could be an honors student if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to be.  He could be getting an A or he could be failing depending on his inclinations at any particular moment.

I can work with the kid, is what I’m saying, and he’s generally not a huge problem, especially if the other Kid Who Is Always Suspended is not in the room.  They have a synergistic effect on each other, you see; both together are substantially worse than either of them individually ever is.

Last year, Darryl was suspended more than any other student in his grade.  This is probably only because the second Student Who Is Always Suspended came in mid-year.

We’ll call the other kid Jihad.  Jihad is, basically, unredeemable, as far as I have ever been able to tell.  There are a number of virtues that can cause one to like a person:  they might be smart, clever, funny, attractive, kind, gentle, generous, brave, athletic, or charming, for example.  Darryl could be many of those things depending on his mood and the day of the week.

Jihad is none of those things, ever.  If he has virtues, of any kind, I am unaware of them.  I don’t say this often; I can think right now of four students out of my entire career that I might use this word about:  I hate this kid.

His mother thinks he is a perfect angel who gets picked on by his teachers.  His mother is a lunatic.

(Actually, I should point something else out about him: a lot of the time I can find a way to work with even my worst kids if I know they’re coming from shit home situations.  I’ve tried individual tutoring with two of the four kids I’m referring to up above on the rare occasions that they’ve shown an inclination to actually learn something– if you’re embedded for your entire life in a context where criminality and ignorance is normal, I have trouble getting too angry with you for growing up criminal and ignorant.  Jihad lives with both parents, who are happily married and gainfully employed.  He has literally no excuse.)

The 64th day of school happened to be this week.  I happened to have a conversation with my assistant principal about Jihad on that day.  She remarked to me that, of the 64 days of school we’d had, he had been suspended or otherwise absent on 34 of the 64 days.

I’m doing the thing again where I give tons of background information for what ends up being a not-very-long story; sorry about that.  Needless to say, having one of them in my class substantially erodes my ability to teach– and it’s a class of 31, and it’s not like the other 29 kids are all angels.  I have another three or four kids on top of the two of them who can trash a room all by themselves when the inclination strikes them; we’re not going to talk about the drama issues that the girls are occasionally prone to.

Having both of them in class at the same time makes teaching virtually impossible.  Understand that, despite all my rage and complaining here, I am actually pretty well-known in the building for being able to keep my kids in the classroom.  Office referrals from me generally get taken very seriously by administration precisely because they’re so rare.  Teachers are able to dismiss a student for fifteen minutes to in-school suspension on basically any pretense we want.  There are teachers in my building who rarely go a class period without dismissing at least a couple of kids.  I generally do no more than two or three a week– and of those, half will be for Jihad.  I’ve kicked Jihad out of class within fifteen to twenty minutes of the start of the period at least half a dozen times this year, and probably twenty times altogether.  That’s probably over half of my total for all the referrals I’ve written for everyone else combined.

There’s no point in providing the details; I wrote Jihad up on Friday and sent him to the office.  He was suspended on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, returned to class on Thursday, I think managed to make it through class without an ISS referral, and was sent to the office on Friday after literally every adult (three) in the room had multiple interactions with him either trying to get him to shut up and do some work or trying to calm down some issue he’d started with someone else.

I got a call about fifteen minutes later from my assistant principal.  Jihad’s being put up for expulsion.  She wanted a formal statement from me about what had happened.  Which I provided.

I ought to be doing fucking cartwheels here, people, and the other teachers he has throughout the day are doing cartwheels.  I seriously cannot make it clear enough just how awful this kid is, or how much he destroys our ability to educate the other 29 kids he shares a classroom with.  The education of those other 29 kids is vastly more important than his is.  He is in the most literal sense a detriment to the education of everyone he comes into contact with throughout the day.

(And, frankly, the expulsion is going to be denied because he’s not violent– he’s far too much of a coward to fight, another thing I don’t like about him.  I figure at best we’re quit of him until January and it might only be a couple of weeks depending on how long it takes to get an expulsion hearing scheduled; these things, luckily, can take a while.)

I spent all day Friday beating myself up, going over what had happened in my head over and over and over and trying to figure out where I had gone wrong and what I could have done– either on Friday in particular or over the third-of-a-school-year that I’ve had this kid– to keep this from happening.

Which is fucking bullshit.  I know exactly where each and every one of this kid’s buttons are– it’s not hard; they’re large, and red, and they blink– and I’m twenty times smarter than him on his best day on Earth and my worst.  I could have manipulated this kid into blowing up and getting kicked out of school in August if I’d wanted to.  While I’ve put him in ISS a lot (everyone has) only one of the office referrals leading to suspensions (prior to this one, at least) have come from me, and that’s because a fight that started in someone else’s room bled over into my class.  This is not. my. fucking. fault.  And, again: it is undeniably a plus for my other kids that, at the very least, we’re quit of this child for a few weeks.  Hell, it’s even a plus for my kids who aren’t in class with him, because he so frequently manages to ruin my mood in the morning and it spills over into my teaching with the other kids.  So this is literally one student’s shit behavior fucking up almost ninety other kids’ educations.

This is a good thing, goddammit; this kid manages to stress me out on weekends and he’s out of my room.  So why the fuck do I feel bad about it?

Gaaaaaah.

In which… well, not much, actually

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Teaching4 Comments

My son is apparently reading a book called “The Alphabet for Hippies;” so far I’ve heard him mention that R is for radicchio and K is for kohlrabi; I feel like he should not know what these things are. I barely know what these things are, to tell you the truth. S is apparently for Swiss chard.

C is for cookie, dammit, not “currant.” I rebel against the tyranny of the good-food alphabet!

Anyway.

Featured events for today: One of the two Kids who are Always Suspended came back from suspension today; the other was himself suspended by the end of the day. At the moment I don’t know what for. Another kid has just been put on half-days due to behavior issues and has also been suspended for the last several days; he managed to last literally less than five minutes before getting sent out of the room and then home. That’s not a joke or an exaggeration. Here was his school day: 1) came to school; 2) ate lunch; 3) four minutes of class; 4) sent home.

Also, I intercepted a note from one student to another that turned out to be a rather detailed and surprisingly well-written and romantic description of her first kiss. The girl flipped out in a fashion that was probably supposed to be dramatic but just ended up hilarious; when I stopped laughing I assured her that I didn’t give a good goddamn who she was kissing and gave her the story back. There are certain situations when we find out about stuff that they’re doing where we become mandatory reporters; a two-second kiss is not one of them.

At some point I actually did do some teaching today, too. This has actually been a pretty good week (the absences of both of the Always Suspended twins for the first two days of the week helped) and I’m hoping tomorrow keeps the trend going. Especially since the other possibility is that the week has been saving all of its bullshit for Friday. I’d prefer that to not be the case.

(He’s still reading that book. What the hell is a Xigua?)

Tonight’s activities will mostly involve reading, vegetating on the couch, and trying not to die. Forgive me; I can’t be exciting every day.

what is this i don’t even

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Sitting on the couch in the living room right now, watching Hank Azaria do his impressions of Grover and Cookie Monster and Elmo, and really really hoping that as the Jimmy Johns in my belly digests it’s going to take some of the stress away. I don’t know how likely that’s going to be.

Things that happened today, or in the last few days: (this will format poorly. I will fix it later when I’m on a computer.)

  • It seems like about a third of my kids are suspended right now for one reason or another. At least one, a kid with a seriously nasty past who was pulling As for most of last quarter, has gone from being a student in pretty good standing to up for expulsion in something like two weeks, for two rapid-fire instances of theft (an iPad from another student and then some food from the cafeteria) and then beating the hell out of the kid who snitched on him for the cafeteria theft and then cussing the assistant principal out when he got busted for it. Note that each of these incidents took place on the day he returned from the previous suspension. He was only at my school because he got expelled from another school last year; it seems highly unlikely that I’ll be seeing him again.
  • A full-scale meltdown from one of my BEST kids (I don’t know what “BEST” stands for and somehow in seven years in this district have never learned; it basically means crazy kids and criminals, and should not be taken to refer to anything positive) involving having to be physically restrained by somebody about four times his size in the hallway and then causing no manner of destruction on his way down the hall– for, apparently, the second time in a row. This happened prior to my class; I don’t know exactly what triggered it.
  • I’m getting another new BEST kid in that same class tomorrow; apparently the two I have aren’t enough and someone downtown figured that if the first kid was getting expelled I deserved another disaster behavior student in that room. Occasionally these kids aren’t actually that bad and I can’t figure out why they’re in the program; this kid is coming to me after being kicked out of another school so I don’t have high hopes.
  • Meanwhile, my favorite student is moving to Arizona on Friday and another top-tenner is transferring to another school, also on Friday.
  • No less than four three-day ISS suspensions for girl drama related stuff; I’ll give you three guesses who might have been involved in that and the first two don’t count. If you said the blowjob-denier from a couple of weeks ago, give yourself a cookie.
  • The two Kids Who Are Suspended All the Fucking Time are both suspended again; note that these two kids aren’t the kids mentioned above. One of the two has still not made it through a single week of school (this is week… eleven?) without at the very least a day of ISS and for most weeks there has been out-of-school suspensions involved. Apparently he grabbed somebody’s tits in ISS. His mother continues to insist he’s a misunderstood angel. This also happened on Friday while I was out. I’m not sure what happened with the other one.
  • I wrote up one of my Algebra kids this morning for a situation that he could have ended at any of half-a-dozen points up until the point where I lost patience with his bullshit and wrote him up. There were something like six or seven other kids involved; all of the rest of them saw the wisdom of managing to go a few minutes in the morning without being idiots until they were no longer under my direct supervision. This one… did not. He spent the day in ISS; I found out from the assistant principal that afternoon that she’d been subject to a long harangue from his father about how all I ever do is pick on the kid and it was my fault he was written up. This student, by the way, is only in my Algebra class because we’re trying to keep him out of trouble; I am overstuffing my Honors class to keep this kid away from the shitheads he hangs out with who would otherwise keep him in trouble even more than he is. I made the point to him, and I’m happy to make the point to his father, that if he wants to transfer to a school where he will be allowed to hit anyone he wants, no one will stop him. If his father is foolish enough to pull this move with me instead of with my AP I’m going to take his damn fool head off.
  • (One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same) I bought a Fitbit Force. I’m wearing it right now. Thus far it entertains me but I’m not convinced of its utility in the long run (which is shitty, because it was expensive) and you should expect a longer review after a couple of days.
  • OH RIGHT:  Fleas.  Everywhere.  Mutant apocalypse indomitable indestructible fucking fleas, because I’m a fucking peasant in a hut in the English countryside circa 1658 and not a middle-class twenty-first century American in a goddamn six-figure house.
  • That line came before I added the video.
  • I just found a recipe for egg drop soup.  I didn’t know I wanted egg drop soup.  I’m startled at how happy this makes me.

It’s Thursday, right?

Vegetating (Day Six)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Teaching1 Comment

I have about 32 more hours as a vegetarian before I can go back to eating meat. When I first thought about doing this there was a real question in my head about whether I’d be able to pull it off or not; that fact is no longer in doubt at all. There is basically no way that I’m going to either accidentally eat meat or be forced to eat meat tomorrow, and I’m all done eating except for a stray snack or two for the day now, so I’m going to pull off a week without meat.

Do I want to try and go for a second week? No. No, not at all, thanks. At least not during the school year. Weirdly, it was lunches that killed me– as a teacher my lunch hour is a) extremely short and b) geographically constrained; I have to either bring my lunch with me, eat food from the school cafeteria (my usual choice) or race at top speed to one of several fast food/ grocery deli options in the area and hope there aren’t red lights or lines in my way. I tried to leave work for lunch once this week and the kids were like zombies outside my classroom door by the time I got down there. I just don’t have the time to leave the building, especially if I’m not racing. And cafeteria food is almost always meat-centered, and when it isn’t it’s rarely something I actually want to eat. (Generally, I don’t rag on our cafeteria food. But it’s terrible if you’re a vegetarian. Just not feasible at all.)

This means that I needed to bring my lunch, and I never really hit on anything that managed to keep me full for the rest of the day. Seventh grade has first lunch, meaning that we eat at eleven, and if I walk out of the building before 3:45 or 4:00 it’s a bloody miracle. So afternoons are long, and I need to make sure my lunches are filling enough that I’m not scavenging the corners in the hallways for scraps by the time I go home. I’ve been snacking a lot. Too much.

I think if I wanted to I could pretty easily shift to a plant-or-fish based diet for dinner five or six nights a week without it being that big of a deal. I do not think right now that I can include lunch in that. If I had a different job, it might be a different story, but with the way my lunches work right now it’s just too much of a pain in the ass to be including arbitrary restrictions into what I’m willing to eat.

Today was exhausting, by the way. My kids weren’t the problem; thinking was at as high a level as it ever gets and I didn’t have any particularly egregious examples of kids trying to pretend they’d never heard or math before or giving up on shit they know how to do. It was just one of those days where every time I thought I’d gotten something done or accomplished I turned around and there were five more things, Hydra-like, waiting where I’d cleared something out. Charmingly, the day ended with me and the security guard and both of our administrators investigating a stolen iPad in one of my classes; I’d not even been aware the thing was in the room, but the thief managed to convince the kid he’d stolen it from that I had confiscated it. The kid came running up to me at the beginning of last hour, practically in tears, begging me to give it back to him and not wait for his parents to get it and I had literally no idea at all what the hell he was talking about. It was lovely.

Oh, and one of the thieves (turned out there were two working together) was seven plus two kid from yesterday. So there’s a few more days where he won’t be in my room learning math. Meanwhile, the other jackass I discussed yesterday didn’t bother showing up for school today, meaning that he still has to serve his three days of in-school suspension when he gets back– so I’ll have him for a maximum of two days next week, and I don’t doubt his ability to do something on Thursday that will get him suspended again on Friday.

I think I’m glad it’s a weekend.

Second verse, same as the first

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

AvI_0yPCAAII5dDThis has been kind of a frustrating week, and I can’t quite put my finger on why– for all I know, it’s the meat shakes again.  Or maybe it’s fractions, which are apparently the most difficult mathematics in the history of time and are certainly rapidly becoming the most frustrating to me.  I got a heavy dose of “we’ve never seen this shit before” from third and fourth hour today, including one kid who, when adding mixed numbers, had to be harangued for five solid minutes before admitting that he knew what two plus seven was.

This is a seventh grader, and this is emphatically not a fucking joke or hyperbole.  Two plus seven.  He spent five minutes insisting that he didn’t know and that math was hard and why am I bothering him and god I don’t know and I don’t get it and once I finally got an answer out of him immediately switched to insisting that he’d been telling me the answer was nine for “the whole time” and that I was just hassling him.  This kid’s ideal day at school is one where no teacher ever talks to him and he does nothing whatsoever; he will do literally nothing if someone is not hovering over him making absolutely certain that he is doing work for literally every second of his day.  It hasn’t sunk in yet that that shit’s not gonna fly in my classroom, and I’m sure as hell not ever going to let someone get away with “I don’t know” when the question is fucking seven plus two.

But if he doesn’t pass ISTEP, it’s my fault, for not bringing enough fucking balloons and firecrackers into class and keeping him entertained.

I let them get into my head too much, I think.  I have a kid who is currently signed up for the Washington, D.C. trip later this year who is, while not the worst behaved kid I’ve ever had, easily in the top ten– and that’s in twelve years of teaching, so we’re dealing with a sample size in the low four figures by now.  I should have kicked him off the list immediately; there was never any chance that this kid was going to be able to pull his behavior together well enough to convince me to take him eight hundred miles from home for four days.  Never.  But I didn’t cut him off last year because kicking him off a trip he’ll take as a seventh grader when he was in sixth grade didn’t seem fair.  So far this year he literally hasn’t made it through a single week of school without at least a day or two, sometimes more, of either in-school suspension or out of school suspension.  This week he was here Monday, absent Tuesday, in class yesterday and today, and then by the end of the day today he’d managed to land in the office three times from three different teachers, including getting called out of my class for something that didn’t have anything to do with me– so that’s four times in the office, actually– and he’s in ISS for the next three days for the cumulative effects of all of that.

If there’s ever been a time to pull the trigger, it’s now; my principal okayed me to kick him off last year.  And I still keep not wanting to do it because maybe he’ll get it together.  I keep throwing questions at this other kid– in private, mind you; it’s not like I’m calling him out in front of the whole class– hoping that sooner or later the math will click.  And it’s not gonna.  For either of them.  And I keep banging my head against the wall, because banging my head against the wall until the wall breaks down is my goddamn job.

I need a goddamn cheeseburger.

tl;don’t r

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching, Uncategorized1 Comment

In accordance with prophecy, the post that instructed you to not read it if you respect me (which, in case it isn’t obvious, I wrote last night and delayed until noon today) has received a full day’s worth of traffic already.  I hate you all.

I spent all day today putting out fires, and right now I’m split between basically writing a short-ish “YAAR EXHAUSTION” type of post or going exhaustive and giving you a moment-by-moment breakdown of the horror that was my day.  I think I’m leaning toward exhaustive– after all, I’m at OtherJob, my lesson plans are already done, most of my grading is already done, and it’s been raining all day so there really isn’t much else to do.

It is entirely possible that this post will end abruptly with “fuck this, you get the idea” or something similar; please don’t hold it against me.  After all, you already got a post today, right?

BEFORE SCHOOL:  I wake up on time, but somehow going into the office to check and see if my paycheck came in and my union dues got paid takes half an hour.  I have no idea where the time went; I rush through my shower and manage to forget to eat breakfast before leaving the house.  I do manage to pack a lunch, which is an unimportant detail except insofar as it indicates that I was in the kitchen while I was forgetting to eat.  I manage to make it to work on time.

AT SCHOOL, BEFORE SCHOOL STARTS:  As I’ve mentioned previously I cover the gym in the morning.  There are a couple of other adults in there with me by the time the lion’s share of the kids are at school but it’s not uncommon for it to be me and two hundred kids.  Today, our assistant principal (new to the building this year) comes in and asks me in a rather pointed fashion what the building policy is on cell phones.  Note: she is fully aware of the answer to this question, which is that the kids basically aren’t supposed to have them, ever, and if they do they’re to remain in backpacks until such time as they are placed in lockers, and at all times they are to be off.

I explain to her that my policy on cell phones is You Don’t Want None There Won’t Be None; I ignore anything that is plainly related to listening to music, force phones to be put away when anything that could involve taking pictures is taking place, and tend to react reasonably, but harshly, to kids who are actually talking on them– which is rare.  The main reason is that every second kid in the gym has a cell phone with them and if I start taking cell phones away (which I am fully empowered to do by district policy) I will do nothing but take phones away and fight with kids every morning, all morning.  I fully understand why this is the policy in class but it is virtually unenforceable when the ratio of kids with cellphones to teachers doing something about them is literally a hundred to one.  I am not interested in that fight every day, and kids who are being reasonably discreet are going to be ignored.

She does not appear happy with this explanation until I look around and find five kids who are quietly listening to music and ask her which one she’d like me to take a phone away from first; that child will immediately find the other four and ask why I’m not taking their phones away instead of whoever I’m talking to.  They will then report to their parents that I’m picking on them.  No thank you.  This appears to clear the fog a bit and the conversation ends with no directive to change my policy.

The kids are on edge in a weird sort of way but there aren’t any fights or any real threats of one.  But there’s a weird vibe in the gym that I don’t like.

HOMEROOM:  The bright spot of my day, once the girls are done screaming about another spider in the hallway, which is quickly becoming the theme around here lately.  We do a Word of the Week; this week’s word was “ration.”  The kids are supposed to write a sentence for me; I select the best two or three and send them to the librarian, and he names a victor for each grade level.  One of my girls wins today.  If my name were Mr. Smith and her name were Charlie, this would be the sentence:  “Mr. Smith told me that he has a ration of Charlie that he is allowed every day, and I don’t get to talk to him again until tomorrow.”

I am beloved, obviously.

SUCCESS:  (It’s between homeroom and first hour, I didn’t name it, shut up.)  I’m ten minutes into my lesson when the teacher next door asks if she can borrow me for “a minute.”  There are two teachers in the room for Success so I have the other one take over and go into the hall.  There is an eighth grade girl who I only know by sight (new to the building this year) pacing and muttering angrily in the hallway with her fists clenched and tears in her eyes.  I get over my initial why the hell is this my problem bewilderment and ask her what’s wrong.

Here’s a thing:  Seventh and eighth grade girls are really fucking easy to manipulate.  I don’t know if you knew that but holy Christ is it true.  Some fifth grader– a fucking fifth grader— on the bus asked her if she thought she could beat up some other student, and now she’s angry because she has to fight this other student.  Who, as it turns out (and unbeknownst to the teacher next door) happens to be in my room at that very moment.  I spend a few minutes trying to calm her down and then call the other student into the hallway.  They are both saying stupid shit like “I don’t wanna fight her, but if she hits me I’m gonna kick her ass,” and pointing out that both of them are starting their sentences with saying that they do not want to fight is not doing the job it should of convincing them that, no, nobody’s actually going to fight here.

This conversation literally costs me the rest of the period.  By the end of it I’m reasonably convinced that I’m not going to have to break the two of them up at any point today and I’m ready to break the fifth grader’s head myself.  Then the teacher pulls another student out of her classroom who I have to convince that none of this shit was his business and he doesn’t need to threaten the first girl because nobody wants to fucking fight here so stop being a damn asshole.  I make a mental note to have a stern word with the fifth grader and bemoan the critical thinking skills of everyone under 30.  I do virtually no teaching in my first class of the day.

FIRST AND SECOND HOUR I have to spend keeping an eye on one of my autistic kids because he’s making his para insane and in general the kids are being weirdly dependent and pretending to not be as bright as they are.  This is an affliction that is not at all specific to them but they’re bad about it; I need to break them of this habit.  I have deliberately put a review packet together for my kids today because I have a crapton of desk work that must get done by the end of the day and my prep period was full before I even walked into the building.

(Note: this is something that most people don’t realize about teaching.  I have virtually no time to do anything during my day that isn’t teaching.  Any paperwork of any kind, including all of my grading, gets done on my own time.  It had piled up too much by this point.  It was time to have a work day.)

At any rate, this plan didn’t work out, because the kids had way too many questions.  I got a bit done but not as much as I wanted.

THIRD AND FOURTH HOUR was when all hell broke loose.  Third and fourth hour contain The Twins, who are several posts unto themselves and who I will talk about in more detail when I have the mental energy.  And if I’m being honest this is already a fourteen hundred word post and I haven’t even gotten to the stressful part.

So, yeah: I’m gonna abbreviate.  A lot.  The twins are, very soon, gonna get the shit kicked out of them, and it’s going to be their own damn fault– and that is not something I am prone to say about my students, particularly students who have obvious developmental issues (I suspect fetal alcohol syndrome; this is unconfirmed.)  But they piss off everyone they come into contact with, more or less deliberately, and then they tattle on the kids they’ve pissed off.

For example: if walking past the desk of the biggest gangbanger in the building, a kid who was in jail before he got expelled from his previous school and sent to us, maybe you don’t knock his shit on the floor on purpose.  Because he might literally kill you.

It’s happened twice.

The kids nearly caused two different fights today, and that’s not counting the number of students they got pissed off at them.  I ended up sending them out of my room with my coteacher for their own safety and not only arranged for them to not be in the halls during passing period for the rest of the day but literally created a security detail to get them to their buses at the end of the day so that they didn’t have to be in the gym with the rest of the kids.

I fully expect to find another article in the paper in a few months about how I didn’t do anything about the way they were mercilessly bullied, by the way.  I’m at 1700 words; this post would be twice as long if I actually talked about all the nonsense they created today.

And that was before my fifth and sixth hour got into my room.

God, I’m tired.

In which I am listening to Nappy Roots

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

field-of-pretty-flowers-124a

Let’s begin now.

Have some pretty flowers.  At least, this is what Google gives you when you google “pretty flowers.”  (Image credit.)

Okay.  Today was better.  At no point today did I wish to resign, storm out of the building in a high dudgeon, or annihilate any other living being who I work with or am responsible for in any way.  That’s progress!  Days without rage are good, and as you could probably tell from yesterday’s post that day was rather high on rage.  Better is good.  I got things done today!  Things that have been nagging at the back of my brain for weeks, and only emerging into full remembrance when it’s been much too late for me to actually do anything about it!

I have my ISTEP scores, by the way, which is unrelated to yesterday’s issues.  Short version:  I’m happy, personally.  I’m not going into building level stuff right now and may not go into building stuff at all here, as it makes it too easy to locate precisely where I work and I’d prefer not to do that.  I’ll have to figure out how to write the post if I do.  But personally I’m happy.  More details of some kind later.

(Fifteen minutes of staring at the screen later)

I’m apparently lacking in things to say today.  Despite how bad yesterday went, I’m doing a pretty good job of keeping to my “don’t yell at kids” promise this year.  I had that one moment with one kid (I think I talked about it here; if not I’ll come back and edit, because it’s kind of a funny story) but other than that I’ve done really well.  Even the reading of the riot act that occurred this morning (complete with rearranging the desks and new seating charts for my first and second hour classes, which were the main sources of my bad mood yesterday, although by far the only ones) was done largely through tone and without raising my voice.  Today we managed to remember that, hey, we’ve sorta done math before, once or twice at least, and maybe a fraction isn’t some sort of alien life form that no one has ever seen or expected us to convert into a decimal before.

So, yeah.  Point is: better day.  Hopefully yours went okay too.

Ha!  I didn’t tell that story.  I love my homeroom, right?  They’re wonderful kids and I would keep them forever and ever if I could, but sadly they’re only my homeroom and I don’t have them all day like I did last year.  I have duty in the gym in the morning, so often my girls are already waiting at my door for me when I get to homeroom– my unofficial rule is that I don’t care when the bell rings, if you beat me down to my room (which, remember, is out in the sticks) then you’re not tardy to class.  Anyway, one day a week or two ago I’m letting the girls into my classroom when I hear a piercing, blood-freezing scream from one of them– a kid who I like a lot but who could very justifiably be accused of being slightly high-strung.

I spin around.  Note that at this point I’m not even raising my voice.  “Nefertiti, what in the world is wrong?”

She points at the tiniest arachnid ever, which is toddling across the carpet and minding its own damn business.  She’s still shrieking.

“THERE’S A SPIDER!!!!”

At this point I lost my temper a little bit, I admit it– I don’t like horrifying piercing noises first thing in the morning, and drilling my ears for no reason is worse— and I snapped at her– loudly– before I really even realized I was doing it.

“Child, unless that stupid thing has laser beams coming out of its eyes that I need to know about, you’d better leave it alone and get your butt into my classroom before the bell rings.”

And that was it.  I’ve yelled at one kid this year and it referenced spiders shooting laser beams.

I think I can live with it.

Terrible decisions: interlude

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Parenting1 Comment

Lowe’s wants $2000, sans material costs, to tile our bathroom, which has 37 square feet of floor space and less than 70 square feet of shower wall space. The entire budget for the bathroom is $2500, so… looks like I get to learn how to tile.

I can do this. Really. Honest.

While we were at Lowe’s today getting bad news, the boy was sort of misbehaving. Not really in any large way, just in that toddler “I want to do things that I find interesting, but are not compatible with my health or your desires” sort of way. He got a bit screechy about wanting to push “his cart” (he’s two; everything is his lately) in some direction other than toward the front door after we decided it was time to leave, and I made an Executive Daddy Decision, put my screeching son in the cart, and we took off, mildly embarrassed at the terrible sounds my poor, oppressed little boy was making.

Then we got to the front of the store, where there was a father with three little kids with him. Two boys: the oldest, maybe nine, then maybe a six or seven year old, and an infant of indeterminate gender in a stroller. All three were screaming and crying. The two older boys wanted candy, and were bawling at Daddy’s refusal to buy them candy, repeatedly insisting that he justify his non-purchasing-candy ways for them. The infant was also screaming, probably just because its brothers were.

My son isn’t old enough for me to have had to make any real decision about physically disciplining him yet. I am ambivalent about whether spanking an older child is ever a useful practice. I am certain that it is worse than useless with a two-year-old.

And I’m not sure whether I think this guy should have full-on slapped both of his kids in their faces for their stupid, embarrassing public display of bullshit or whether I respect him for his restraint. One way or another, he got out of the store without beating either of his spoiled-ass kids, although I can’t vouch for what happened when he got them back to the car.

“I forgive you,” I whispered into my son’s ear.

Maybe I don’t want him to get much older.