In Which I Survive to Teach Another Day...

First day of school blog post!  Always a good omen.

I was playing every teachers' favorite game today, that being "Taking Roll and Mispronouncing Names."  Best.  Game.  Ever.   I came to a child who we shall call William. 

"William,"  said I, "what would you like me to call you?"

Can you see where I went wrong?  What I meant was, would you like to be Will or William?  Totally legitimate question.  But, in fairness, that is not the question I asked.

Without even the slightest hesitation, William answered, "Danny DeVito."

And now I have Danny DeVito in my second block class.  FOR THE WIN.

It's the End of the Year As We Know It....

The bad thing about having a student teacher is that far fewer amusing things happen when you aren't teaching.  Sorry 'bout that.

Buuuut now I'm back, and the last weeks of school are always good blog post fodder.  After a full year of harassing seventh graders  training young minds, I have molded at least two of the children in my own image.  Consider:

1.  A child was walking down the hall at the end of the day with cupcakes.  I demanded to know why I had not also been given cupcakes.  Without missing a beat, he replied, "Cupcakes are for winners."  The same child brought in a container of cake sprinkles the next day to torment me, shaking it at random intervals to remind me that indeed, only winners have sprinkles (see Sprinkles Are For Winners! for more details). 

2.  I was tormenting my last block class by eating pretzel sticks in front of them, as one does.  I started to feel a little badly about it, so I gave each kid two pretzel sticks.  The small ones.  Upon receiving his magnanimous gift, a student told me, "I like two more things about you now than I did before."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  Go forth and spread chaos, younglings!

Watch Out For That First Step...

It's been a busy week, but there were some doozies!

1.  We're reading about the Titanic disaster.  The selection in our textbook was written by Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreck.  I told the kids about how nowadays he is exploring the deep trenches of the ocean.  It takes him hours to go down the trench in the submarine and hours to go back up.  A student asked, "How does he hold his breath that long?"

2.  I have no idea how the topic came up, but someone made a comment about how old I am.  I immediately notified the students that I am not the oldest seventh grade teacher; my arch-nemesis co-worker is.  By six months.  But it still counts.  A girl in the back looked at me up and down and said, "Well, clearly she moisturizes." 

3.  A student managed to stick a pencil eraser to his forehead and approached me saying, "Look!  I'm a unicorn!"

For reals.

Once More Into the Breach, Dear Friends...

Day One:  CRUSHED IT! 

You know it's gonna be a good year when you get a blog post on the first day of school, right?  So I do actually teach a lesson on the first day--because I am the meanest teacher on Carpenter Road.  Plus I have 90 minutes to fill.  The first lesson is always about how to write a personal letter.  Then they have to write a personal letter to me to introduce themselves.  Genius, right?

Writing this letter isn't all that complicated.  There's really only 3 formatting issues to be dealt with.  In order to explain where the various components should be placed on notebook paper, I draw a piece of paper on my whiteboard so it looks something like:

Only mine doesn't look this good, because let's face it...I'm an ELA teacher, not an art teacher.

The point I was attempting to make is that when we write, we justify our words to the left margin.  I'm nothing if all about academic vocabulary, even on the first day.  I was trying to get the kids to come up with the name of the red line running down the left side of the page, which initially got me responses of, "It's a line!" and "It's a red line!"  

Highly technical terms.  

I said, "It begins with an M."

And a student in the front blurts out, "Oh!  I know!  Mississippi!"

*crickets*

*hysterical laughter as I bang my head against the wall*

I need to go back and review exactly when I began being a geography teacher, apparently.

Sprinkles Are For Winners!

So there was some fierce dodgeball action in the middle school last week.  Each class had a team, and then one team per grade level progressed to the finals.  Much to my surprise and delight, my homeroom won!  They then went on to beat the 8th grade team in the semis that afternoon.  I discovered that there are some VERY competitive people in my class, and there's one kid who attacks like a spider monkey. 

This meant that my homeroom was going to play the staff team in the finals.  Meaning I was a winner either way at this point.  Despite my getting hit within 30 seconds of the start, the staff team hung on and emerged victorious.  There were some allegations of cheating, but come on--we're much bigger targets than the kids.  We deserved some accommodations.

I decided to buy my homeroom doughnuts the next day to show that a) there were no hard feelings, and b) that they rocked.  My teammate was appalled, reminding me that SPRINKLES ARE FOR WINNERS!  And so my evil plan was hatched...I would buy sprinkle doughnuts for all the teachers, which we would eat defiantly in front of the children.  When they complained, we would explain that SPRINKLES ARE FOR WINNERS and they did not win.  After some teasing, I would bring out the doughnuts I bought for them--which were glazed, but not sprinkled.  BECAUSE SPRINKLES ARE FOR WINNERS.

The plan unfolded beautifully.  The children were amusingly outraged when they saw us eating doughnuts in the hall.  They demanded doughnuts for themselves.  I told them that SPRINKLES ARE FOR WINNERS.  They accused us of cheating and reminded me that our moral focus virtue for the month was integrity.  I responded that I was amazed that anyone would choose me to teach moral focus values.  And ate my sprinkles.  Then I gave them their doughnuts, which made them happy.  When someone commented on the lack of sprinkles, I pointed out that I had actually compromised my values by providing them with glazed doughnuts versus plain ones and perhaps they should be thankful for what they had.

One child in particular was obsessed by the sprinkles.  Let's be clear--they weren't even the good rainbow sprinkles.  They were yellow and orange Halloween sprinkles, for reasons that Tim Hortons ought to explain.  Personally, I don't even LIKE sprinkles.  They are crunchy, and doughnuts ought not to be crunchy.  Unless they are Cap'n Crunch doughnuts from Voodoo Doughnuts.  Then it's all good.  Anyways, this kid wanted sprinkles so badly that I gave him one that had fallen off.  You would have thought that it was a billion dollar sprinkle, he was so happy.

The day after Doughnut-Gate, there were still sprinkles on my floor.  Apparently it is hard to vacuum sprinkles up?  Who knows.  But this same kid went bonkers.  He picked them up off the floor before I could say anything AND ATE THEM.  He then proclaimed, "It's my lucky day!  It's like dinner!"  I didn't tell him that there were sprinkles on the floor in the hall from where my fellow WINNERS and I had been eating doughnuts the day before.  For obvious reasons.

Those Authors, Sheesh.

The powers that be have given me a student teacher again.  THE FOOLS!  THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO!  Because I am apparently genetically incapable of allowing her to deal with behavior issues, I try to peace out for part of the time when she is teaching.  This way she can learn how to give the death glare and the universal "zip-it" sign instead of me launching myself across the room to handle it for her.  Instead, I wander the halls, causing chaos and anarchy wherever I go.  For example, today I riled up the kindergarteners in gym class.  At one point there were about ten of them launching dodgeballs at me, screaming, "GET HER!!!!!" 

But I digress.

Having a student teacher also gives me the freedom to lurk in the back of my room and listen in.  We just started the infamous poetry unit, so "The Highwayman" was the poem of the day.  It's usually a popular selection due to the combination of hot pirate-like criminals wearing leather pants and fun words to use in 7th grade like "breast," "butt," and "hell".  Plus everyone dies in the end (spoiler alert). 

The last class of the day totally latched on to the connection to Romeo and Juliet, which we'd studied earlier.  Once they realized that Bess the landlord's daughter died to save her love, but he dies anyway, they went crazy.  One gentleman sitting in the back by me had some particularly scathing commentary:

"Why do all the good characters have to die at the end?  Especially when they are hot girls?  Man, authors SUCK!"

#truth, people.

In Which Something Weird Happens in Reading Class

Sometimes getting kids to read is simply a matter of finding the right book.  I usually have one or two students who make miraculous strides in this area each year, but there are a lot more than normal this year.  A LOT.  Like, ten so far.  And we're only one-third of the way through the year.

The point of this is not to make myself sound like some amazing teacher.  I really didn't DO anything other than read a bunch of books and then pass them on to kids.  Sometimes I get lucky and something clicks.

But what happened today was unprecedented in all of human history.  Or at least in seventh grade history.  Some background...

I teach an elective class called Battle of the Books.  Students in the class read books that I have selected for them, take the Accelerated Reader tests over them, and earn points for their team.  Winning team gets a fabulous prize at the end of the trimester.  Trimester One just finished, and the class was split between kids who wanted to read every day all the time and kids who would rather eat bees than read a book.  Kinda challenging. 

One of the latter type of students barely read anything throughout the whole last trimester.  Today during first block, my partner-in-crime teaching colleague extraordinaire told me that she had to take away a book from him during math because he wouldn't stop reading.

"What?  No you didn't!" was my immediate response.

"Oh yes I did!"

"SHUUUUT. UUUUP."

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER!  WHAT IS HAPPENING?

So the students comes to my class before lunch.  With his book.  He wants to know if it is an AR book because he couldn't find it when he looked it up.  So I of course literally dropped everything to look it up.  Turned out it WAS an AR book (books with subtitles are often difficult to find in the system).  When I told him that it was worth 5 AR points, his eyes lit up.  "What?!"  he exclaimed.  "I have two more of these books!  And I love them!  That's gonna be, like, fifteen points!"

So third block rolls around at the end of the day and of course he's reading his book.  Almost done with it, by the way.  And then I notice something EVEN WEIRDER...two OTHER boys who would never have been caught dead reading a book last week WERE READING BOOKS!  I had to stop class to ask them what alien had switched their brains--but I wasn't mad at the alien because it was SO FREAKING AMAZING. 

And, I'm not gonna lie, it was QUIET.  Instead of causing chaos, kids wanted nothing more than to sit down with their respective noses in their respective books.  Even some of the other students noticed how different it was.  One of them said to me at the end of class, "It's like books are the new fidget spinners or something....look how focused they are!"

Ah friend...I hope with every fibre of my being that your words are true.  Because then my work here will be done.  At least for an hour or so.