"We're waiting..." aka Awkward Stares and Power Struggles

This weekend is crazy, and I don't know how I blogged this. Time continues to go by faster than it should as I'm currently in the process of making a TAKs packet for my kids so that hopefully they all can pass with the added help. Who knows if what I'm doing will help, but I'd sure like to think so. 7 school days left until TAKs - 4 until I leave for True/False.

I had a long week this week, especially since I picked up a bacterial infection on Tuesday and was out on Wednesday. I sent 30 kids to the nurses office on Monday and Tuesday, half of them having to go home because of fevers. When I came back on Thursday, I was doped up on so many medications that I had to ask my kids to bear with me and realize that I'm not 100%, but I would do my best and hope that they would to. This worked out WONDERFULLY, except in one of my classes where I blew up at a student. I blame the medicine, myself, and actually, I blame the student quite a bit. I should have written him up and kicked him out of class, but instead I addressed the problem in the middle of the class.

You see, I had just started class and told the students I was sorry for having been absent the day before, when this kid interrupts me with "YEAH! You SHOULD BE SORRY!" which I let slide, continuing with my short introduction of how I'm still sick and working through the cold, asking the students to be considerate. I took attendance, then started the lesson by putting notes on the board. I give the class a certain amount of time to copy the notes, and go around the class making sure everyone is on task. This certain student was not, so I reminded him to copy the notes, which he started doing, but at a very leisurely pace. When it was time to go to the next slide, everyone else in the class was done except for him, and he screams "WAIT! I didn't FINISH" so I told him I'd give him an extra 30 seconds, which I did. He was still not done, so I told him he would need to look at a friend's notes or stay after class to finish. He complained about that too, but finished writing his notes. He pulled the same stunt on the next slide, so I didn't give him the extra 30 seconds to finish writing (I have slow writers in the class too, and they had all finished).

I was midway through the lesson on Tone and Mood and had directed my students to a vocab list of good Tone/Mood words. I told the class, like all my others, to spend 30 seconds and circle any words they don't know, as it was higher level vocabulary for the most part. After circling these words, I was taking 6 words from the class to use as vocabulary words that they would write down in their notebooks and use during the class. When the class was told to volunteer words, some students were raising hands and calling out words like "Nostalgic" and "Reminiscent" that I wrote on the board, but this one student felt the urge to scream out the words "ANGRY!" and "SAD!"

At first, I ignored the child's outbursts, as he neglected yet again to follow classroom procedure in order to be "funny" though no one else laughed. He screamed out "ANGRY" again, to which I said "Do you really not know what angry is?" (He had a big smile on his face at this time). "It means that you're mad. I know you know this though [student]. I want you to focus on words that you don't know, because we're doing this as a class to help you." I asked the class for more words, and he screamed out "SAD!" with a huge smile on his face.

I stopped the class and just nailed this kid because I had addressed his behavior more than once and he thought it was a joke. "[student] I am NOT going to call on you or listen to you without your hand raised. You are wasting our time in class and disrespecting me and your fellow students." (At this point a classmate said "Quit being a jerk [student]," which I let slide, because this seemed like a good time for negative peer comments.) I continued with my tirade for about a minute, and finished with "When you're ready to act like you can learn, I'll get this class started again. We're waiting... and we'll wait until after the bell if we have to." I sat for the next 30 seconds, (which seemed like an eternity), staring directly at this kid while his peers made chide remarks about him needing to "stop being a jerk" and "do your work. You're making us all suffer." He realized that he was not going to win his little power-struggle, and with a blank stare of "did Mr. Johnson just tell me off?" picked up his pencil, and started writing down the definitions we were discussing as a class. I immediately continued the lesson, but was forced to keep kids afterwards to finish their assignment, and told the class I would not write passes to their following class. I apologized to the on-task students at the door for their classmate's behavior, but they reciprocated the apology. It was a great thing to know that I wasn't the only person annoyed by the student's raucous outbursts.

I still felt dirty about yelling at the kid, but it was effective, and it was my last resort for a day where I was already on a short rope. Nevertheless, he came in the next day with a smile and didn't act up. Crazy teenagers.

Countdown TAKs/T/F

I think I should apologize for not blogging this weekend, but after submitting grades, I distinctly remember looking at my computer to make sure that it was actually Sunday, and not Saturday night as my body hoped it was. The weekend felt altogether much too short, but looking back on it, the week should not have been that taxing. Monday was a "Staff Development Day" which is always a humbling experience because I get to put on my student cap again and see what it's like to sit around in the same room for 8 hours with nothing but my imagination and some type of learning objective. Yes, I doodled, and no, the trainer didn't get on my case about it. I brought work to grade in the break periods, as grades were due by the following Monday. I felt like I wouldn't have gotten away with my behavior in my class, but when I think about it, I don't really bother my kids too much. I try to keep them on task, but if they really don't want to work, I don't force it. I have a few students that work the best when they doodle, so I make sure that they have enough paper to learn and to play. I'm not a big fan of angry kids, and I don't see a point of making kids angry if they don't see the point of an assignment. It's usually not their fault they don't see a purpose to an assignment, it's mine. So if they give me attitude, I try to give them purpose, and more times than not, the attitude goes away. It works surprisingly well. I said usually because sometimes kids can be kids and really just not care at all and feel a need to rebel even if it's in their best interest NOT TO DO SO. At least I know the feeling and can empathize.
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I've put a large countdown on my board, showing the amount of school days left until TAKs, counting the current day. On Wednesday, the kids will be on 15. I feel more than a little bittersweet that I will be leaving for 2 of these days to go to the True/False Film Festival. Yes, I will be leaving the weekend before TAKs, and I will only have one day with the kids, but I had already booked the trip and I had told my administration about the trip before I was even hired and they didn't have a problem with it. I still feel like I'm letting down the kids, but at least I'm doing my darndest to make sure they are super-prepared well before the day I leave.
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I've got too many funny kid stories to count from this last week. I really felt like I enjoyed my job more than usual, and I only have the kids to thank. I don't know if it's because of the countdown and the greater "sense of urgency" but they seem on-task, or at least are more entertaining when they are off-task. Well, I'll tell one story...

So I have 68 Limited English Proficient or "LEP" students, and in one class that has a majority of LEP students, we were reading a poem called "Skinny Tomboy Kid". I was having the students focus on descriptive words, specifically those that pertained to the character. When we came to tomboy, my non-LEPs understood, but one my LEP students thought "tomboy" meant "lesbian" and said so in class. He was not joking at all, it was just an honest to goodness misunderstanding. As you might imagine, I had to clear up the definition of tomboy for the student, and told the class that "tomboy" was not the same as "lesbian" because a tomboy was a girl who liked to do boy things, like play sports, games, and maybe fight. When I said this, one of my athletic LEP girls gasped, got really red, and the whole class burst into laughter, because clearly she thought that by playing sports, everyone thought she liked girls instead of boys. I quickly recovered by asking every girl in the class if they have P.E., which they do, and asked them if they played sports. They all said yes, and I said, "well, technically you all are tomboys. The word doesn't have the same meaning as it used to because it's more acceptable for girls to play sports and do anything boys do without being judged for it." The class stopped its giggles as they finally understood, but I still crack myself up if I think about the whole situation again.
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I leave you all with one last nugget of awesomeness. I urge you to check out the website www.freerice.com. It's an amazing website where you are given multiple choice questions asking you to determine the correct meaning of a given word. There are TONS of words, so it's great to build your vocabulary, but the best part is that for every word you get right, the website donates 20 grains of rice to feed hungry nations. I checked it out, and the site is legitimate, as it takes the ad revenues generated from each ad (at the bottom of each question) and uses them to buy the 20 grains of rice. It's the absolute COOLEST idea I've ever heard of. Being able to enrich your own mind while helping to feed the hungry is probably the most worthwhile internet minutes you could spend. So check it out, test yourself, and get to feeding some hungry nations!

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

This past week was a bit stressful. The kids had to finish their short stories, which, after 5 weeks of off-and-on work, a little over 2/3rds of the class had drafts ready to type. As you can probably tell, this made life very stressful for me as I had to repeatedly ask students why they didn't have anything to type after several days of inclass work for the rough draft (5 weeks ago now), 2 days of revision two weeks ago, and reminders every day since that they needed to have their drafts ready to be typed. I even told the kids that anyone who brought in their draft for me to look over would get comments and edits the VERY NEXT DAY. I had 6 kids take me up on my offer out of 140 students.

Luckily, the only lab my students are able to use has this fun setup where the computers will delete all of the local files when they are restarted, which happens every evening. The computers are also not properly cloned, so none of them are hooked up to any type of network drive to make things easy to save. So aside from going around to help the kids that didn't have drafts brainstorm ideas for a hopefully passing paper, I spent my afternoons on Thursday and Friday, as well as Friday morning getting every single Microsoft Word file from all 34 computers. At the start of each class I gave all the students clear instructions on where to save the files, and had everyone do this at the start of class to avoid confusion. Apparently, confusion is harder to avoid than an elephant charging you down, because files were saved multiple times, and all over the place. Like a good teacher, I dealt with this and used my tech sense (and recent documents) to pull every file necessary, and even double checked ones that looked suspect. However, I still had 3 students lose their work, which made me feel absolutely horrible. Anywho... the week is done with, and I spent the weekend zoning out to episodes of "Lost" streaming from ABC's website, going to the batting cages, and performing first aid on my friend's badly cut thumb at a party on Friday night. He's ok, but I'm definitely glad I had a first aid kit in my car, since it came in handy.

I leave you all with a video that my mentor teacher told me about. The music is from Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and I have no idea who the girl dancers are. I would say that this is my message that as it gets closer to TAKs, I will be "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" in every aspect of my teaching, but I don't think that's really going to happen. I'm just going to have fun and get these kids as prepared as possible, and work on getting my grades on a routine schedule for this semester.