What's Number One?

It's been a while since I covered the opportunity class. I really hadn't missed it.

Opportunity is where they send students who are very low on credits. They did next to nothing in their other classes and usually have behavior issues as well. Lots of behavior issues.

I spent an hour trying to get them to do something. Anything. (They claimed to be finished.) When I finally got them settled, it was time to go over the work that they had done. On page three of their packets was a grammar page.

They were to have underlined all the nouns. Oscar, who had been as difficult as the rest of them, read off the answers to number one. And he was correct. I attempted to get someone else to give me the answers for number two, but they were arguing amongst themselves. Oscar proceeded to read off all the underlined nouns.

I was impressed. Oscar was mostly correct. He only missed one, and the rest of his errors had to do with including the modifying adjective with the noun.

We were on number three when Jimmy had a question. What was the answer to number one?

I ignored Jimmy. If he had been paying attention when we went over number one, he would have heard the answers. Instead, he was flipping off his neighbor. Oscar moved on to number four. Then five.

We had gotten to about question eight when Jimmy decided he had had enough. He got up to go.

He was half way out the door when I asked him where he thought he was going. He was going to report me to the assistant principal. I wasn't giving him the answer to number one, so therefore I needed to be reported.

Yeah, because his lack of attention was my fault.

I eventually got him to sit back down. I gave up on going over their packets, but I did get them to do their math. I'm still not sure how I managed that.

I'm exhausted. And there were only five students in the class.