Ripped the Example

Earlier this month I spent two days covering an 8th grade science class. And things got... um... hairy... The crazy was too good not to share.

On day one, they were to work on a foldable, which is kind of an art project illustrating the concept they were studying. In this case, it was graphing and relationships between data: direct, inverse, or complex. They had to define and then show a graph.

(It sounds more complex than it was.)

The teacher left an example of the foldable assignment for the students to see. They could come up and look at it, but they could not take it back to their desks.

Two reasons for this: (1) So it doesn't go missing; and (2) So the students don't just copy it.

I explained the example needed to remain up front. And I had to remind them a few times. So, when the boy took it back to his desk, I was going to retrieve it and put it back where it belonged. When I got there.

(I was in the back of the room dealing with another issue at the time. The boy was at the desk just above the desk covered with my tag in the picture.)

Before I could get there, Britney got up, snatched it off his desk... He grabbed for it... RRRIIIIIPPPPP...

(I've written about Britney before. She was the "sweet girl" who I sat next to Abraham.)

Britney and the boy traded recriminations. But the girl seated next to them, Bobbi, really lit into Britney.

By that time I got there, retrieved the pieces of the example, and tried to calm the situation. But Bobbi was angry. Really angry. Britney knew the example had to stay up front. The boy didn't think she should snatch it off his desk. And Bobbi thought Britney didn't need to butt her nose into it in the first place.

It took some time to calm them down. It took less time to tape the example back together.

There was only one class after them, so it wasn't a big problem. But when the yelling started, that made it an incident that needed to be noted. (It would have been noted anyway, but now Bobbi was part of the incident.)

I was so glad the example "disappeared" the next day. (The teacher put it away. I managed to find it easily, but I didn't need to tell the kiddos this.)