Reruns

Today was one of those days. Average. The kids weren't bad, but they weren't spectacularly good either. It was a good working day.

Unfortunately, it didn't give me a great incident on which I could hang a blog post.

I spend my days looking for that one thing that will make a good story to blog about. (Well, that and doing my job, but that should go without saying.) I usually have a couple things to choose from. I do for today as well. But none of these are terribly original. My choices...

1. I had an issue finding the lesson plans. They were in an obvious place, but since no teacher had left his/her lesson plans there in a while, it didn't occur to me to look there until after I called the teacher at home. (I blame Mercury going retrograde.)  
2. It warmed up. I had the air conditioner going. The kids complained that it was too cold.  
3. I ran into a student I had had in class at the traditional high school (I was at the continuation high school today). I wasn't surprised to see him at the CHS. His behavior at the THS screamed future CHS student.  
4. I was in a computer class. Some students were doing things (online, games) that they weren't supposed to do. They thought they were hiding it from me. They weren't.  
5. I got to watch a video twice. I saw it before in another class.  
6. And I was just happy not to be at one of the other schools today because they were having an assembly.  

I probably should have just gone with the skip today. It wasn't a terribly interesting day.  

Not Deshawn

Today I had 8th grade science. The teacher had forgotten to leave the seating charts, so I had to call out the roll. (I assume he forgot the seating charts, as the lesson plan made mention of them, but I couldn't find them anywhere.) This went fairly smoothly until 6th period.

There are some names that are unique to various races. For example, a Jose is always a Latino. So, when I called out Deshawn, I knew something was up when one boy indicated that this boy was present, but he was over there (indicating a white boy). Especially when "Deshawn" looked a bit bewildered about this. He refused to say that he was "here", so I marked Deshawn absent.

The boy who pointed out "Deshawn" responded to the name Chris. I heard a few snickers from the crowd. I knew what game "Chris" was playing now. (Yeah, this game has come up a couple times.)

I don't know why Deshawn wanted to pretend to be someone else. It's not like he did anything out of the ordinary. In fact, had it not been for the name swap, he wouldn't have made my note at all. As it was, the swap was pretty obvious.

At the beginning of the period, several students tried to remember to call Deshawn "Chris", but most slipped up within moments. (They were working on group projects, so there was continuous noise. Since most of them were doing what they were supposed to be doing, I wasn't concerned.) If I had had any doubts about Deshawn's true name, those would have been erased before the class was halfway over. By then, the charade was up, and most of the others had forgotten to call Deshawn anything else.

I left Deshawn marked absent, though. I thought it served him right.

Math Time Fillers?

The girl took way too long to sharpen her pencil. I shooed her back to her seat, but she didn't go there. She found two of her friends and joined them.

It was a geometry class. Normally, the talking in the room wouldn't have bothered me, but first period had worked silently, and all the classes were way too happy to see a sub. Happy or not, I still wanted to see them do their work.

I meandered over to the trio of girls to gently chide them to get on task. I found them painting their nails.

I've seen girls put on makeup in class (I've never understood the point of this, not even when I was a teenage girl). But nail polish? Really?

They explained that they never do their work, yet they all have As. Really? Tell me another one. Are you three on the honor roll, too?

I couldn't let that pass without letting their teacher in on the joke.

The algebra readiness (they no longer call it pre-algebra in high school) class had a quiz. After they finished, they got free time for the remaining few minutes of class. Most of them sat and talked. Two boys decided that it would be fun to hit each other on the knuckles over and over again.

Um, no.

The boys couldn't understand my problem with their game. No amount of explanation swayed them, so I resorted to I-asked-you-not-to as a reason.

One boy declared himself the winner, as he was the last one to get a hit in. I reminded him that the game had been stopped, so there was no winner. The boy showed off his red knuckles as if they were a prize. (They only got a chance to knock each other twice before I got to them and stopped it. If they get that hurt in that short a time, I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn't stopped them.)

My suggestions for ways to pass the time didn't interest them. They attempted to find other ways to hit each other.

What passes for fun...

A Finished Cardigan

It turned cold last week. It was gray. A couple days it rained. And I was as thrilled as I could be.

Last Sunday, I finally finished that sweater that I'd been working on...

For much of the time I was working on it, I was sure that by the time I finished it, the weather would have warmed up, and I wouldn't get a chance to wear it. (I even said it in a post.) The weather did just that a few times. But then it would cool back down, and I'd wonder. Will I get a chance to wear it this winter?

I finished it just in time for one more cool down. I wore it every day I worked last week. And I loved every minute of it.

It's supposed to warm up this week. I don't mind now that I've had a chance to wear my new sweater.

Crashing Down

As the 8th graders entered 6th period yesterday, I thought of the phrase a herd of elephants. I could tell that it was going to be one of those classes. I was going to have to come down on them hard, but I was going to wait until the period started before I dropped the hammer.

It was an English class. The teacher had strung a long line of yarn across the back of the room. It was tied to the windows, and it draped down into the class. Along this yarn were hung various poems that the students had written. It was a clever way to display them. No one had bothered this display all day.

As the students entered the class, they ducked under the poems. One student reached up to touch the yarn...

I shouldn't have been surprised. The whole thing came crashing down. Several thoughts flitted through my mind. At the front, though, was that that was a brilliant bit of chaos. I couldn't resist. I gave it a golf clap.

8th graders. This led to a round of applause from most of the class.

The student who had caused the crash said: "Ms. B. would have been mad."

Um, yeah. She might still be. Did he think that this incident wouldn't make it into my note? I didn't see the point in yelling at him, as his face showed me just how chagrined he felt when that yarn broke.

As soon as the yarn broke, two students jumped up to try to reattach the yarn. One ended up on a desk. The other stood by attempting to help. The culprit went over to assist as soon as he put his stuff down. He said that it was his responsibility given that he had broken it.

By this time class had started, and a group that was already wound up was now on the brink of going absolutely insane. I debated whether I should go over and put the display to rights, but I had some crowd control to do.

I attempted to get class started. They had a warm up exercise. I told them that they'd better do it.

I don't know what the issue was at getting the yarn reattached, but the students weren't getting anywhere. I was ready to cut them off, especially when they came asking for tape or a stapler. (That wasn't going to hold, and then we'd be right back where we started.) Then they realized that if they tied the yarn to the next window over the yarn would reach.

Once this was fixed, I somehow managed to get them all back into class mode. I threatened them. I explained that when I was talking I needed them to not be, and my note would reflect how well they paid attention when I was talking.

I'm surprised that it worked.

Perhaps it helped that they knew me. It sounded like I'd hit all of their science classes in the past couple months. I'm just grateful that they settled down.

Career Faire

Today was Career Faire day at the continuation high school. It's the second easiest sub day on the school calendar. (The easiest sub day is in November.) My job consisted of sitting in a classroom while someone made a presentation to the students.

Today I was in the room with a representative from a local community college. She was there talking about the school's automotive repair program.

She was a fair speaker. She hit all the important points about the program, so any student who was interested got a good overview.

We had four sessions. In the fourth session, we ended up with the "interesting" group. I kept my fingers crossed that we wouldn't have any major behavior issues. The students were more lively, but they didn't get to the point where I worried about them disrespecting the speaker.

One of the points of the presentation was the requirements for students. As there was an internship program with this, each applicant would be required to pass a drug screen.

And we lost half the group.

Several of them informed the speaker that that left them out. They remained a good audience for the speaker until the end of the time, though.

I don't know what troubles me more: that they admitted that they couldn't pass a drug screen, or that none of the students that admitted this surprised me.

Smoothly

Some days, finding a topic to post about is easy. Some days the kids try to bribe me. Other days every other student is paranoid about the Illuminati. And then there are the fights.  

Today was not one of those days.  

The English teacher left us three poems to read. (I Googled them and found them: "The Secret," "The Gift," and "Halley's Comet".) I even managed to get a discussion out of them.  

They called the poems boring. They didn't get the point. I tried to help the students make sense of them. I don't know if I succeeded. But somehow we managed to have a lucid discussion about the poems that didn't devolve into them talking amongst themselves while I talked at them.  

I call that a win.  

Unfortunately, that means that I don't have an interesting story to go with my day for today. Sorry.