5 too many

Waiting for the bus after school I saw 5 Dodge Magnums within a two minute period. When did this car become so popular? Is it just popular in the neighborhood in which my school is located? Is it just a DC thing? A Maryland thing?

I thought that I would never say this, but I have found a vehicle that I think is uglier than the Scion XB.

Old Ugly Car Winner (The Scion XB)

New Ugly Car Winner (The Dodge Magnum) Am I alone on the mega failure of the Magnum? It looks a little bit like a Hearse combined with a Prius with a little bit of stretch limo. I hope I never one again.

Shut Up!

Wow, even though it is my second year, I have had a few firsts lately. I had the first student ever tell me to ,"Shut up!" today.

Also, for the first time, I was hit by a projectile (an eraser) actually aimed at me. My class this year is actually way better than my class last year and they are generally very respectful of me. I guess there is a first for every thing.

I just hope no student asks me whether or not I am pregnant. I have heard so many stories from teachers whose students ask them if they are pregnant because they notice their teacher has put on a little bit of weight.

Tiny Dancer in the Bathroom

What is with the boy's bathroom this year?

Today I let a boy go to the bathroom. He follows our bathroom procedure perfectly. Raise your hand with the bathroom signal (two fingers). Wait for my permission. Sign out on the bathroom tracker. Take the pass and go.

About 5 minutes later, this student was brought back by one of our security staff members who informed me that he was not going to the bathroom, he was just dancing in the bathroom. Like full on, dance party dancing. This student left a math lesson and followed the whole procedure just to go dance in the boy's bathroom--alone! Weird. I told his mother that he did this and she just laughed and agreed that he should lose his privilege to go alone.

Monday and they are crazy

After lunch, I had one student punch another in the face because he thought the other kid was talking about him. Turns out he wasn't, but the kid got punched in the face anyway.

Also, a student put a post-it on her own back that said, "Steal Me!" (yes this is how she spelled it) and tried to blame it on other students to get them in trouble.

Also, a student wiped her nose with a tissue just so she could harass another student by putting it on the other student's desk. That's just a weird way to tease someone and this girl acted like it was the funniest thing in the world and thought she was so smart for thinking of it.

We can't stop!

The future Mr. Oyster and I have developed a tiny little habit that I LOVE. We have a game boy advance (I know it is so old school compared to other gaming systems) and we play it every night before I go to bed. Yes it is G-rated bed time activity. We both love it. We play either Life or Yahtzee. After a long day in the classroom, a boring night at grad class, and a stressful evening of planning, I'm exhausted and this is how we've been bonding. Its especially nice because he doesn't go to bed at the same time as me so it is a way for me to fall asleep with him in bed with me. I recommend it to other couples looking for a cute bonding activity.

Illegal Item of the Day

Last year it was a 7-inch kitchen knife. This year, the first "weapon" brought into my classroom was a lighter. The sad thing is that the student who brought it is the same student who has some serious behavior and mental issues and did not know that what he did was wrong. He was terrified and explained that he found it in his house and was trying to hide it so his little brother wouldn't find it and play with it. I never believe stories like this, but this student has the mentality of a 5 year-old and I am 99% sure he was not lying. I think it means he will be questioned by Child Family Services soon.

Possible Wedding Location

If future Mr. Oyster has his way. This is where we will be exchanging vows.

Rockefeller Chapel on the University of Chicago campus. I am not quite sold, yet.

I hate being sniffed...

One of my students walks up to me and nonchalantly says, "You smell like pepperoni." I was puzzled and just looked at him. He then got closer to me, actually sniffed me and walked around sniffing me. He then says, "Nevermind" and walks away.

Administration Frustration

Today, one of the six teachers/administrators who are assigned to my room* came in like usual. She was walking around while I was teaching and then after 10 minutes interrupts me and asks, "Don't you have a meeting to go to?" I told her I didn't think so. She informed me that my principal told her to come in and cover my class because I had a meeting. I was in the middle of writing conferences and about to start this awesome math lesson I had planned. I had no choice but to trust the resource teacher to follow through on my plans and execute them well. And I left to run around the whole school looking for this mystery meeting I was supposed to be at. It turns out, the meeting was supposed to be with the Open Court Consultant, the Reading Content Specialist, and the fourth grade team. In reality, the Reading Content Specialist double-booked herself, didn’t cancel anything and was no where to be found. I was the only one who showed up to this meeting with the consultant! The consultant was more than annoyed and trying to play it off like she didn’t care. I decided to use the time and set some reading goals for the fourth grade team. I think the consultant now thinks I’m in charge, which was the only positive about being ripped out of my room. The other teachers showed up about 30 minutes later. The consultant left after about an hour. Overall, it was a huge waster of time and money.

* Because I am the only teacher in first through sixth grade with less than two years of experience, I have been assigned not only as the special education inclusion teacher, but I also have 6 administrators coming in and out of my room daily to check up on me. This is beyond frustrating. I would be thrilled to have these people in my room if that meant higher student achievement. So far, it just means more inconsistency and more interruptions in my day.
1) A Math Content Specialist
2) A Reading Content Specialist
3) The Special Education Teacher
4) My Principal
5) A Math Resource Teacher
6) A Reading Resource Teacher

Foster Care Update

My student is now MIA. He goes into foster care and never comes out? What the heck? I don't understand the transition into foster care at all. I just wish that this student could have stayed with me until his foster parent had a chance to do things like buy uniforms and figure out how he/she was going to get him back and forth from school. Another frustrating part of this situation is that nobody can get me in contact with the foster family. As a teacher you have to have a good relationship with the parents, and I assume this is doubly true when applied to a foster family. Please help if you know what my next steps should be.

not related to teaching but...

Has anyone out there seen the new subway commercial. I've only seen it while up late at night planning, but the voice-over refers to the subway sandwich as a "YUM ROCKET."

I don't know what a Yum Rocket is, but I do not want one. How do they think this sounds appetizing. At the very best it sounds clownish and dirty.

Ooooooh, speaking of dirty. You will love one of my upcoming posts about an art project one of my students made.

Foster care in DC can't be good

One of my students was taken from class on Friday to be put into foster care. Here's the whole story. It's the closest I've come to crying in class.

From day one, he has been my sneakiest trouble maker. He is the kid who is always watching me because he wants to know when I am looking at him and when he can get away with his sneaky behaviors. I will catch him watching me, look away and as soon as I do, he does something like move seats, sharpen his pencil without asking, go talk to a friend, or take something from the supply closet or library. He is not a violent or really mean kid so when he gets in trouble, he gets this goofy smile on his face and says, "what?" I won't lie, the whole act is extremely frustrating and so is that way he shrugs it off like he doesn't know he was being bad. Still, I can tell he is more of a class clown than a trouble maker and he is doing it to be silly and act like a kid. Nonetheless, I have been toying around with calling this boy's mother. A third grade TA told me his mother doesn't play so I thought she could set him straight. I never made the call and I am so glad I didn't.

This boy's little sister came to school on Thursday with bruises on her back. The school counsellor told me they were so bad it was sickening. This was coming from a woman who has seen this kind of thing many times before. So the bruises were really bad. The little girl, went straight to the hospital and was removed from the home that night. My student left school on Thursday and went home to his mother and other three siblings. (Don't get me started on this bad decision). On Friday, my student came in and was a mess. He didn't want to talk to anyone and he wouldn't participate during Morning Meeting. Who knows what this boy went through that night. He got pulled out of my class and questioned by a detective and examined for bruises by a doctor. They didn't find any bruises on him, but he was the only one without the bruises. The authorities decided to remove all of the children from the house, but couldn't get them all into the same house. My student was so scared when he came back to the room to get his things to leave early. He said he had to go somewhere and wait for a while. I didn't know what to say so I told him to take a book with him in case he got bored and I sent him on his way. What even happens to a child in DC foster care? If DCPS is so bad I can't imagine foster care is any better.

The part of this story that got to me in class was the fact that he was the only one without bruises. I finally understood his sneaky, childish class behaviors. He is the good kid at home. The one sits around like an angle being careful not to do anything wrong so that he doesn't get what his siblings were getting. That's why when he comes to my class, he can't control his impulses to test my limits and push the rule boundaries. All I could think was how glad I was that I had never called his mother. I don't think I'll be making any parent phone calls for a couple weeks.

Open Court Reading Propaganda Video

I could go on and on about all of the reasons why I hate this reading program, mostly having to do with my school's implementation of it and its focus on teacher-directed, lower-level think skills, but these teachers need to spend more time on planning instruction. I know their frustrations, but instead of propaganda videos, put your efforts into actually making changes like proving that this curriculum is NOT the be all end all of literacy instruction. Little to nothing has surfaced in my research thus far that shows that OCR is an effective reading program. Hmmmm, maybe more research into this would be a grad school paper idea...



I couldn't get the video saved to post it up here so follow the link to the video. http://www.needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog/?p=363

I would rather they all suck their thumbs

There is no other way to put this...

A STUDENT OF MINE POOPED HIS PANTS TODAY IN CLASS AND THEN SAT IN IT FOR HOURS!!!!

Maybe you primary grade teachers know what to do when this happens, but I have never had to deal with poo poo and pee pee in class. I teach 9/10 year olds. I feel like I am living in a different world and there was no way I could convince this child to go to the bathroom and check his pants. Ahhhhhhhhh!

Thumb Sucking?

My little sister sucked her thumb until she was about 15. Here's the thing though, she stopped doing it in public when she was little. I have a student who was retained last year and seems to functioning below grade level so far this year. He will understand directions and complete all of his work sometimes and really be a great student. At other times, he just sits at his desk doing nothing but sucking his thumb. He is 10 and sucking his thumb in class! Do I say something? Do I tell him to stop? It seems to be much more than an unconscious habit. I contacted the teacher he has last year and apparently he would talk about suicide a lot! How is he not in counselling. I just put in a request form, but his thumb sucking must be some clear sign that this kid is not okay. I can't believe he has to wait for this form to go through some administrative process before he can get some counselling.

On a related note, maybe I am just looking for it now, but I saw a junior/senior high student (maybe she was about 15) on the bus this morning sucking her thumb! I was shocked to see such an old girl doing this on public transit. If you know, does thumb sucking in an older child signify some emotional or developmental problem? Or is simply a habit that dies hard?

Extrinsic Rewards Work Their Magic (on one person at least...)

While I patiently and consistently attempt to instill intrinsic motivation in my students, I carefully employ a few extrinsically based reward systems. Last week, four of my students did not meet their behavior and academic goals and thus, did not get the reward. Two of them didn't care at all, not a huge surprise there and exactly why my students eventually need to be intrinsically motivated. The other two were so upset they pouted with their heads down. Dare I say they almost cried like babies when they saw everyone else in the class being rewarded and they were left out. Mind you, I am really fair about the rewards. The students know at the beginning of the week exactly what they need to do to get it and students are never surprised when they haven't earned it. They already know. I told all four students that if they earned our weekly class reward by Thursday that they would be able to choose what the class would get for a reward. Dare I say too soon, IT WAS A BIG FAT MANIPULATIVE SUCCESS! Well at least with two of them. It is only Wednesday, and one girl has almost reached the goals two days early. It is a huge change from her performance last week. I hope she doesn't break my bank with the class reward she chooses.

Karma!

My class has the biggest bully I have encountered in my short teaching career. This little girl is the nastiest kind of bully because not only does she say and do whatever she can to make the other students feel like crap about themselves, she tries to get others to join her and gang up on certain kids. She has obviously been doing this for a while because she is SUPER sneaky about it too! Her latest victim is the boy from the popsicle post. He had been having a really hard time not playing during lessons so I moved him to a table with three girls so he would have no one to talk to. Well, it solved the talking problem, but the girl bully just started messing with him every chance she got. This went on for two days with me trying to teach them to ignore each other. I guess I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until popsicle boy just lost it on the bully. It was a full on panic attack complete with crying, shaking, heaving, and yelling. This boy could not stop yelling at the bully and was threatening her with all kinds of violence while screaming in her face, but wouldn't touch her. This kid was UPSET, but luckily, he is not violent. If he had been one of my more violent students, I think the bully would have been a bloody mess from getting her butt beat up.

I could tell that this girl had never had one of her victims freak out on her before because she was genuinely shocked and scared by this boy's reaction. I had to hold and hug the boy in order to calm him down, which is a statement of the situation's seriousness because I do not normally baby my students.

I won't get into the details of my conferences with both the victim and the bully, but the best part of the story happened about 20 minutes after my conference with the bully. She was at recess playing and jumped off of a piece of playground equipment. She wasn't paying attention to where she was jumping and jumped right into a bar. Her head split open and blood started gushing. I have seen a lot of playground injuries, but none with this much blood. She had never cut herself like that before and started freaking out thinking she was going to die. As I walked her to the nurse's office and watched her get cleaned up, I couldn't help but thinking this was Karma doing its best to set the world right. She left school to go get stitches in her head. And the student she was bullying had a great afternoon and did all of his work perfectly.

My Room is Now Inclusion

At the beginning of the school year I was told that my classroom was chosen among the three fourth grade classrooms to be the Special Education (SPED) Inclusion room. If you aren't familiar with SPED language, inclusion means that students with an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) are kept in a regular education classroom and the Special Education Teacher periodically comes in the room rather than the student being pulled out into a resource room.

So far, the only thing that has frustrated me about this situation is the fact that the SPED teacher comes into my room and speaks in a normal voice with the SPED students. This means when she is in my room I am competing with her voice and the other students are distracted and think it is okay to talk. Why can't she just whisper?

Attention Seeker Update

The girl who is babied by her mother cried when her mom was leaving this morning! She came in perfectly happy. Her mom tried to sneak out once her child got settled. The little attention seeker ran out after her screaming "mommy" and cried, a lot. She had to stay in the hallway for a while to get it together. I just do not have the patience to deal with this. When asked about it, she just said she doesn't like when her mom leaves without saying goodbye. Uh, okay. I think she expected me to comfort her and she reached out to hold my hand for a while. I said, "I'm sorry. I bet that is upsetting." And left her to get it together alone. Did her other teachers really put up with the routine every morning?

Three New Students

After more than a week of school, I got three new students. New enrollements at a charter in DC are never a good sign. Unless they live directly in the area, kids only go to a charter if some crazy stuff has gone down at their old schools. If you are a high-performing charter school with a long wait list, chances are the kid is coming because their DCPS school was a disaster for that child. If your charter is and average, no-name charter, kids seems to only come because they either 1) acted so crazy at their old school, they had to leave or were forced to leave, or 2) were so low performing that they were referred for SPED and their parent didn't want it, or were so low performing that they were retained and the parent switched them out so their kid doesn't have to repeat a grade. Two out of my three new students definitely fit this stereotype.

New Student 1: Is the loudest, most violent student in my class. He has been the only one to start a physical fight, not just a shove or one hit, but punching and kicking. He even beat up a girl today because she was trying to collect his paper. The girl was punched repeatedly for not letting go of his paper. It was his second day so I decided to spare him the suspension he was sure to get and made him make her a "feel better, I'm sorry" card. He hated every second of it. He also had to say nice things about the girl in the card, like, "I am glad you are in my class because I think you are nice and smart." To top it all off, I accidentally sat him next to one of my SPED students. I didn't know anything about how big of a bully this kid was. He teased and bullied him all day and called him stupid. Ironically, he reads at a first grade level while my SPED student reads at a late second grade level. Next time this kid puts his hand on another child, he will be sent home. I'm guessing it'll be next week.

More to come on the other newbies.