Songs of Journey

Gee, if I'd know it would create a dedicated, hardworking, quiet student, I'd've thrown half the class out two weeks ago!

Yes, it finally happened... Someone got himself tossed to the principal for dealing with. Why? Hmm, well, the final straw was this:

"Ok, if you'll open -- Student! -- to page fifty- --- Student, stop that. -- fifty-seven; we've read -- Student! -- this passage -- Student! -- we've read this before... Ok, Student...OUT!"

He was an angel all through study hall. ::eyes Lesser Evils #1, 2, and 3:: Hmm....

Today, God, Murphy, Fortuna, oh I dunno, pick your favorite "why does shit happen?" deity attempted to tell me to go the hell back to bed. Repeatedly. At high volume.

Message the first: Had headache when woke up. Painkillers didn't.

Message the second: The train broke. No, really. We sat outside Rutherford for over half an hour while they fixed the brakes -- eventually by disengaging them entirely. Leaving the 5-car train with only 4 cars of functional brakes. Which meant that the remained of the trip in proceeded at a snail's pace. End result? Getting to Hoboken at roughly the same time I'm normally holding my breath on the 6 train. I consider it a personal achievement that I was only half an hour late to work.

Message the third: Having to send a kid out of the room for the first time. Kid got A Talking To. (fast forward 1.5 hours, kid is back at it. Must improve capital-letter talks.)

Upside: Children at large are convinced of my evilness, as not only did I force-exit kid, but summarily doubled the class's homework assignment. (Made 'em complete the stuff they were supposed to do in class, and opted to blow off. I refuse to feel guilty -- they had two days to do the previously-existing homework due tomorrow, and they have until Monday to finish the homework they were supposed to have tonight.)

Message the fourth: All and sundry in the faculty lounge telling me "what a wonderful day it is in Central Park." Thanks. I was planning to spend my lunch break there, but now I'm stuck in here doing those things which I did not do this morning. (See message the second.) Rub. It. In.

Message the fifth: Crying child in my class after lunch. Given this is child with tough-guy image... Hoo-boy. Have no idea what set it off. Have pretty damn good idea who set it off, however. 'Who' got A Talking To as well, and Who may wind up getting more than that before dismissal.

Which is in 3 minutes.

Thank. God.

Two quick things -- I'm too tired to write lengthy and humorous posts tonight.

First -- I find it somewhat disturbing that nearly 50% of my class of fourth-graders has seen a movie which 20-somethings I know have called "excessively violent." (Troy)

Second -- It's interesting that after two trimesters of ancient civilizations -- Egypt and China -- both of which involved studying writing systems and included discussion of how literacy was a prized skill, the entire class face-faulted when I (attempting to elaborate on the Dark Ages) came out with the sentence, "They forgot how to write." "How stupid do you have to be to forget how to write?" I pointed out that, in ancient Greece, perhaps one person in the room would be literate. There was another collective face-fault. Somehow I think "writing was a rare skill, difficult to learn, and highly valued" didn't reeeeeally sink in the first two times.

Ok, I lied... Item the third. I'm also a little disturbed that, given a map of the top half of the Mediterranean, from Italy to Turkey, and asked to draw an arrow pointing in the direction of Egypt, two students indicated Carthage and one Cyrene (roughly Libya) before with a good bit of gentle nudging we got the arrow pointing east. Ok, so they didn't have Africa's coastline to help, but shouldn't there be a "hey, Egypt's right at the right-hand edge of the sea" thing going on?

Three sentences only a teacher would say:

"It's ok if the womb is purple."
"Fold the mouse."
"Here, tape the nucleus back together."

Bonus points if you can guess what we were studying.

I just taught my very last science class of this job. And ate my penultimate lunch. Which was edible. For a change.

Science classes went pretty well. Obviously the demo would go better with older children who are capable of holding still, but still, we got rather effective results, and the kids drew the right conclusions pretty quickly. I felt really sorry for one kid in my second period who was really interested but kept getting drowned out by the other kids (and by me, as I then had to step in to control the noisy ones). But the appeal of rolling balls around a bedsheet was apparently sufficient to keep them minding reasonably well -- I did have to stop one class dead after we'd done the main part and were into discussion (so much for "demo part II") -- or is it that the appeal of taking notes is so little that they'll do anything to avoid it?

Got a random compliment this morning. One of the admissions people stopped me in the lobby on my way in, and she says, "Whenever I bring a tour through, the parents are always so impressed with you." Wow. *blush*

I have one, count it, one more class. After that, I'm nothing but adult supervision, as the kids run off to all the pre-Xmas special events. Wheeeeeee!

On the down side, the way my homeroom has been behaving, my Voice of Imminent Doom is going to be getting a workout.

On the up side, one of the kids gave me chocolate today. Whee! Chocolate! Life is good.

I really want a soda, and my money is in my classroom, which is occupied. Assuming I had singles, which I don't. So I'd have to get change from someone -- not likely -- or go 'round to the store next door: Brrrrrrr!!!

Ok... one more class. Then I'm done teaching, the children go to gym, I can get some grading done, and we're more than halfway home! Huzzah!!

TTFN!

...post-class.

Measuring skill! Math skills! ARGH!!!!!!

Because every project I ought to be working on will barely be set up in the time I have before class (chapel ran looooooooooooong *eye roll*), I'm going to ramble a bit.

Woke up with "I'm Under Your Spell" from the Buffy musical stuck in my head. It was very annoying. I still have something stuck in my head, but now it's moved on to "I've Got a Theory." Thematic, eh?

Turned in the collated stack of grade reports; yayness! Now to do the grading I wasn't doing while I was doing that. *eye roll, again*

Speaking of grading -- the math quizzes the kids just took? It's like half of them just blanked. Their homework on this stuff has been fine, I swear. Except for the kid who was duplicating prime factors, and the kid who was putting all factors into their Venn diagrams. And we fixed that. But... GCF of 50 and 60 = 1 ? WTF??!!? *headdesk*

Chapel. The aforementioned Thing Which Ran Long. Either one can give a talk, or one can do the Jesse Tree stuff. Not both. Please. PLEASE! We sang "Good Christian Men, Rejoice" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" -- the kids didn't know the former. I mean, like, at all, not even the mumbling we usually get on second verses of stuff. 'S always interesting to see what they do and don't know.

Four more days after this. I only have two classes today, because they have Lessons & Carols rehearsal this afternoon, and naturally they're missing Science and History instead of Phys Ed. But hey, on Thursday I only have one class, because of rehearsal. At least (I discovered today) we get out early that day... though we have to be back for L&C later that night. Ah well.

Still need to figure out some xmas pressies. 9 3/4, suggestions?? Please? Veiled hinting about what you want? Not-so-veiled hinting??

Gotta write Aggie plot outlines...

Whoops, gotta get to class!

Apparently I neglected to mention what job I got. I've now been thwapped by at least half of you -- you can stop now.

I am a family leave replacement, now 'til Christmas break, at an all-boys independent/Catholic school in NYC. I'm teaching 6th grade math and science, and I have one of two 6th grade homerooms.

I started yesterday, but the gentleman I'm covering for -- let's call him C -- is not yet on leave; I'm shadowing him while I learn my way around the school (a rabbit warren), the boys (so far I've learned 10 names), and the other faculty (very sweet. really, I should be getting cavities soon; this is unreal).

Yesterday is a bit of a blur, really. I was in meetings when I wasn't in classes or getting lost somewhere in the aforementioned warren. The only thing that really stands out is the one math class, which was notable for the jaw-dropping error C made in teaching the boys order of operations. Solve the following: 3(4 + 2 - 1) ÷ 1 · 3 (If your answer is a single digit, seek out your nearest math teacher and beg for a remedial lesson. If your answer is two digits, you can teach this math class more effectively than some.) I didn't say anything, not even when he did it again, different problem, because what was I supposed to say? I'm the n00b here.

Anyway, I itch to get my hands on the math class.

Today, however...

Well, I went down to the faculty lounge this morning before school started, met some lovely people and had a very nice conversation over coffee. Then I went up to homeroom. C stepped out for a moment to... do something, I forget. Anyway, I was alone in the classroom as the first couple boys trickled in.
( Powerful Fish )
After that, I sat in on the Religion class...
( Saying without saying while saying you're not saying... )
Uh, this got really long and I have to get up in 5.5 hours. Next time I'll do "Mass, Meals, Martian Monopoly and Math". Really. Thwap me if I don't.

MSN has a set of three links to news/opinion articles on the front page of the Hotmail inbox. Mostly I ignore them, but occasionally one catches my eye. Today the top one was

Are teachers overpaid?

Naturally this sent me shrieking off to read it with a scowl... but as the eventual conclusion was "no, and why aren't we paying them more?", it's ok. ^_~

That article linked to this one, which was quite cool. I wanna see the set-up for the Civil War lesson mentioned.

... for a LIVE "Adventures in Subbing" entry!

Ok, so it's 9:40 pm and I've been home long enough to eat dinner, shower, and watch West Wing, but it's more live than the posts about what I did before Thanksgiving.
Don't think about that too hard.

Today's exciting adventure: Math! Spanning seven years of growth and learning, in four grades!
( This Batty-time, this Batty-channel... )