I got Paid!

Friday was pay day! My very first pay day! And I have never seen a paycheck that large in my life. This is so crucial because I'm moving from Maryland to DC to two weeks and need the extra cash to buy furniture and stuff, not to mention food. On that note, by the way, the next three weeks are going to be so stressful dealing with school, back-to-school night, progress reports, and moving all at once. You'll see. It's going to be awful. I just have to keep reminding myself that that which does not kill you makes you stronger and that once I survive this, I can do anything.

Before I tell you how Thursday and Friday went, I wanted to mention something I forgot last time. I had told you I got two new students on Wednesday. One of them was only in my class for one day before they switched him to another room, but I need to mention him because of this: he'd been shot. This boy walked into my cast with his arm in a sling, so I'm thinking he broke it playing basketball or skateboarding or something. During class, he raises his left hand and says, "What am I supposed to do? I can't write because I got shot." All the sudden I'm stunned because one, it had slipped my mind that the boy wouldn't be able to write without his right arm, and two, he got shot?! What?! Of course, as the teacher, though, I need to remain calm even when I'm panicking inside, because if I show signs of panic or confusion, the class will immediately pick up on t and start acting up. So I just calmly asked another student to volunteer to copy down notes for the boy and then got his phone number so I could call his house and discuss what we would do about his school work.

All day I was anxious about calling his home to discuss this. I did reach his mother and it turns out he was hit by a stray bullet from a drive-by. He was not the target. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So that's kind of a relief and a tragedy at the same time. It's a relief that he's not in any kind of trouble and it shouldn't happen again and a tragedy because the boy was lucky he got shot in the arm and not somewhere else. Oy - the ghetto. It's too much, too much.

Back to school, though. Thursday with the 8th graders went all right. It took them way longer to do the activities I had planned than I thought, though. As usual, readings I give them that I thought were at grade level were not and they still don't know the vocabulary words we've been practicing for two weeks. A whole lot of students didn't even turn their classwork in and that is going to seriously hurt their grades. I hope they will finish it as homework and turn it in next time I see them, but I highly doubt that's going to happen. On the behavior front, my regular 8th graders are still behaving fine which is fantastic news, but my GT class is still acting up just like they do with all their teachers. It's like a school-wide dilemma. All of us are dumb-founded as to how to handle this group of kids who is clearly grade-levels above the rest of the school but whose behavior makes it so difficult to give them the more challenging work they deserve.

Friday with the 7th graders was kind of odd. My homeroom went fine and I gave the quiz. 3rd period, though - shoot. Those kids still haven't found their minds from when they lost them on Monday. For four days I had managed to yell at any of my classes, but that class got me yelling and screaming again like I couldn't believe. They were sooo bad. They wasted so much time that they only had 10 minutes to take the 25 minute quiz. I've been implementing this new system where as many checks the students get on my clipboard, that's how many minutes they stay after class with me. Well, only 4 students were allowed to leave when the bell rang. Meanwhile, I'm telling the kids they can stay in to lunch as long as they need to to finish the quiz, but not a single one of them stayed longer than I made them. Not a single kid in the room finished the quiz. They just stopped working and turned it in. So not only did only half the quiz not turn in their classwork, but the whole class failed the quiz again.

Now, to add insult to injury, I realized when I went to grade the quizzes that I forgot to rearrange the order on the matching portion. So the answers to numbers 1 through 9 went ABCDEFGHI. At first I was like, "Oh my god! I can't believe I did that! Now I'm never going to know if the kids actually know this stuff." On the contrary. I now know very clearly that the classes didn't learn much of anything at all, because even with the answers spelled out for them like that, only 2 kids got all of them right. Only 2! At some point I have to stop blaming myself and blame the kids for not studying. This was the second time they took this quiz and I re-wrote it so it was easier than last time. Now I'll take this as a teachable moment to tell the kids that I will do everything I can to make sure you succeed in my class, but I can't make you learn. You need to put forth some effort. We did five separate activities surrounding these vocabulary words, so it's not like I didn't give you enough opportunities to learn them. You chose not to study. Hopefully this will wake them up to the fact they will be held to high expectations in my class.

Another teacher told me that if I need to fail every student in my class first quarter, then I should do it. I shouldn't go back and make their grades better for the sake of having a more palatable class record. Failing them may be the strong message they need. Oh man I hope I don't have to do that, though. We'll see.

I'm going to go now. I have more to do than can ever be done, so I should get started. See ya later alligators.