Me Want Spring Break NOW!

Lisa: This post's for you.

The majority of my career was spent at the secondary and college level.  Most of my students were on a pretty even keel for the majority of the year.  Sometimes I would notice senioritis when graduation was approaching, but for the most parts my students' behaviors remained consistent. At the elementary level, it's quite different.  Around March the kids start to behave like wolves with PTSD.

 At first I thought that perhaps the children had been left out in the sun and baked too long.  Then I thought that maybe their brains were infected by ninja larvae warriors.  Teachers would ascribe the behavior changes to full moons, but they're only full for a day, so that didn't seem like the correct explanation.  Other teachers said the kids needed a break, but there are several breaks for them after the winter one and they return to school squirrelier and squirrelier each time.

Finally I think I know the reason: The kids have sussed out the situation  and have learned that they are the ones in control.  Yesterday a fourth grade teacher told me that one of her students punched another student square in the face. leaving a crater large enough to hold a coffee cup.  The AP said she wasn't going to suspend anyone right now because that all important Critical Multiple Guess Test that measures how good your test taking skills are, is coming up in April. These are the students that wouldn't pass the test anyway.,and their presence in the classroom prevents other students from learning.  Seems like suspension would be a less worse option.  On the days that certain crazy bugs are absent from a class, it's like teaching in Nirvana.  You don't have to spend 98% of the class time keeping that child from calling out, thumping on the floor, jumping off chairs, or any other behavior that sucks the life force out of the room.

Schools don't like their suspension rates to look bad so they allow these little terrorists to commandeer their classes,.  So if suspension isn't going to be an option, then there should be an opportunity room or holding pen or whatever you want to call it, where the students sit in little desks with blinders on each side, doing the work they are keeping the other students from doing.  Apparently you have to have a certified teacher to monitor them, and I'm not sure why because substitute teachers are not certified teachers , so instead of hiring an extra level of ridiculously overpaid administrators at the county level whose only function, as best as I can discern, is to generate new acronyms, why not hire a few certified personnel to do this job? The kids in my community don't care if they get suspended.  Most of their parents don't seem to  care either, unless it's an inconvenience for them.  One day one of my second graders came up to me while I was on cafeteria sentry patrol to ask me if I had missed seeing him the other day.  I said I did and asked why he was out.  He said, "I had to take care of my baby brother."  I asked how old his baby brother was. He said, "He was just borned (sic) a few months ago." I asked where his parents were.  He said, "My mother went in the car and I think my father is at work.  These are the kinds of parents that wouldn't notice whether their child was suspended or was playing in traffic.

The other thing I noticed about the kids at this time of year is that they have now formed mini gangs that excel in varying levels of hating each other.  Doing activities is like an exercise in logic; Student A can only sit next to Student B, but Student B is only allowed to sit near Student A if Student C is in the middle, except on alternate days of the week.  But if Student A is absent, then student B has to sit with Student D unless Student D consumed food that was within 500 miles of a peanut. No one can partner up without this refrain, "But my teacher said I can't be by him."  Here's what I say, "Fine, then he will be your partner the rest of the year, including lunch, and then I  will come into the cafeteria and sit with you two.to make sure you're still partners. Word got out that I will actually do this, so they don't mess with me on that one.

Back to post- January behavior disorders  Ooooh PJBD. I can generate acronyms, too!  Maybe I can move into an administrative position at the county level now.

 On Tuesdays I have a class of the future criminally insane. One of them is Kenny from South Park's doppelganger, except that he is alive at the end of every class, although he seems to be working on changing that.  .  He was in a self-contained BD class up north, but for some reason at our school he is free to roam around screaming and cursing and jumping off of furniture, especially if it's really high off the floor.  Yesterday he called me a "son of a bitch," in front of the class.   I so wanted to correct him and say "daughter," but I ignored him.  I rang the buzzer.  No one came. When he saw that no one was coming to get him, he started playing billy goat gruff and jumped from chair to chair.  I saw him today in the hallway the next day  Apparently his IEP allows him to call teachers bitches and do mountain goat imitations.  Either that or has reached the maximum number of suspensions for a child with an IEP, which I think is 179, one less than the total number of instructional days.

Aside from Kenny and his three cohorts that follow him around like he's Jim Jones, there are about 7 really, really mean girls and they don't seem too fond of me.  At least, that's what I surmised when one of them said, "I hate you."   They argue all day long about important topics such as who said what about whom.  I told them last week to solve their problems before class, so this week they came into the room and solved it over a 10 minute period while I sat with my arms folded and waited.   They said, "But you told us to not bring our issues into the classroom and we were trying to solve them and now we're mad at you because you told us to not do that."  I breathed slowly and thought about what I could say that would make any sense I mean, they had just come from lunch and recess.  Couldn't they have solved it then? . I softly said to the rest of the class, "If you want to join me fine.  If not, that's fine, too." I started my activity and the 5 normal ones joined me.  But gradually the rest of the class joined and I was thinking that finally things were going well, but then  crazy Kenny started doing his lion tamer routine and the rest of the class couldn't focus any more.

 When I got home I cried for about an hour.  I told my husband I wanted to quit.  I take it personally when a class doesn't go well.  I will beat myself up until I figure out what things I could have done differently.  If I were younger, I wonder if I would quit and looked for a job as a mime or anything where I wouldn't have to talk or worry about anyone liking me.   But I hate feeling like a failure, so I I decided to do some critical self-examination.  A little self-flagellation helps the medicine go down.... in the most delightful way.  Sorry. Sometimes being a music teacher means that you have to get that little bit of song out of your head lest it become an ear worm.

On Wednesdays I have my present day criminally insane children.  I don't have any Kennys, but these kids were clearly created on a Monday morning after a weekend of partying with Class I drugs.*.  What I had decided was that I was going to make a deal with them.  If they got through my lesson without their usual hi-jinks (stuff like screaming at each other, throwing things, forcing foreign objects into their neighbor's body parts, laughing at words that have a similar phoneme to a curse word and/or sexual act like the word vibraslap), then the next week I would take them outside for the whole class period and do some playground games. The previous week I noticed that one of the ring leaders was actually doing a fairly decent job playing xylophone ( he was not making dents in the instruments; my bar is admittedly fairly low) .  I made a huge deal about it.  I took him up to the other music teacher and bragged about him.  This week when he came to class, he had a different attitude--the belligerent what did I dog gesture and whine routine had been replaced with a teacher pleaser. All I had to do was look at him and he knew to stop that behavior.   It served as a reminder that  if I can find just one complementary thing to say, it really means a lot.  It says that there's an adult who cares about them. Sometimes I forget to do this because I am so frustrated, so maybe the  previous night's crying jag helped me get back on track.

 Can't do that with the mean girls, though .They don't fall for flattery.  I'm still thinking about how to deal with them.  But this class is mostly boys so I will become the queen of compliments. . I was feeling pretty good after class, but wouldn't you know,, as we were leaving two lunkheads sneaked into the music storage closet and stole some tennis balls.  I wouldn't have known except one of the balls fell out of a boy's pocket.  Then that boy pointed at the other boy and said he had stolen some and two more balls go bouncing down the hallway The first boy, being as bad a liar as he is a thief, said he brought them to class with him.  I tend to doubt it because his pants are rather tight and he wears them around his nether region and there's not even enough room for an inchworm, let alone a tennis ball.. It was kind of funny because they both ratted each other out while denying culpability, even as the tennis balls went bouncing by. . Oh,, and of course, to make it even a more special day, one of the boys made the international sign for oral sex.  His teacher said to write it up, but I really wrestled with how to describe it.  I ended up writing, "He made a V sign with his fingers and thrust his tongue in and out between them."

Spring break. Spring break. Spring break. Spring break. Spring break. Spring break. Spring break.

SCHEDULE 1 (CLASS I) DRUGS  are illegal because they have high abuse potential, no medical use, and severe safety concerns; for example, narcotics such as Heroin, LSD, and cocaine. Marijuana is also included as a Class 1 drug despite it being legal in some states and it being used as a medicinal drug in some states. 

My Student Who Mastered the Recorder

I am continuously amazed at the deep and profound knowledge about sexual acts that elementary children know about. Back in the dark ages, c. 1963, when I was in fifth grade (not sure if that year is correct, but it's in the ballpark. My math skills rival those of my 2nd graders). But anyway, in fifth grade we, the girls, were asked to go to a special assembly to see a movie with our mothers. I can't swear it was a Disney film, but if not, it would've been the way Disney would've handled the topic. The topic was "THE PERIOD." I learned about what happens when you get YOUR PERIOD, which wouldn't be until five years later, when I was 14.  Today the age of puberty has been pushed back a LOT.  I have 2nd (SECOND!) graders who have started to menstruate and I've seen mustaches on  boys in Kindergarten (double exclamation point)

 I don't remember anything romantically sexual about the film; just the facts, ma'am about what happens during The Fenine Cycle. When I got back to the classroom, the boys were busy looking in the dictionaries to see what they could find about PERIODS. They were disappointed to find only definitions reflating to grammar or measurements of time. One boy asked aloud, "Why did the girls see a film about punctuation?"

 Yesterday during my fifth grade clown college class, one of the boys who was sitting on the carpet turned around to face the girls, who were sitting on chairs. They kept giggling and I realized that this boy was not facing me. You'd think I'd have noticed him sooner, but my class is like whack-a-mole. I put out one brush fire and another pops up in its place. After class the girls came up to me to tell me that this boy was rubbing the recorder as if he were masturbating. Yup, they used that word to describe what he was doing. I asked them why they didn't tell me immediately and one girl said,"Because it was funny." Yeah, I guess it's funny if you're an adult in the Catskills listening to
                                               \
                                                           Buddy Hackett

 I try not to be curmudgeonly and yearn for the good old days. But yesterday I wanted to turn back the clocks to a time when children didn't know about adult sexual activities until they were at least pimply faced and were half-way through puberty. I am wondering, how does knowledge about sex affect the children's emotional well-being? Back in the Victorian ages, a mere ankle viewing would set males swooning. I don't want to go back that far, but if 9 year olds are exposed to oral sex, then what will it take to set them swooning? The bar is set kind of high.

 It's difficult to teach children who are not children. I am no longer am able to read Puss and Boots to my kindergartners. I can not say booty or booties when referring to shoes. Ok, I can live with that. But I can't say vibraslap or vibrate without getting hysterical reactions. A few years ago I saw one boy turn around and make the international sign for oral sex with a woman. All this information without any emotional or social context can not be good. And just because yesterday was master your recorder day, when I walked into my room to get something, the AP was taking a deposition from a 4th grader and I overheard him say that another child was touching the penis of his classmate in the bathroom.

It is difficult to teach children who are so street savvy.  Because they lack so many fundamental music skills and knowledge, it's a challenge to find literature that teaches the basics without being cute or sweet.  I was doing a lesson from Artie Almeida's book called IMPROVISATION.  There's an echo section to introduce each instrument, like, "Xylophones are in the zone, let's hear from metalophones"  I allowed my fifth grade boys to modify the text and for awhile they did some fun things, but then sexual innuendos starting  creeping in--something to do with big booties, which, I admit, does not rhythm with wood or glockenspiel, but somehow the boys decided that they had won poetic license to go completely into after dark HBO hours.

And that's why I'm home on a mental health day.  Also, I think I woke up with a hangover.