Things I Won't Miss When I Retire

It's hard to believe that I am going to retire after, like, a zillion (40) years in the teaching field.  I thought I would retire when the wheels on my walker started to rust and someone had to turn me around so I'd occasionally be facing the sun light, but when I began this school year, I started having thoughts about murdering children's faces or cursing at them in Pig Latin,  and it dawned on me that before I committed any actionable offenses that landed me in prison, it would be best that I leave on a less lethal note.

My first step in getting into the retirement mindset was to set about formulating a motto to live by.  It came to me in five seconds:  If you don't like it/me, don't rehire me next year.  That little motto has been helping me keep things in perspective.  I didn't show up for tutoring a subject I don't teach or have any interest in ever teaching?   Don't hire me next year.  I didn't break up a fight between two cruise ship-sized fifth graders?  Don't hire me next year.   I didn't volunteer for 43 committees?  Don't hire me again next year.  

I also formulated a goal for the year: Leaving the field without ever having written a lesson plan or posting an essential question. I will be very proud if I accomplish those achievements.  I am still trying to puzzle out how kindergarten students are supposed to read an essential question when they can barely puzzle out letters.  And I still don't understand why someone needs to see a lesson plan before deciding if you can teach.  A beloved principal once said, after I asked her why she didn't ask for my lesson plans:  Any idiot can write a lesson plan.  I'd add to that:  Any idiot can be an administrator.(except her.  She was fabulous.  Only principal I had in all my elementary teaching years who was worth her weight in gold. Thank you Catherine Harper).

 Now that I had a motto and a goal in place, I could set about writing my list of things I will not miss when I retire.  After several revisions, I culled the list from 187 to 20.  Here it is:

1. Perpetual whining
2. The refrains:  He's looking at me  She skipped me or the synonymous He cut me .  
3. Tortured use of the English language:   Her/him hit me;  Give me that, it's mines; You nasty; and I didn't do nothing.
4. The word stop dragged out to elebenty hundred gazookian syllables Staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwp!
5. Nutball answers:  

• After teaching the song Let Us Chase the Squirrels and explaining what hickory nuts are,  I ask,  "Class, can you name another tree that produces nuts?"  Answers: orange tree, apple tree, pear  tree, strawberry tree, and, from somewhere deep in the  end zone....cereal breakfast bar.       
•  Me to fifth grade: "What country is south of us?" Answers: Michigan, Africa, Georgia and Mexican, which prompts the fifth grade teacher who was sitting in the back of the room to smack her head and slump over in her chair.

• Me in same fifth grade class: IF the half note gets two beats and the dot gets one-half of the value of the half note, what is the value of the dot?  In other words, how many beat (I purposely don't say beats, thinking they might get the hint, but then quickly realize that the incorrect grammar wouldn't register)  does the dot get: Answers: 3,   1/3, 6   I ask again, this time adding:   the dot is the same value as 1/2 of 2. What's the value of the dot?   Answers: 1/3, 6, 3 (note the different order now) , 2 and 1/2. Same fifth grade teacher starts to pray.
• Class, what language do they speak in Mexico?  Answer: Mexican
• What country do you think this song is from? Answer: Africa (Africa as an answer anytime you ask for a country name.  Mexico is  the second default answer, but at least its a country)
• Can you name some of the other religions in the world?  Answers:  Hannukah (presumably because I had a menorah on display and we were earning the dreydl game), American, Christmas and .... religion.  
• While explaining the dreydl game, .... Class, you have to take half the number of whatever's in the pot.  There are 9 counting chips in the pot   What would half of that be/  Answers:  3, 2 ,18 and.....what do you mean by half? (can you hear me slap my head now?)
• Fifth grade, why are there 365 days a year?  Answer:  Technology.  Me: This system was devised years and years before technology.  Answers:  Because there are months.   Because there is day and night.  The weather.  Me:  What do you know about the earth and its rotation around the sun?  It goes dark and light.  Ms. J, what are the flat Earthers?  Me: blank stare followed by a heavy sigh, finishing with  eye roll
• While reading the book There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Bell, I ask third grade for another way to pronounce the word bow.  Answer one:  boh  Me: No, that's exactly how it's pronounced in the story.  Answer two: boh.  Me: No, that answer was wrong two seconds ago and, remarkably, it still is.    Answer three: Rhythm   

        6.   Non-stop tattling

        7.   Parents who forget to give their hyperactive children their meds

        8.   Kids who need meds but don't take them

        9.   Not being able to tell parents to medicate their children

        10.  Hall duty or any kind of duty

        11.  Teachers who pick their kids up late, yet always get them to you at least 2 minutes early

        12.  Having to get to school on time, but meetings that never end on time.

        13.  Meetings of any kind

        14.  Micromanaging administrators

        15. Administrators who are 12 years old and have taught a total of 8 minutes (which is why                   they  micromanage. )

         16. Emails that address us as family and/or wild animal

• Dear Cougar family please pray for the custodian's sister's brother-in-law's cousin twice removed  who was funeralized on yesterday  (see grammatical errors I hate)
• Welcome back Wildcat family; I hope you had a pawsitively wonderful break (wild animals plus cutesy puns are even worse)
• Enjoy your well-deserved break Panther cubs  Please make sure to keep your dens locked.
•  Hello Rodent Family. Has anyone seen my pencil/stapler/tape dispenser?  I'm going to piggy back onto this one because I said I only had 20----people who respond with reply all and then you have to empty your mailbox of all the : I saw it; I didn't see it; Sorry you can't find it; Do you want to borrow mines (sic); I used it to staple a student to a chair

        17. The word awesome

        18 . Having to give all sorts of awards to children for behaving the way they're supposed to                  behave   

       19. Getting up an insanely early hour and then driving to work in the dark
        20. CHILDREN

         

Phuc Ewe

Well, winter holidays have ended and now it's time for the kids to start their journey to bonkersville. January is 11 weeks long and it's just packed with fun.  The beginning of the year starts off with a whiff or normalcy; but as the year progresses, the kids start to form coalitions that are at war with each other and every week there is a new grievance that had started on the bus and escalates to volcanic proportions by time they come to specials. January is the month that starts the steep downward journey to hair pulling time---mine and theirs.

At my worst performing school I have a class and a half of 36 EIP, IEP and LMNOPs .  There are two teachers in one of the classes and one in the other, so it takes three teachers to teach this group, but it's my great joy to be the only adult in the room.

My classroom is outside the building in a portable.  I can hear these kids coming from their distant galaxy a few minutes before they land on my planet.  The EIP teacher walks her seven kids into my room, stands at the doorway and makes sure they are calm.  The other teacher stands about 15 feet from my door and watches them run into my room like cheetahs chasing after their pray. That's when the fun begins.  One of her students will play a game of let me shove you into the wall with the nearest student. The other student is usually ok with the game until one of them goes too far and then a fight breaks out. I used to try to break up the fights, but now I just stand back and let them duke it out.  If  it look like one of the kids might be getting injured I'll step in, but the last fight I broke up, I wound up hurting my leg.

I have gone to the administration about the class size (one less than the state limit, which is 37.  Now that's a whole other story.  Who the hell thinks that 37 is a perfectly reasonable number of students in one classroom, especially in a school with a very disadvantaged population) and the mix of kids and the fact that there are three teachers for two classes and only one of me, but all I get is a sigh and a shrug in response, so every week I have to ring the buzzer to call for one of the two discipline parapros to come and haul away the pugilists..  I'm thinking of changing my specials area name to Joe Lewis Day Camp.

What's in a name?  I'll tell you  At the Joe Lewis Day Camp, it's phonics in a whole new way.  A colleague at a neighboring school for wayward children has a student named Diarre and it's pronounced Jeeahdah and the student was mighty angry when she couldn't pronounce it.  I would've pronounced it diarrhea, so that probably wouldn't have gone over very well, either. I have another student named  JJuliette, because why use one J when two is so much better.  But my all time favorite is this gem:  NVMEMsBerthaMay.  When I first heard it, I was, um, doubtful, but the onsite teacher pulled up the name in the data base and there it was.  And the kicker is--the last name is Jones.

Today I got a new student in kindergarten, who was apparently sent from a land under the sea because all he did was swim around on my carpet like a baby seal.  When I finally got him to sit with the class I asked him his name.  He said, Puck."  I wanted to make sure I heard him correctly because Puck is not a usual name in my community and I was reasonably sure his parents weren't avid Shakespeare fans.  I asked him to spell it.  He said, " PHUC."   This kid is not Vietnamese and has not one Vietnamese relative, neighbor or friend.  He's home grown.

And yesterday, or on yesterday as they say in my part of the bizarro grammar universe, I was playing a game with my fifth grade called Bump up Tomato, which is essentially a silly game where one student tries to make another student laugh  but is not allowed to talk while doing so.. It was a hit with my classes, so I thought I'd try it with my most difficult fifth graders.  This fifth grade class is academically on par with the Joe Lewis kids..  They are all elite members of RTI (response to intervention, which means they are essentially as academically gifted as a tree stump.).  They have zero social skills and spend the majority of their time in my class insulting each other or devising activities that will prepare them for life as a matador.   We started playing the game and the kids were having fun.  At least, I think they were because they had stopped poking and shoving each other., which is always a good thing. Then, the boy standing next to me told a student who was unsuccessfully trying to get another student to laugh  to "teabag him."  Only recently had I found out what tea bagging.is and I can assure you that I got through a long single dating life and a long married life without knowledge about this activity and feel like I didn't miss anything.   But, um, fifth grade?  Is this something they need to know?

So this class knows a lot about sexual activities I am still learning about, (and I came of age in the free love 60s), but when it comes to writing, that's another story. One day  I decided to try a new behavior strategy because the other 593 had not worked so well.   When the students did something awful,  I was going to have them write, "Today in music I  ______ (description of offense) because_____.   This assignment would go home and to make sure it did,  I tell them I will call home to let their parents know  that I expected the assignment to be signed and returned.  I wrote the assignment on the board and within five minutes, found my first miscreant. I handed him a piece of paper and pencil and told him to get to work.    He sat down, started at the board for a disturbingly long time, and finally started to write on the paper,  Eventually he came up to me and showed me what he had written.  He had not copied any word correctly.  I said that because is not spelled becus.   He looked at me and said, "What?  What did I do wrong."  After pointing to each misspelled  word and showing him the corresponding word in the English language,  he begrudgingly  corrected his paper   He brought it back to me, but he hadn't filled in the blanks.  I explained that just copying what I wrote was only the first part; he needed to fill in the blanks.  I got another blank stare.   I told him to sit by the board and read what I had written and see if he could figure out what I wanted.  I saw his pencil move again, but when he handed me his completed work, for the life of me, I have no idea what he wrote.  Reading it gave me a greater understanding of what severe dyslexics must experience.

PML *


*phuc my life