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
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