Miscellaneous musings

My parents are in town -- actually, they are currently up in Vail, house-sitting a huge place for some friends who are off heli-skiing.  Now that's the life.  A and I went up for the weekend and skiied both days in snowy conditions, but apparently we missed the feet of powder that have come down since we got home!  From what I hear, my parents are living it up, skiing the back bowls, going snowshoeing.....  I think I'm jealous!

I've had a pretty good week at school, moderately surprising since one of my girls sent my student teacher home in tears last Friday.  They've spent the last few days focusing on each other instead of either of us, which I guess is a nice change, although still exhausting.  One was gone today and yesterday, home sick -- although she called the school twice, asking for one of her friends to be paged so they could talk on the phone.  Thank god for school secretaries.  Can you believe the balls it would take to make a request like that?  Man, kids these days.  Mimi, you better raise yours right.

Having a student teacher has freed me up to focus on some other things -- I'm taking four of my kids to the district spelling bee tomorrow, for instance.  It's mostly for middle schoolers, but they always save a few spots for fifth graders.  I hope they do well, or at least have fun.  I brought a couple kids last year, totally out of the blue -- this year we actually studied!  I sent a batch of my top math students to a math contest held last weekend, again mostly just for fun, and one of them (a fourth grader entering a fifth grade contest) came in second, out of maybe 200 kids.  I was pretty stoked, although  I think it honestly has very little to do with me!  The kid is just brilliant.

CSAP testing, our annual round of assessment (thanks to No Child Left Behind) starts on Tuesday and runs for nearly two weeks.  That's twelve hour-long tests for fifth graders, three each in reading, writing, math, and science.  We test three days a week, two tests a day. Whenever we're not testing, I think we're going to do Shakespeare (King Lear this year) and a wagon train simulation -- anything except sit at desks!  No homework, either.  CSAP is a big time drag, but at times I kind of enjoy it.  No planning, no grading, no talking......the kids are blissfully quiet for hours on end.  That never happens the rest of the time!  Of course, I don't like not being able to teach, answer questions, point out mistakes, all those things that are second nature by now.  I have to bite my tongue a lot.

And then it's Spring Break........big plans, anyone?

Three Cups of Tea

I just finished reading the above book, which is an amazing true story about a mountaineer, Greg Mortenson, who got side-tracked from climbing mountains and started building schools instead. To date, he and the organization he founded, the Central Asia Institute, have built 55 schools in Pakistan and Afganistan. They are adamant that girls be educated as well as boys, and get overwhelming support from the local communities where the schools are located. Talk about an alternative way to combat terrorism -- "books not bombs." Mortenson recently came to speak at my mom's bookstore, and she said he was a fascinating and compelling speaker. They raised somewhere around three thousand dollars for the CAI from donations and ticket sales. The book is co-written by Mortenson and a journalist named David Oliver Relin. The prose is occasionally flowery, but the story is so great that it's easy to ignore the few times when the adjectives get out of control! Anyway, I highly recommend it, either for personal reading or for book clubs -- I'm going to suggest it to mine. And if anyone's got extra cash lying around and looking for a good cause, it doesn't get much better than this.  They have a special fundraising projects for kids too.

Compliments?

On Friday I asked my students to think of (and write down) something nice about every other kid in the class. This had two goals: one, to get them to start thinking positively about each other instead of being whiny and bitchy; and two, I was planning to collect, collate, and type up the compliments to give to each one of them for a Valentine.

Some of them missed the point.   My favorites so far: "doesn't brag", "is a midget", "doesn't insult me", "talks a lot", "is nice sometimes", "tries to be quiet", "goody goody", and "big head".   Yikes. Of course there were plenty of legitimately nice comments, but I had to do some serious editing as I typed....

Our party is tomorrow.  I'm hoping for a record two years in a row without someone in tears. Of course, B will be back from suspension, so anything could happen. Stay posted for the latest results.

Dogs in the salon? Glue on the floor?

When I was getting my hair cut today, a woman in stiletto heels came into the salon, with her cocker spaniel on a leash and a dog bed in her arms, and sat at the station next to me. Her poor stylist kept nearly tripping over the dog, who first wandered around the chair, and then cruised the salon when the owner took off her leash. Eventually the dog jumped up into the woman's lap and stayed there for most of the rest of her appointment. It followed her into the room with the sinks, and cuddled with her while she was under the dryer.....the whole thing was very odd. My hairdresser, who is allergic to dogs, was disgusted by the whole situation, and kept muttering under her breath about how some people have no sense of proper behavior. Hilarious. Anyway, I am now back to being blond, with about four inches of hair less than yesterday.  It feels great.

A possibly even better feeling is the knowledge that one of my troublesome students won't be in school Monday or Tuesday.  She managed to get herself suspended.  After typically disastrous week, on Friday she decided it would be a good idea to fill up her lotion tube with glue and try to squirt it on other students as a prank.  She ended up getting it all over the floor in the hallway when she chased someone out of the room.  Gotta love it.

Backseat driver

It was kind of a rough start to the week again -- same problems with the same kids -- but today was better. It helped that one af my problem children was absent! Even the littlest things can make such a difference to the atmosphere of the room. E takes over full-time starting on Monday, and I think she is nervous, but she'll do fine. It has been hard just to sit back and watch -- not that she is doing a bad job, not at all. I just keep wanting to jump in and say something, rephrase something, add something. It's almost comical. I guess I'm just used to being in control, leading the class, and it feels strange to be in the backseat, so to speak. But I think I'm learning a lot, too, about what works and why -- things I've been doing for years and haven't really thought much about for a while. So that's kind of fun.

Global warming and other matters

I feel like we've been living in North Dakota lately -- the grass in my backyard has been buried under at least a foot of snow since mid-December, and it's barely broken thirty in the last two or three weeks -- yesterday the high was eight! It's never like this in Denver; it snows a lot, sure, but usually the snow is gone within a few days, and the winter temperatures swing anywhere between ten and sixty degrees. I remember a day last January when I went out to pick up my class from lunch in short sleeves! The constant chill, and the snowstorms which have rolled in nearly every weekend like clockwork, are taking their toll -- it's just tiring to deal with weather like this all the time. Plus it means no recess for the kids, which translates to fussy, over-excited students in the afternoons, which leads to cranky teachers. A bad spiral.

A new student has really thrown a wrench into the gears of my classroom since winter break. She and two other girls seem to be either hating each other, or backing each other up in a hatred of all adults in the building. It flips back and forth faster than I can keep up sometimes -- I never know if it's safe to let them sit together. On balance, they should probably never sit together; either they will turn on each other, or decide together to turn on me! Having E (my student teacher) around both helps and hurts, I think. We can tag team the worst offenders and take turns calming down their fits, which I never had time to do when I was on my own, but they also play us off of each other. "I hate you. Ms. ______ listens to me, but you just try to get me in trouble." Both of us try not to take them too seriously, but E seems fairly disturbed by it all. I guess I have gotten more used to this kind of behavior over the last six years, but I can't tell if that's a good thing or not. Maybe I should be more worried and upset by how they treat each other and the two of us? It's interesting to try to see it through her eyes in any case -- I just hope she doesn't get scared away from teaching!  I try to point out all the good things, too...