"Keep Your Butt to Yourself!"

SO today started off in a very unorthodox manner; a student came in & announced that a 3rd grader had threatened to kill her after school today.  When I inquired as to what was said, I realized the girl who threatened already had a history with her. This girl has been making derogatory comments about my student's mom, and my student started making them right back.  My student also petitioned this girl to share her friend (since she insists that Aaliyah has taken control of her friend.) I walked them both down to the office where the assistant principal admitted she was on her way to get the 3rd grade girl out of class anyway, because she has been bullying other girls (calling them “whores” and such. That was not a word I knew in 3^rd grade!)  They both were sentenced to a social skills class with the assistant principal after-school on Friday; that sounds interesting…..I wonder what those are actually like. At least my students were reading quietly at the back table, under my team member’s supervision, when I returned.  

Most of the rest of the day passed without incident, with an occasional interruption and blurt-outs. I did end up moving two students because one girl would not stop talking during independent work time for math, so I changed her seat with a girl in the front.  She who had been sitting in the front, is a “know-it-all” who rarely raises her hand to make a comment, was the perfect candidate to move back there, because now she will have to raise her hand to get my attention from all the way back there.

One of my most undisciplined students this year, shoved a crayon in the pencil sharpener near the end of the day when the kids were working on their soil profiles in their science journals, & that kind of threw me over the edge.

I kept another student after school to discuss his behavior with him. He was constantly talking all morning when he should have been working, and then when the kids lined up to get colored pencils, he was pushing his butt and backside into another girl in the classroom insisting that she started it while they were waiting in line. When I asked them to sign their cards, I told them they had to put “could not keep butt to self” & that we would be showing their discipline cards to their parents at parent-teacher conferences next month, so I hoped they were sufficiently humiliated at that point. I'm such a kind teacher! ;)

Highlights of a School Day

Today had a lot of funny aspects to it; I have to mention just a few. I started one student on a behavior contract; he is quite the class clown (or so he thinks), & he is rarely on-task, normally out of his seat & bothering other classmates. He really made me chuckle during the counselor's visit to the class today though, because when she was mentioning tolerance & brought up race (specifically the term) "Latino," this clown student (who is Mexican), proceeded to ask what a Latino was......as if it were some foreign species.
During that same conversation, another student mentioned holding another student in a "headlock" as the primary bullying threat at our school .........which I was unaware of, apparently.
Several students got confused on their spelling homework, & when they inserted the word student instead of season the context made me laugh; "Autumn is my favorite student." That was just purely ironic, when in fact  that student has caused me some grief this year already (mentioned in prior entries with ADHD) and may appear to be my favorite student since she is requiring a lot of my time, when in fact I am just gritting my teeth and trying to maintain patience with her. It's funny how students interpret things sometimes. 

ADHD x3

I think one of THE biggest challenges for an educator is that blasted disease-Attention Deficit HYPERactivity Disorder. ....especially when untreated! I had a student who didn't take her meds most of last week in the morning & made things particularly difficult. On top of that, I got a new student, who I found out has ADHD as well, & his mom/auntie forgot his meds that morning & had to come back & give them to him later on in the day; what an adventure!
But the girl student who didn't take her medication was really bouncing off the walls; every time I went to help other students around the room, she was constantly at my elbow and butting into other students' business, asking if I had "fairy books" for her to read, complaining about how hungry she was, & also informing me at the same time that she was gnawing on pencils & erasers. Wow! Luckily, the school counselor loaned me some snacks for her, & she made it until lunch....when I say "made it," I mean she knocked her plant off the desk entirely, finished a task here & there (a co-worker had suggested I highlight passages or lines for her to do at one time & then have her bring it to me) & stayed in her seat for a grand total of 5 minutes.
I spoke with this young lady's mother after-school on the phone about how we needed to work something out for her daughter to get that medication, because it really isn't fair in a class of 28 students for me to have to mostly attend to just one of them. The mom told me she's not easy to handle at home either, but I reminded her mom that she's just responsible for her daughter at home, whereas I have 27 other kids to be attending to simultaneously while her daughter is acting like that. It was kind of strange to me that the mom said her daughter's medication was "stolen" & they would be refilling it---sounds sketchy, but I'm at least grateful that she showed up on medication today; it made the day somewhat smoother! :)