"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! ;)