lactaid

setting: my classroom. first thing in the morning; the kids are just finishing breakfast.

scene:
(student puts down his empty milk carton. pauses to think. raises his hand.)

(student)
Ms. Matthews, um, is this lactaid or regular milk?
(nervous. points to milk carton)

(Ms. Matthews)
(raises her eyebrows in horror)
Honey, that's regular milk.

(student)
Um, uh oh. I'm lactose intolerant. I ...
(looks down at his ... belly)
Uh oh. Can I go to the .... you know.
(stands up and walks quickly and awkwardly to the front of the room. Ms. Matthews is waiting with the hall pass. They complete the hand-off and he exits stage right)

ohmygoodness

starting today, a student from the life skills class is going to come
be part of our classroom for our science period.

from now on he will be in my class at the end of the day, a generally
traumatic time for us all.

he's coming up for "socialization" ... but we do (unfortunately for
the kids) very little socialization in here. a lot of learning, but
very little socializing.

and to top it off, science is the subject that we usually don't get to
(bad, i know). this puts a little fire in the belly to finish math
class before he shows up.

oh geez louise.

ratios

i am beginning to be convinced about the effect a certain ratio has on students in my classroom.

normal student to adult ratio in room 403A: 8:1
student to adult ratio with the tss worker there: 8:2
student to adult ratio with the tss worker and student teacher: 8:3
student to adult ratio with the tss worker, student teacher, new tss worker, behavior specialist, and student teacher's supervisor: 8:6

theory: the ratio of students to adults has an inverse relationship to the negative behavior of the entire class. as one decreases, the other increases. stated more simply, the more adults there are in the room, the more poorly behaved the students are.

today, our ratio was 8:6. what a terrible day.

(maybe this held true last year too ... i just never got to figure it out)

eh, what?

i have a student teacher. as of this morning, she is with me all day, every day until christmas break.

like, i am supposed to be her mentor.

haaaaaaaahahahhaa.

spoooky!

happy halloween!

today we had a total blast. our door was decorated with paper jack-o-laterns, we did all our lessons, just using halloween-y activities and a cool harry-potter looking font.

such fun. the kids got really grossed out when they had to stick their hand in bags of questionable substances in a science activity. we played scary music and ate tons of candy.

just how it should be!

PD days sometimes suck

but today was worse than normal. not because we were told to reflect on "what is rigor instruction?" or "what the children is doing," which made it bad, but because we talked a little about some of the sensitive situations our kids are in.

so student from last year's dad died last week. another kid i know well witnessed a double homicide last week on his block. man shot two guys at point blank range. a few other kids are on house arrest for attempted murder. there's a 7th grade boy who supposedly raped an 8 year old girl. the list goes on and on.

it is so unbelievably painful to look at these kids, the ones with the the house arrest anklets on, the ones about whom you just know stuff, and the ones who look absolutely normal. it is beyond me to even begin to conceive of what their lives are like and what they deal with each day.

and somehow, amist all this hurt and pain and sorrow and evil, our school can still, sometimes, be a light. a place of joy. the kids come in all hurting and angry, but after about an hour, there are smiles all over the place. in their work they put aside all the crap at home and ask questions like "how come we know for sure that the iceman was real?" they write letters to their teachers convincing them to take the class on trips and play more games in school. they laugh when their classmate's pants fall off and they beg for candy at the end of the day. like every normal kid.

they are so resilient. but i wish they didn't have to be.

even sadder

i found out today that one of my students from last year's dad got hit
by a septa train last week and died.

precious thing. i feel so sad.

apology

one of my students accidentally tore a page in a book that belongs to my sister elizabeth. it had one of those sweet holographic stickers with "this book belongs to elizabeth matthews" in the front ... that is, in fact, why it got torn. the kid was anxious to see it and flipped the page a little too fast.

i asked him to write an apology to her.

sad

a kid came in today very very sad - and angry. he finally told me all about how he hates being at home and is angry at his mom because she ignores him. she gives all the attention to his older brother and baby sister, and pretends like she doesn't hear him when he asks her a question or asks for help with his homework.

i asked him if he wanted to write her a note to tell her how he feels ...

he said no, because he already wrote a note, but he gave it to her and she never read it, so he took it back and threw it away.

sweet thing. he was so sad.

at the end of the day, he came up to and asked if he could have a hug because he was starting to feel sad about going home.

depantsed

how do you spell that?

yesterday, i turned around from the chalkboard when i heard a kid stand up then fall back onto his chair - THUD!

and then i see him pulling his pants up from around his ankles.

he is cracking up laughing.

i instruct the girls (and myself) to turn our heads the other way while he deals with the situation ...

he laughed for about 10 minutes at himself.

all day he had been complaining about not having a belt. i knew they wore their pants big, but these things literally just fell right off!

let me add here

that one "thing" i learned in grad school class today was that, although you can cancel out factors in the numerator and denominator of fractions, you *cannot* (and she repeats, CANNOT!), *CANNOT* cancel out the 3s in a problem like this:

23
---
35

why thank you! i have always wanted to CANCEL OUT DIGITS OF THE NUMBERS IN A PROBLEM.

trogdor the burninator (aka my grad school class)

my "i am so bored i'd rather try to remember how to draw a cartoon i haven't seen in months ... years ... than listen to this woman talk about how to recognize if a fraction is 1/2 or not"-attempt(s) at trogdor. the "more different S" is harder than it looks

this is how boring my grad school class is right now. last week i resorted to trying to remember how trogdor looks. this week i made up my own sudokus and completed them.

if i were you ...

(one of my students asked if i had any kids, or if i even have a boyfriend. shocked and appalled at my lack of a future, he tells me ...)

"if i were your age and still didn't have nobody, i would just go out on the streets and find me the first clean lookin person i see. and i'd just ask her, do you wanna get married?"

the first *clean* looking person, he says ...

battle of the books

i was just walking through the 2nd floor hallway. there's a table down
there where a security guard sits. a few weeks ago i thought i saw a
bible, open, on the table. but then last week i noticed that it was
the koran. today it's a bible again, open to matthew 25.

"Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour ... "When
the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then
he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all
the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a
shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. " (v. 13, 31-32)

it's the battle of the books. which one will win? mwaaahahahaha.

phone calls

my student who left a couple weeks ago to move to another school called me a few minutes ago. he sounded really sad.

maybe that's due to the tetanus shot he has to go get ... because he got jumped today in the cafeteria and got bit in the chest. and no one from the school so much as called his mom.

he told me about his new class. the teacher is a man, and is mean. they don't read a lot because they don't have any books (i asked if he was serious, and he said that the only books they have are the textbooks). in science and social studies they copy vocabulary words and look up the definitions. there are ten kids in his class and he is friends with one of them, and the rest of the kids are "bad and mean."

yelling

i yelled more today than i have yet, total, i think.

i had a couple kids who were acting like morons all day. all stupid stuff that they know not to do with me.

and of course, the occasional yell doesn't help, it just makes me feel like crap.

which is what i felt like when i came home and slept for 2 hours.

precious moments

this morning i arrived at school fairly late, about 25 minutes before the first bell. as i was walking in, i saw one of my students walking with his older brother and his friend.

i waved hi, and he left the group to walk over to me, give me a hug, say good morning, and then walked back to join the other boys.

sweet sweet thing. 6th grade boys are generally self-conscious and WAY too cool to even say hi to a teacher, much less walk away from the group to give a hug.

a precious moment.

weird

not much to say here. i had myself a 4 day weekend and so today was very chill. only 5 kids there, we did our work, we had cookies and juice (since they were good for the substitute on friday) ...

a couple of my students are (finally) starting to come out of their shells. for a while there were a couple who never seemed to speak much; it was hard to get them to talk if they weren't in the mood to do work or anything at all ... now they're all smiles, all the time.

i really need to get on the ball in terms of instruction. just because my kids are chill doesn't mean that i get to just chill. haha but it feels like i am ...

go roadrunners!!

went to the game. twice.

the first time, i went 30 minutes late and the previous game was only in halftime. saw a former student there, who was, suffice it to say, shocked to see me.

the second time, it was the right game. came right as it started. a kid who i knew got facemasked and fell, hurting his wrist, and had to go to the hospital. then i met my student's mom, who was super nice. then "we" scored 2 touchdowns.

i have to say, while form and technicalities were a bit lacking (there were about 8 false starts and lots of penalties/illegal tackles), the natural talent was rather impressive.

next was the 130-weight-class game. i didn't stay for that, but the kids were getting ready and i couldn't help but think that every one of those kids is bigger than *i* am.

roadrunners

so my brother david plays for the spartans football team at home. i used to love going to his games, the year i lived at home.

a bunch of the kids at our school play for the kingsessing roadrunners, including a kid in my class and a few kids from last year. i told one that i would *love* to come to any of his home games, which are played about 5 blocks from my house.

when i got home last night, my roommate said one of my students had called. she had managed to catch his phone number through all the mumbling. i saw it and knew whose it was ....

so i called this morning and talked to him. he has a game at 1:15 today. he's number 92 and is a tackle of some sort. jerseys are red white and blue ...

we'll see if i can find him on that mess of a field!