Didn't Like You Then, But I Love You Now

Middle Schoolers are just plain strange.

As part of our school-wide positive behavior support program (I'm not writing that again, so you'll have to deal with SWPBS), we've developed a "check-in/check-out" program with our kids that had the dubious honor of being the 15% that were always in trouble.  We started SWPBS last year, tracked a lot of data, and realized that 15% of the kids were getting about 60% of the discipline referrals.  Interesting.  So, we came up with a 2nd tier of intervention (the first tier being the school store and the money you can earn to go shopping).

This involved matching these kids up with an adult mentor (not always a teacher, but support staff as well) that the kid checked in with in the morning, and checked out with in the afternoon.  In the meantime, the kid carries around a slip that they hand to each teacher who scores them on their behavior for the day; they have a certain individual goal of points, and there's a system of rewards in place. The goal is to get them behaving like they should, to have a grown up advocate in the building, and to eventually have them learn to self-monitor their behavior.

Teachers and staff could volunteer to be a mentor and we were given a list of kids and could select ones we thought we could work with.  The student then got to look at the list of available mentors and choose whom they wanted to work with.

Well.  That was interesting.

I ended up picking Mouthy Girl who was a member of last years' Notorious Seventh Period Class From the Very Depths of Hell Itself, and then Last Word Boy who was also a member of this stellar class of children.

Mouthy Girl gave me absolute fits last year - she was a handful - always into fights, always into drama, never doing work, and just the rudest and most disrespectful little blonde fireball there ever was.  (The fact that she has a homelife from hell is part of the reason for her behavior).  However.  She hadn't been in much trouble so far in eighth grade when we got the list, and she'd even come by several times to talk, was nice, sweet, and pleasant so I thought, "What the heck?" and selected her.  Kids change.

Oh boy do they.

Apparently Mouthy Girl was ecstatic that I had selected her as a possible mentee.  (Surprised me, truth be told.)  Her enthusiasm has not waned and we've been doing this program since Thanksgiving.  She is a regular fixture in my room, comes by several times a day (in between classes, on the way to lunch, any chance she can) to get a hug, whine about something she's upset about, to get a pencil, and basically to have someone to mother her since her mother is too busy to do it herself.  The good thing is that she'll give me a head's up on a problem, I can email her teachers to let them know, and they'll keep an eye out and keep a lid on things.  In the meantime I have a kid whom my entire homeroom thinks is my real daughter as she calls me "momma" and constantly borrowing pencils, paper, etc. (which is fine, that's part of the job.)

It's paid off.  She has not had one discipline referral this year.  She's walking away from the drama.  She's not getting into fights.  And she's learned that she can be successful in academics as well (All B's and C's this nine weeks - yes!!)

Wow.  What a change.

Now to see if we can work magic with Last Word Boy.  He's new to the program.  He started before Christmas but made it only one day before he got a write-up and had enough points to earn his way back to alternative school.  He's back now, and so far, he's met his goal every day but one.  I did insist that he have a schedule change to get him away from a teacher whom he obviously had issues with, and I think that helped.  So far, so good.  His new teachers seem to like him, which is a plus.  He's a smart kid, but can be very argumentative and just hates to be corrected.  (He will admit this.)   If he can grow up, and get it together, he'll do okay.

Helping them out, one day at a time...

Be Careful How You Land

It's amazing how life can just up and turn your world upside down.

Take, for example, the case of Mrs. Chicken.  One minute she was sitting on her stool in her classroom (most of us use barstools as chairs since our computer teacher stations are so high - I usually stand most of the time). The next minute she had landed on the floor which is tile on concrete.  Apparently when she went to stand up, one of her feet got tangled in the rungs towards the bottom of the stool, and she fell.

Right onto her hip, managing to crush her pelvis and break the top of her femur.

Good thing?  The kids were NOT in the room but were at their elective classes.

Bad thing?  Well duh.  It's a pretty serious injury, especially for someone who's old enough to have been teaching for over 30 years.

This happened the first week back in January and we currently have no idea when we'll see her back at The School.  The kids aren't happy - they love her.  She's a great teacher and one of those teachers that you'll be somewhere with, a restaurant or something, and people will come up and tell her they they had her so many years ago and how she was such a great teacher, and they just loved her class.  Everyone in town knows her.

And so now she's home, spending most of her time flat on her back, trying to heal up.  We're pitching in to send meals out to her place as cooking isn't really on her list of things to do right now.  She can stand or sit for about 45 minutes and that's about all she can do.  According to her Doctor, she's in a great deal of pain and it could be over a year and a half before she's back to her old self.

However, The District, was hoping she could come back to do "light duty" this past week.

Really.

She had a doctor's appointment on Wednesday and were expecting her to come back, hence they didn't request a substitute for her class.  Because this is considered an on-the-job-injury, The District is watching her progress very closely.

But really?  A broken pelvis and leg and they though she could do light duty in less than a month?

We're all trying to figure out what light duty is, anyway.  Perhaps they'll retrofit her room so she can teach from a hospital bed?

The Insanity of Tearing Down a Role Model

I've been a fan of sports nearly all my life.  Daddy had one child - me - and even though I was a girl, that didn't stop him from teaching me about sports and learning to enjoy them.  We spent a lot of my childhood at the ballpark in Anaheim watching the California Angels.  My grandmother was a dedicated and devoted Denver Bronco fan.  And my cousin, even at 5' 2" but with amazing skills, played college basketball on a scholarship.  I follow hockey, SEC football, baseball, and about the only sport I could care less about is basketball.  Even today, a lot of my conversations with Daddy are about sports - he's a Cubs fan - and it's something we enjoy together.

That being said...I haven't followed the NFL for quite a while.  I love college football - especially SEC football - but the NFL just didn't have it for me anymore.  For one thing, John Elway retired and I tended to work a lot on Sundays helping my husband with his business a number of years ago.  Not much of a chance to watch games.

And, let's be honest, I got tired of hearing about the thugs.  

Players hanging out - constantly, it seems - in strip clubs.  Players getting shot.  Players doing the shooting.  Players driving drunk, beating their wives, engaged in dog-fighting, gambling, you name it.  It turned me completely off to the NFL and I stopped watching.  Just didn't care.  

And then along came Tim Tebow.

As a Georgia fan, I absolutely HATE THE GATORS, but I still enjoyed watching Tim Tebow play.  Granted, he wasn't the best quarterback, technically, but that kid had that something that inspired people to rise about their limitations and do their very best.  He could rise above his own limitations and do amazing things.  SEC football fans saw it time and again as he motivated his team to win after win.  And the fact that he's a good kid, a Christian, someone who sees football as a platform to do greater things and help people, well, that just made it better.  

So, he got drafted by my beloved Denver Broncos (Grandma would be thrilled) and I decided to watch the NFL again to see Tebow play.  I wondered if he could bring that same magic he had during his college days.

And he did.  And believe me, my family in Denver went nuts over him.  He made this team believe in themselves again, which is something we haven't seen in a while.

So we finally get a good role model - a football player who isn't all about himself.  One who takes a city and helps it believe in greatness again, even if it's in an arena such as sports.  One who helps others.  One who sees the big picture and it isn't all about himself.  And what does the media do?  They tear him apart.  

All because he bends down on his knee and prays.

Honestly folks.  We whine and moan and cry and complain - "Where are the role models?" - and we finally get one that is a good and true role model and what happens?  They rip him up.  They deride him.  They make fun of him.  And it's absolutely ridiculous that it's happening.

So, for all those media snots who are having fun ripping up Tebow, let me tell you one thing.  I wouldn't be watching the NFL if it wasn't for Tebow.  Granted, that's one person...but I suspect there are a few others out there who may have given up on the sport, perhaps for some of the same reasons I have, who are now a bit more interested.  Who've come back to the fold, and who are actually following the NFL now.  

And it's because a truly good, inspirational player is out there, trying to create magic with his team.  Give me that any day.  

Because, truly, character does count for a lot.  And Tebow, he has character.

  

A Little Unbalanced, I'd Say.

In the past week, eight new 7th graders have enrolled in The School.  I got five of them.  Mrs. Eagle got one and Mrs. Angora got two.  This is not to be unexpected, because we usually get a lot of kids moving in and out over the holidays.  The Guidance Diva also noticed that many of these kids had the address belonging to the cheap but gang-infested brick apartment buildings down the road, so apparently some units have opened up.  Two of my kids are sort of homeless - Mom has an RV and parks it wherever someone will let her.  Another one is living in a church with his family.

Sad.

In any case, our numbers are going up because, for what seems like the first time in forever, we didn't have any kids move off the team.  No one left.  So now I have 28 in my homeroom and most of my classes are in the high twenties.  Mrs. Eagle and all the other seventh grade teachers are in the same boat.

So on Tuesday of last week, Mrs. Eagle and I are walking down to the science lab to grab some graduated cylinders, droppers, and beakers to use in a lab on Wednesday.  The science lab is at the very end of the eighth grade hallway so we had a chance to walk by the eighth grade classrooms who were in session.

As we're walking along, Mrs. Eagle says, "Hey, take a moment to check out those class sizes as we walk by."

We walk, and glance in through the doors and glass frames (which give you a pretty good view of the rooms) and realize that these rooms are practically empty!  They have class sizes in their teens!  One of the last rooms we go by belongs to Mrs. Hummingbird's science class.  (Mrs. Hummingbird taught with us a few years ago and we miss her and love her).  She sees us, comes to the door to wave and say hi and we realize that she has 16 kids in her room!  SIXTEEN KIDS!

OH. MY. GOSH.

My first thought was, man, are they going to be in for a surprise next year when we dump the huge group of seventh graders we have on them.  My second thought was that they better find a way to get another seventh grade team next year because the sixth grade currently has about 50 more kids than we do!

Wow.  I wouldn't even know how to deal with a class of 16....

Snow, well, Ice Day, #1

For those of you who use your precious time to actually read this (including my mother!), you may recall that for the last two years The District had pretty much used up all of our THREE snow days for the year and we were going over our limit by this time in the season.  This was NOT fun because it meant that we had to use up holidays as well as add an additional 30 minutes to the school day to make up for the time missed.  That 30 minutes may not seem like a lot, but if you do after school activities it meant that you didn't get home until after dark, and it seemed that all you had time to do was fix supper, clean up, and go to bed to just get up and do it over again.

So this year has seemed a bit odd because it's been so mild.  We haven't had a lot of really cold, below 32 degree days, and for precipitation we've had quite a bit of rain.  Last year it seemed like day after day after day it was below freezing and snowing or trying to snow.

So yesterday we went from a high of 46 in the morning when I left for school, to about 42 degrees at lunch to 29 degrees by the time we left for the day.  They were calling for snow showers but not a lot of accumulation.

These are the days where I wish there wasn't a single window in the building.

It started to snow in between 5th and 6th periods.  I know this because every single kid was walking in the halls and coming into the room screaming, "IT'S SNOWING!" as if they'd never seen snow before in their entire lives.  IT'S SNOWING!  IT'S SNOWING!  IT'S SNOWING!

Yes.  We know.  Now try to settle down and let's get on with some learning.

Then of course they wanted to know if they'd go home early.  "Probably not because it's not sticking and we only have an hour and a half of school left," I told them, but to no avail.  Because, after all, IT'S SNOWING!

Sigh.

Then came the announcement that all after school activities, including the much-anticipated basketball game, were cancelled.  Chaos.  IT'S SNOWING!  IT'S SNOWING!  IT'S SNOWING!

The only thing that got them calmed down and interested in science was the fact that I was bouncing eggs around on my document reader.

The kids went home, and we were asked to have the building cleared by 5:00 which was no problem.  Then the announcement came over the loud speaker that we might want to go out to our vehicles and make sure we could open them as many of them had doors frozen shut.  All the rain that we had earlier in the day had frozen.  So, many of us spent some time in the parking lot prying open vehicles, then letting them warm up to get all the ice off the windshield.  (I was getting a brake job on my car so had hitched a ride with Mrs. Eagle.  $800 in two weeks between my vehicle and hubby's.  I need another job to pay for the vehicles.)

I picked up my car, and got home with no problem, although I did notice a lack of salt trucks on the roads.  The snow was starting to stick, but you could still see grass and it wasn't very heavy.  Mr. Bluebird got home from his meeting, and was surprised at how good the roads were.

However.  The temperature kept dropping, and dropping, and dropping.  About two hours after we'd been home, and Mr. Math had come over to help Mr. Bluebird with a computer problem, our driveway was a sheet of ice.  Mr. Math, who lives a half mile away, reported after he got home that it was one slick, nasty trip home.    School Districts around us started cancelling based on the ice, not the snow.

We cancelled around 4:30 this morning, not because of snow, but because of the ice underneath the snow.  All that rain we've been receiving, when it was in the 50's and 40's, turned to ice when the temps rocketed downward.

So, we have our first snow day, ice day, of the year, and it conveniently happened on the Friday before a Monday holiday.  Yeah!

Still, I'm a bit concerned.  My celery-food-coloring-salt-water osmosis demonstration will be a bit, well, ugly come Tuesday.  And as for the bouncy eggs?  Well, I don't want to even think about those.

P.S. Because I know ya'll want to know what a bouncy egg is...you soak raw eggs in vinegar for a few days to remove the shell.  What you get is the inner membrane holding the egg together and it will, truly, bounce (try it, it's fun).  What we're doing with these eggs is putting them in a cup of syrup to predict what will happen to them in 24 hours.  (We're studying osmosis and diffusion and there's your clue).  I have no idea what will happen after 5 days.  We will see.

Now Let's Enjoy the Rest of the Year

In My State, teachers on a professional license get observed four times a year.  One of the disadvantages of being at the beginning of the alphabet is that I was one of the first, if not the very first, person observed at the beginning of the year.  This was the second week of school and I hadn't even learned all my kids' names yet - mainly because we were still fixing schedules, assigning books, and all that fun beginning of the year stuff.  And, truth be told, it takes a bit of time to learn 130 names.

And now that we're into our second semester, the cycle begins again and I am supposed to have my two unannounced observations some time this week.

Ugh.

For those of you not in the teaching profession, I'm not going to bore you with all that goes into lesson plans, and observations, and teaching to reach multiple learning styles, and being sure to assess at least three times during the course of the lesson, and of course, keeping the kids in check and hoping that they actually learn anything, and of course, making it relevant, sticking to standards, and oh, all that fun stuff.

You can thank me.

For those of you in the profession - you know what I'm talking about.

In any case, I got lucky and The Enforcer did my two observations on Monday and now I am FREAKING DONE with my observations for this year.

So I guess...one of the advantages of being at the beginning of the alphabet is that I get done with these nasty observations before the others and can actually enjoy teaching for the rest of the year without these things hanging over my head.

Until next year.  When it starts all over again.

Slacker

Yes, I know I've been slacking on this.

Honestly, I've been sick with either a cold or bronchitis or something since the middle of November.  Not sick enough to miss school, but just sick enough to not want to do anything except sleep once I got home.

Feeling better and nearly normal now and so totally looking forward to our Christmas break.

Just a few random observations...

We had three days of Government Mandated Really Big Deal Testing for our seventh graders.  Three days of constructed response writing tests.  So, for the first three periods of the day, the kids were testing and writing.  Except they finished in 20-30 minutes and then had nearly two hours to just sit there and BE SILENT.  I'm convinced that whomever comes up with these ideas for these tests has never been in a seventh grade classroom (at least not recently) and has no clue about 12 and 13-year-olds.  A big block of time, doing the same thing, for these kids is maybe twenty minutes.  Thirty max.  No standardized test should last longer than a typical classroom period.

So, the result of making these seventh graders be ABSOLUTELY SILENT AND STILL for nearly three class periods is that they lost their minds.  We had a dance that Friday and had not one, not two, not three, but FOUR fights break out.  It's rare we even get one, let alone four.  All of a sudden kids who were normally well behaved were acting like fools and teachers were writing referrals and sending kids to the office left and right.  Kids were starting fights in PE, in lunch, in the halls, you name it.  It's nuts.

We all need a break from each other.

Another result, I believe of the testing exhaustion and the upcoming holidays, is that my kids stopped working.  They just up and quit.  Homework turn in dropped to below 50% and kids who had never missed an assignment had zeroes.  In-class work - not turned in.  Project - not turned in.  All these things we're doing in class, and they aren't turning them in.  They woke up a bit this week and managed to turn in a bunch of late assignments (when some of them realized that they were pretty close to failing or dropping a few letter grades), but it was almost bizarre how the entire grade just up and stopped doing school.  Mrs. Eagle's and Mrs. Angora's kids weren't any better.

On the positive side, my homeroom still rocks.  It's bigger now - we got some new kids and I now have 27 in there so I'm nearly out of seats, but still most of them are pretty good kids and they get along with each other.  We're having a canned food drive for our Angel Tree program and they've been wanting to win the pizza party - but even more than that, they Want to Beat the Sixth Grade.  Every year a sixth grade class wins and we're trying to change that trend.  My kids claim that one particular sixth grade teach bribes her kids as well as brings in a lot on her own, but I told them we were playing fair and not going down that road.  We ended up with over 350 cans, which is huge, but I'm not sure it's enough to beat the Dreaded Sixth Grade.  We'll find out on Monday.

We have a day and a half left and then some time off.  Plans?  Sleeping, reading, knitting, spending time with hubby.  Perfect.