It's a Good Thing I'm a Little Nuts Already

The saga of the exploding homeroom continues.

On Friday, 29 of 35 kids showed up. Whee!!! I had seats for everyone. It's not unusual to have a good chunk of kids not show up because a lot of them move over the summer and we may not have received a request for records yet from their new school. I was hoping, as you can imagine, that this number would stabilize.

This morning, three of my "missing" children appeared, so my number jumped to 32. I have, barely, 32 seats available. This means every single isolation island is being used, and those kids will need to have some spare chairs to pull up to a lab group when we do labs - there's no extra lab tables available to start with and there's no room to put when if I could find one. So, I sent a request to the head custodian to find me 4 plain chairs. Mrs. Social Studies, next door, had to get 3 more student desks. We are not alone. Chairs and desks are a hot commodity right now.

This afternoon I get an email informing me that a student was being transferred from Mrs. Eagle's team to my team. I knew the name right away - it's the younger brother of a kid I had a few years ago. His mom is very involved, but I actually kind of enjoyed her - if I ever needed a volunteer, she'd be there. She had told me a year ago she wanted her youngest on our team - however, the team her older son had isn't the same. I'm the only returning member from that era, and in fact, Mrs. Bunny's team has two of the teachers that were on our team that year. However, amazingly enough, her team's numbers are even higher than ours are, so I ended up with Little Brother.

Of course he ended up in my homeroom.

I informed Guidance Mom that he'd be sitting on the floor as things stood now. She's going to try to move another kid out of that class and into one of my others, and hopefully we'll keep that 32 number. As it stands, most of my classes are in the 28 range which is a pretty big group.

However, it beats sitting on the floor.

Our numbers this year are, well, unpredictable. The Principal informed that even before school started, we were running 100 kids over the prediction. I have no clue where they are coming from, but they're here and we're running out of chairs.

I have heard, however, that the 8th grade is rather empty, compared to sixth and seventh grade. Funny how things work out.

Speaking of 8th graders...I'm teaching an 8th grade Health Class this year which is going to be kind of fun, as long as my 8th graders don't get lost. I have 29 on my roster. When the bell rang for 7th period, only 7 had shown up. Something was wrong. I asked one of my kids from last year to show me his schedule and discovered that it had my name, my room number, and the title was "PE"...ah, health used to be part of the PE department and apparently that didn't get changed when they did the schedules. So, I had seven kids who read their schedules and came to the right room (and earned a Jolly Rancher for not being a goober), and 22 who, most likely, ended up wandering lose in the gym.

I got a hold of the Guidance Goddess to see if she could radio the gym teachers and send me my missing kids. About ten minutes later one of the coaches showed up with the missing sheep, and was on her way to drop off Mrs. Eagle's missing sheep (she only had 4 find her room!)

You know, I quit watching soap operas when I began teaching...it's just way more entertaining.