All Bets Are Off

Usually the first day, and even the first week, of school are rather uneventful for me.  Or they should be.  Having kids in ISS the first week is NOT a good thing.  That's the Honeymoon Phase.  If they can't keep it together for the first week, it does not bode well for the year.

First day...no problems.  In fact, the first full week was quiet for me.

Which meant I could plan out the entire year of Craft Club, get the Veteran's Day Program started, and work on forms and paperwork.  It also meant it gave admin a few more days to actually figure out my schedule which gets changed every year for no reason whatsoever.  Every year they change it, and every year I have to remind them that there is a one hour time period where my kids (and me) can have lunch where they will not miss their RTI classes.  Why they can't leave well enough alone is beyond me.  The old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" adage... In any case, they had our lunch scheduled for 3rd period, and my planning for 6th (and no one was assigned to watch my kids during my bathroom break planning.  That's a problem.

On Friday afternoon I get word, from a bus driver no less, that I will have a kid starting Monday.  Really?  I go into guidance and ask the Guidance Goddess and she confirms.  Once again, Ditzy Admin forgot to tell me, forgot to put the paperwork in my mailbox, and generally just forgot.  Great.  We are off to a great start.  To be fair, she did, finally email me about 3:00 on Friday afternoon, but by then I'd already tracked down the kid and his information and notified his teacher.

And I was wrong.  We all were.

We were all betting that the first kid in ISS would most likely be a seventh grader.  The sixth grade class from last year, which is now the seventh grade class, was infamous.  We'd been hearing about them and their behavior for years and they lived up to every bit of their reputation.  So I figured things hadn't changed much and my first customer would be a seventh grader.

And if it wasn't a seventh grader, an 8th grader.  Because there were a few troublemakers in that bunch who spent a lot of time in my room last year.

My first kid?  A sixth grader. A sixth grader who slapped an 8th grader as they got off the bus that morning.  And remarkably, the 8th grader had some restraint and didn't hit him back (since I know that kid pretty well, I'm still astounded).

Who would have thought?