Good Doggie, or The Most Interesting Things Happen When You Have a Student Teacher

Mrs. Jayhawker is flying solo this week (and doing a pretty good job of it, I might add), so I'm trying to make myself useful outside of my classroom. I've been getting a lot of team paperwork done, wrote a new benchmark quiz, and have done some one-on-one sessions with most of our kids to let them know what they need to do for the remainder of the school year to get academically promoted to eighth grade. For lack of a better place to work, I've sort of camped out in guidance, using a student laptop to work on stuff and hopefully lend a hand when needed (like the other day when Pinball Boy was having his meltdown.)

So, when Mr. Enforcer told me he'd need my help around 9 on Friday morning, I got curious.

"Something interesting going to happen?" I asked. I worked with him earlier in the year when we had a big deal disaster drill with some visiting consultants, and I knew they were coming back some time so I thought that might be it.

"Maybe," he said vaguely.

"Well, I have a student teacher so if there's anything she needs to know, I'd like to prep her," I said. I've been a sub and a student teacher and there's not much worse than being in a situation where you have no clue what to do.

"We may have some visitors and we may do a lockdown," he said. "Here's a print out of the procedure so she has it handy."

I thanked him, went in to see her (the kids were at their related arts) and gave her the lowdown, or what I knew so far. If she was lucky, it would happen at nine when all she had in the room were the kids that were supposed to show up for homework clinic.

I was on my way to Mr. Enforcer's Office when I heard him come over the intercom with the lockdown message. Kids were snatched into classrooms, doors went closed, and I hustled up to the front office to see a whole slew of law enforcement vehicles out front and a lot of officers in the lobby - with dogs!

Hey, it's a great day for a locker search!

It's no secret that drugs are a huge problem in schools, even elementary schools, sad to say, and even in schools in "good" communities. I taught in a nice rural area up North and we had a huge drug problem in that community (which always kind of made me shake my head when I'd hear parents yabber about how they moved to the country to escape the big city problems.) I've seen rich kids involved, and poor kids, and there's really no common denominator outside of the fact that they made some poor choices in life and were obviously missing something somewhere. We had regular sweeps, and managed to limit a lot of the drug problem at school because the kids knew that there could be a sweep at any time. True, they took the trade off-campus, but it did put a dent in the on-campus problems.

However, in the six years I've been at The School, we've never had a drug sweep. The first superintendent I served under absolutely refused to do so as he feared it would give the public the wrong idea. Honestly, I'd love it if they did the sweeps every quarter so the kids knew, like the ones up North, that bringing the stuff to school was a risk. Sadly, however, we've seen a big spike in drug trafficking in our area, including some rather large drug busts (one of which happened on parent conference day and made me wonder if perhaps some of my parents were a bit preoccupied with being arrested..) Our current superintendent decided it would be a good idea to sweep all the high schools and middle schools and see what they could find.

Mr. Enforcer gave me a bag of locker key masters and told me to go with one of the officers and sweep the sixth grade area. I ended up with an officer from a neighboring county who had a very sweet yellow lab who was prancing around and bubbling with excitement. It was obvious that this dog loved her job. We went through the sixth grade area, checked all the lockers, and the bathrooms, and came up clean. That was good.

"So," I asked the officer as we headed back to the main part of the building, "what would your dog do if she did smell something in a locker?"

"Oh, she'd sit down in front of it, like those dogs there," he said as we rounded the corner and spied two dogs sitting down in front of some lockers right outside my classroom.

Oh dear.

I knew who these lockers belonged to, and it wasn't even a surprise that the dogs got a hit on those lockers. One of the kids is the child of parents who deal in drugs (a well-known fact in the area) and has often been named as a source in the building although we've never been able to catch him with anything. The other is a kid who I've suspected was a user simply because of his demeanor most of the time. The officers searched these lockers, and came up empty for any illegal substances.

The only other hits were apparently quite a few down in the eighth grade wing, but again, a search was conducted and nothing was found. The officer I was with said that they often take the dogs to elementary schools and let the kids pet them and often the dog will indicate the presence of drugs on one of the children - they are so sensitive to the scent they will pick it up on clothing that a kid wears in a home where the parents are users. Considering the two lockers that were checked by my room, this didn't surprise me at all.

All in all it took an hour to sweep the building (and it was their second of the day) and then they were off to another school. Once the kids were released from lockdown and sent off to their classes the rumor mill began, so the teachers were instructed to let them know that they were put in lockdown to keep them out of the way, there was no danger, and this was a county-wide search and not a target at the school.

But you knew the rumor mill was going to go into high gear right away. Mrs. Language and Miss Reading asked me to come into their classes and talk to the kids about it ("Because you were in on the whole thing...") and I basically said that I wasn't telling them anything about what I saw, and if any of them heard from someone else whose locker was searched then they should consider it nothing but a lie and idle gossip because no students were out there and none of them have a clue what they are talking about. It didn't stop the kids from speculating (and amazingly, can you guess what names kept coming up? The kids who did have their lockers searched).

An unintended consequence of this whole thing? It got the kids so worked up that many of them started going to guidance and telling on kids they knew who had, in their possession, illegal substances. (Obviously, we didn't search the kids, they were in the classrooms.) By the end of the day we had expelled three for possession, sale, and use of prescription drugs. Raiding Mom and Dad's medicine cabinet has become big business for some of these kids (wonder how many of them are selling their own ADHD meds?) This is obviously a step up from a few years ago when my students were busy stealing over the counter cold medicine out of the bathroom cabinet and trying to get high off of that.

Just another one of those days that they don't prepare you for in teacher school...

Flying Solo

Mr. T, my student teacher, is flying solo this week.

Which means I'm just about bored out of my mind.

He's doing fine. His content knowledge is excellent. He has good rapport with the kids. He listens well and takes advice to heart. He acknowledges that he has issues with planning and organization but he's already improved in that area. He's also learning that a 45 minute period flies by faster than lightning.

I turned him lose yesterday, although I was in the room most of the day - just in case - but today, after first period, I left him alone. He did pretty well. He did say that 5th period was a bit noisy and ill-mannered (and amazingly enough, I guessed which table was the culprit), so he's going to move some seats and write some behavior notes tomorrow. He's very good at getting the kids quiet for the most part, and commands respect.

The hardest thing for me is finding something to do while I'm exiled, so to speak, from my room. I spent time today in guidance getting some paperwork done for some new kids I need to s-team, plus some follow-ups. I read my new issue of Science Scope, graded some papers, and stayed awake. I'm going to spend tomorrow and possibly Friday cleaning up and organizing our science lab, and writing a page for the teacher handbook on how to use the lab. Nothing elaborate, just simple things like making sure you clean up after yourself. (That's another rant for another time). Guidance asked if I could help administer some skills inventory tests next week to the eighth graders. I've also brought some reading along and, tucked into my bag, some knitting. I may work on a Wiki we have here on our school site, and maybe work on a grant to get some new books for our science library and maybe some iPods for a podcasting idea Mrs. Eagle and I are tossing around.

But I do miss seeing the kids every day. So I tend to be in the hallway when classes switch, because I need my fix. I need to know how they're doing, if things are going okay, if they're having a good day or a bad day, or if they just need a smile.

I guess I'm too much of a mother hen at times.

Mr. T Comes to Town

I have a student teacher.

I wasn't expecting a student teacher - at all - and had agreed to have an observer from The University come and observe. I've had a bunch of observers the past few years so that's pretty much a no-brainer. However, someone at The University apparently can't count and handed off two student teachers to one of our sixth grade science teachers.

We have two new science teachers in eighth grade, and our one senior science teacher up there is probably going out for back surgery soon. So eighth grade was out of the question. The other two sixth grade science teachers were also relatively new (just two years experience), so they weren't an option. That left seventh grade. Mrs. Eagle had a student teacher last year, and Mrs. Robin, with her husband deployed and her two kids being a complete handful, just wasn't up to adding one more thing to her life, so that left me. I'd actually considered taking one in the past, but never pursued it, so I guess now it was my time.

Mr. T just finished student teaching High School Biology and since we are heading off into the cell unit, it's a great time for him to come. He spent today observing and I had him helping do a few things today. So far, so good. His University teacher said he needs work on organization and planning, and since those are two of my strong points he'll be getting a lot of exposure in that area.

Of course, today being a full moon, we had more than our share of drama. First, we had rumors of a girl fight pending, and Mr. Social Studies and I spent some time with kids in the hallway getting to the bottom of it. Mr. Social Studies, by the way, is a master at getting kids to spill their guts to him. It must be his experience in the military as a police officer, but all he has to do is give them a look and they're telling him their life story and confessing to crimes they haven't even thought of yet. He whips out his memo pad, takes down the information, and we turn it over to administration. I ended up giving one of my boys, Puppy Boy, a coupon for a treat at the snack shack for next Friday as he did the right thing by letting us know about the details of the proposed fight, and didn't do the popular thing and keep quiet.

Then we had the 8th grade rumor mill going strong which sent two of my girls from last year down to my room in tears looking for some "mommy time". They came by on their way back from lunch to let me know that one of our boys was in the hospital with meningitis and was going to die or lose a leg or something. Apparently the rumor was spreading like fire and the whole 8th grade was in an uproar. I told them I'd find out what was going on but not to believe anything until an adult told them. They wanted hugs and cried a bit more and then I sent them on their way with tardy slips. Seems that the young man in question simply had a bad case of the flu, went to the hospital because he was so dehydrated, and now was home.

Mr. T asks me if it's always this dramatic in seventh grade. I informed him that it wasn't always, but it being a Friday and a full moon, you just never know.

Like I've always said, I quit watching soap operas when I began to teach middle school because I have all the drama I can stand in my life.

However, it's going to be hard for me to step back and let someone else take charge of my kids, but as Mr. Enforcer said, "It's still your class." This is, most likely, going to be a learning experience for me as well.

And I'm so freaking tired I glad it's Friday.