-New Year, new class, new stories…

After one student was told he had to miss some recess because he was giggling and bouncing around on the carpet, he asked for a chance to explain. His justification for the disruptive scene?

“Ricky and Vanessa told me there was a booger on the rug.”

–The class was working with the number 65 and trying to think of all the ways we could show that number, a student asked me if I was 65. Years old. It’s normal for a teacher to help a student reason and rethink, and to support all efforts at creativity. But I gave him a cool stare and responded with a short “No.”

–While playing a spelling game, I was trying a little too hard to enunciate the spelling word, a little spit flew right out of my mouth. (So embarrassing for all involved.) It landed right on the cheek of the kid next to me, who was clearly startled and digusted. But at the same time, determined. He didn’t hesitate as he spelled the entire word with his eyes shut, wiping the spit away.

–There’s a lady who works in the front office named Ms. Peek. I never realized how much my name sounds like hers until they announced her birthday over the PA. “Wish Ms. Peek a Happy Birthday today!” Half my class obediently responded, “Happy Birthday” while looking at me with a collective expression of “You didn’t tell us it was your birthday.”

As the day continued, I got about 20 more birthday wishes…many from kids I’ve never taught.

–I have a fairly strong vein of dishonesty from students this year.

Exhibit A: Harrison had blue markings on his jeans, obviously from crayons. When asked if he had colored himself that day, he said no, he did that at home. After another student presented me with broken crayons the exact color and length of the marks on his jeans, he still denied.

Exhibit B: Darnell often tries to tell me about his brothers. (He’s an only child.)

Me: ” What’s your big brother’s name?”

D: ” Big Boy.”

Me: “That would be a nickname. What’s his real name?”

D: “Martin.

Me: “What about your little brother?”

D: “Tiny.”

Me: “And what’s his real name?”

D: “________. Martin?”

Exhibit C: Any conversation where Al is asked to confirm or deny some accusation.

Me: “Did you kick Kim?”

A: “No, I was just walking.”

Me: “How?”

A: “Like this.” Shows how he kicked his legs up with each step.

or….

Me: “Did you hit John?”

A: “No, I was just walking. With my eyes closed.”

Me: “But did you hit him with your hand?”

A:” I was walking with my eyes closed doing this- ” (swings arms out and upward.)

–As Dan ran into class from the library, sort of making a noise like an excited puppy, I asked him to go out and try it again. The second time he was composed and calm. “Now that’s how a gentleman wal-” I was interrupted as he belched loudly.

–During a conversation with a parent, I got off the phone to let her talk with her son. Needless to say, I don’t interrupt the day to call a parent unless I have reached The Point. I often sound more upset that I intend to when I reach The Point.

When the student handed the phone back to me, I politely, casually said, “Hello?”

She asked, “How are you today?”

So I made a valient effort to compose myself and say that even though we’d made some bad choices, we were going to hopefully make a change for the better, thanks for asking, I had tried several other methods that day and none of them had worked, and I really appreciate her talking to him, he seems calmer now..”

Pause. “Is this still the teacher?”

Somehow I had been transferred back to the receptionist.

–Somewhere in the book of Early Education Etiquette, when a child is being silly, leaning over to look under his desk, or perhaps seeing how well he can balance sitting on one foot, or thinking they are stealth enough to have a conversation with another student without the teacher noticing, and the said child falls completely out of the chair, looking incredibly silly, SOMEWHERE, it says that the child must jump up and say, “I’m okay!” much louder than he meant to.
And everyone tries to watch while not appearing to be watching. We also try very hard not to laugh because the students don’t want to flip behavior cards and the teacher doesn’t want to be a jerk. This period of silence lasts….really, as long as the teacher allows it to before providing a distraction.

–Once when this happened, the painful silence was broken by my little cheer leader of a student, whose small voice piped up, “At least you didn’t fall on your pencil.”

–Finally… this is so, so bad. Just BAD….

I was walking in the freshly waxed hallway, leading my little line, all confident as I guide them through the halls..and one might argue through life…when my boot heel hit the floor a little farther left than it was supposed to. I felt that stomach dropping feeling as my center of gravity was thrown off, and flailed my arms out ever so slightly (The Etiquette requires that I try at all odds NOT to fall, since I am a teacher and CANNOT be laughed at).

I did catch hold of the Line Leader….her PONYTAIL. I was about to fall and I took hold of the first thing I could find to break my fall- some innocent girl’s cute little innocent PONYTAIL. I felt instant hope clash with horror as my brain processed what my hand had grabbed hold of…

Thankfully, I managed to right myself before taking both of us down. But not before a fellow teacher saw the whole thing happen with a look of total horror. (And she even made a comment about it. Second graders know more about Etiquette than your own colleagues sometimes.)

Hello, Friends. I do realize that this blog has been completely forsaken, so I’m going to tell the only things I have to tell…which are more classroom anecdotes. Consider this your fair warning if you’re tired of them- that’s all you’ll find here. =)
Disclaimer done. Here we go.

Last week, a child, whom we’ll call Princess,raised her hand to inform me that someone had left mean notes in her desk. One said “Ugly Princess” and one said “you are stuped”. Oh, and one of them was signed, “From Lily.”

Now, not only is Lily not quite dim enough to sign her own name to a mean note, but she also knows how to spell.

So I take a quick handwriting sample from the class. (By the way, did you know stupid is a curse word? When I asked them to write down ” you are stupid,” they looked at me as if I’d asked them to eat a talking baby rabbit.)

The sample narrowed it down to three suspects. One of whom was Princess, who gave me a sample that read “ulgly” and “stoopit”

To which I was enlightened for the first time to the depths of her street smarts. Her spelling isn’t that bad. Substituting an e for an i is one thing…

I’ll spare you the full TEN MINUTE INTERROGATION that followed. Here’s the highlights.

Me: “Princess, did you write these notes to yourself?”
P: “No.”
Me:”Are you sure?”
P:”I wouldn’t try to frame someone.”

(Mental Me: CAUGHT YOU!)

Me: “Okay…see, that makes me think you did.”
P: “I didn’t.”
Me: “Right…let me show you this. Do you see how you spelled stupid? Well, the person who wrote the note didn’t spell it this way. I think you spelled it really wrong on purpose.”

P:”Did the person spell ugly the same way I did?”

(YOU’RE REALLY IN IT NOW! I KNOW IT!.. but HOW to convince you that I know it?)

Me: “Actually, no. But it sure looks like they added that extra l in ulgly, doesn’t it? Maybe they added it quickly after they wrote the word? Maybe to try to trick me? ”
P:” __________”

(This is old. Moving in for it.)

Me:” You know what really makes me think you did it?”
P: “____________”

Me:” If someone wrote a mean note to me, I’d be crying. And if my teacher thought I did it.. but it wasn’t me…I’d be so incredibly sad. But you. You seem more scared that you’re getting caught.”

As I’m speaking, Princess is really working to squeeze out some tears. I’m not sure what she was thinking of. But it was very, very sad.

To conclude the story, she finally confessed THE NEXT DAY after I asked her about it once every hour. (Applying the Biblical principle of repeatedly asking for something until the person is worn down and you get it.)

Other shorter stories:

After trying to explain who our Ast. Principal is, I had to refer to her outfit before they realized who I was talking about. Which led to a discussion/comparison of her outfit to my outfit.

“Okay, wait, do you want to talk about my outfit, or do you want to hear the compliment our Ast. Principal gave you?”

Of course they chose compliment. After going on for about five minutes to pass on the aforementioned compliment, Ed raised his hand.

“Now can we talk about your outfit?”

This one’s so sad, I’m not sure I should post it. But one day, there was a STENCH in the classroom. I thought one of the boys had a major after lunch moment. Half the class was experiencing a gag reflex.
Hoping it would clear itself- or the mystery child would air him/herself out on the playground, we headed out for recess.

AFTER OUR 20 MINUTE RECESS, as we’re heading in to art, one boy ran up to me and confessed that he’d pooped in his pants.

I guess recess really does beat out just about anything….including comfort and hygiene. (It turns out he was getting over a stomach virus. Poor, self-neglecting kid.)

Trying to get the kids thinking about impossible (for our grade, since we don’t quite do negatives) math problems, I asked, “If I had five dollars and Bill asked me for 7 dollars, then…”
Student pipes up, “Then you’d be broke.”

This crazy day began after praying and hoping I would wake up and get to school early to get the week started off well. I was proud of myself when I rolled into the school at 7:20- ten whole minutes early. Excellent for Monday morning.
I had a long mental list of things to do and was feeling like I may get them all done in the 20 minutes I had before the students arrived- and then I saw the fish tank.

King has passed. And let it suffice to say- it was very obvious very quickly that he was very dead.

Thus, a major shift in priorities as instead of making homework packets and centers, I realized I had to get rid of the body before the kids saw and were even more traumatized.

So I grabbed the bowl and ran into the teacher’s bathroom. I took the plastic plant out (ew, ew) and tried to ….pour him….. out into the toilet. The only thing that fell out was a large plastic rock.

First things first. I weighed the option of calling the custodian, but I thought by the time I explained and asked for some kind of scoop or something, too much precious time would have passed. Plus, he would have made fun of me the rest of the year.

I did notice that the water was very bubbly….he’d obviously just cleaned the toilets- the one lucky break in this story- so I rolled up my sleeve and went for it before I could change my germophobic mind.

Plumbing issue avoided. Back to the fish.

The water level in the fishbowl was too low and King sank in between the other plastic rocks. There was no way to pour him out without all the rocks falling out with him. So I did the logical thing and grabbed a handful of paper towels, put them on the floor in a heap and dumped all the remaining contents. I then attempted to cut off all synapse connections as I plucked the plastic rocks away from the discolored bit of flesh until only the fish lay stiffly on the now soaked paper towels.

With only minutes remaining, I picked up the dripping mess, dumped the fish, flushed, tried to sop up the small lake I had formed on the floor, sprayed some sort of antiseptic around the entire room, and washed my hands with as much soap as seemed reasonable given the circumstances.

I then ran back to the classroom, hid the bowl, and decided to wait until the right moment to break the news.

Only the thing is, I had two conferences today and in the sprint to prepare for those, forgot to mention it. “It” being the permanent loss of class mascot and continuous writing inspiration.

I’ll let you know if they don’t take the news so well…

And yet some more…

When I asked Vaughn if his parents signed his permission form to be in the school play, I got a small insight into their family.
“My dad said I can’t do it.”
“Oh, okay.”
“But my mom said she wants me to.”
“Oh.”
“My mama told me that she’d be mad at him if he don’t let me. She said I’m a play-actor!”
“Ah.”

One of the student’s mothers told me she walked by her son who was standing at attention. When asked what he was doing, he told her he was practicing for the holiday performance. He explained that he had to practice standing for a very long time.
I knew we were drilling too much during those rehearsals.

The kids participate in this computerized reading program where they’re always asking me to look up their scores and points. It takes forever to pull up a student’s information because you have to open all these windows and click on numerous icons. So imagine what it was like when I was looking up one student’s particular score and she stood over my shoulder and narrarated the entire time.
“Yes, now click that…very good, okay…right go over there…no, yes, i meant there….yup, click that…very good…yes, I was going to say to click right there..”
The only thing is that she was about two beats behind the whole time. Kinda like the delay at a football stadium when the referee is talking.

Sometimes I turn around and trip over a student who has been standing there the past five minutes. They don’t even try to get my attention by actually saying something. This was the case yesterday when I turned and was a little startled because Jen was standing at ready with an uncapped glue stick aimed right towards my nose. She also had a positively thrilled look on her face.
“Mrs. Teague! It smells like cheerios!”
And dadgum, it did.

As part of our Elected Officials lesson, the students were told to describe the characteristics of a good leader. One group (made entirely of girls) decided a princess made a perfect kind of leader. Her desirable characteristic? “Pretty.”
Then they illustrated the life sized drawing (yes, a kid laid down on butcher paper and was outlined. Oldie but goodie.)
I noticed the shirt was about a foot away from the skirt.
“Ladies, that shirt seems a little short.”
“Oh, it’s okay, we’re going to draw a belly button.”

Minutes before dismissal, a cell phone went off in class. Yup, a CELL PHONE. I was ready to pounce on someone but everyone seemed shocked. When I narrowed it down to one of two possible bookbags, both girls were white-faced. Finally finding the guilty bookbag, I pulled out a pink phone from Lynn’s bag. She was horrified and said her mom must have put it in there.
A story which may be valid because when it rang again and I answered it her mother thought mistook me for Lynn and started talking to me. In Spanish.
I had to get a bilinguil student on the phone to explain that Lynn can’t have a cell phone in school. (This was interesting because as always when 2nd graders translate, there’s a lot of “what did you tell me to say?”)

And my current favorite:
Remember the anti-social student who asked what color the man was? (see Part 1)
Unfortunately, he slipped into a spiral of being even more anti-social. To the point where he couldn’t even be bribed to work with a partner. He wrote notes to me requesting that he work alone. He preferred to nod or shake his head as communication. He never talked louder than a hoarse whisper. The other students are patient and understanding, but have learned not to expect very much- verbally- from him.
That’s all backstory, all of it.

Then yesterday…
The drama club was having an open casting call for the spring play. I explained that if they couldn’t stand up on their chair and shout out, “Welcome to our show, everyone!” then they may want to try out next year. Cruel, it seems. I know. Some of the kids were able and willing, some realized they were shy and changed their mind about trying out.

Guess who raised his hand?
“Oh..hmm..honey, do you think you stand on your chair and-”

As I was still talking, he climbed right up and let his line ring out in a strong, clear voice, “Hey everyone! And welcome to our show!!”

There was a silence. The room tilted as my brain tried to process what had just happened. My mouth was still open when the classroom spontaneously and unanimously burst into applause. (I think, though I’m not certain, someone even shouted “Bravo”)

My very own Dead Poets’ Society. I have arrived.