Miss Bennett in the Bay

One of the coolest new things that I’ve been doing this year in my classroom is writer’s workshop. The kids get to work at their own pace on a piece of writing, and I give mini-lessons on things they should consider while writing. It’s great.

For the first round, we are writing personal narratives based on an emotional experience. As a model, I’m writing a story about a time when my arm got stuck under the bar of a roller coaster car. It’s one of those things that doesn’t happen very often, so imagine my surprise when one of my students started writing a very similar story.

Me: Oh, G, you’re supposed to be writing your own story today, not copying mine.
G: Yes, I know.
Me: Ok, then why are you writing about getting your arm stuck on a roller coaster?
G: That happened to me.
Me: Really? When?
G: When I was five.

Ok, now, I remember being seven years old and saying that random stuff had happened to me when I was five. I think I thought that at the age of seven I was so much older than five that nobody would ever know if what I was saying was true or not, since it was in the distant past. I really, really doubt that this girl had this scenario happen to her when she was five. She probably hadn’t even been on a roller coaster by that point. But she is one of my weaker writers, and so I’m not sure what I can push her to yet. I’m going to let it go for now, but if when we start a new story she copies me again, we’ll be having a serious talk about thinking for yourself. These kids really keep me on my toes.

People around here are saying we are in the midst of an Indian Summer. (Which, according to Wikipedia, is technically incorrect, but nevertheless, it’s been very hot.) Combine that heat with picture day on Friday, and you get some crazy behavior.

I went out to the yard to pick up my kids after lunch. There was a large clump of children at the front of the line, which is unusual for my class this year. I get there, and K is crying. I pull her aside.

Me: What happened?
K: (sob) A said mean things to me!
Me: What did she say?
K: She called me a pig!
Me: A, come over here. What happened?
A: She started it!
Me: I want to know what you did.
A: I said water bottle to her.
Me: (in my head) oooo….kay…
Me: (out loud) K, what happened?
K: She called me a water bottle!
Me: A, say you’re sorry.

WHAT?

You can’t make this stuff up.

I took last Friday off to go to Chicago to visit my grandmother, who had a stroke. (Believe me, we are far from the bliss of mental health days just yet.) I spent a long time on Thursday afternoon getting a lot of things ready for the sub. I was worried, since having a sub this early in the year could be challenging since the kids aren’t even used to my routine yet. Change even one little thing and it’s chaos for the rest of the day.

In my haste, however, I realized that I had forgotten to set out the weekend homework sheet. It’s only one page, front and back, which is not at all unreasonable for a 2-day hiatus from school. I asked Jess if she could take a minute out of her Friday to let my sub know where I keep my copies, and thus, know where to get the weekend homework from.

On Monday, I returned to a classroom full of students complaining about the weekend homework “packet.” They didn’t know how to do it. It was too hard. They didn’t understand. The list goes on. I was still jet-lagged at that point so I couldn’t remember if Jess and I had had a conversation about making our homework packet longer or not. Something told me that I would have remembered such a conversation, but I had the kids turn in their homework as it was.

Then, at lunch, I asked Jess about this homework.

Me: Did we randomly decide to send home a giant packet over the weekend?
Jess: No… Just that one sheet.
Me: Somehow my kids ended up with 6 page packets.
Jess: OH, no. The sub must have thought that he was supposed to send home all your extra worksheets!

What really blows my mind about this is that the sub somehow found the time in the day on Friday to sit down and make those 6 page packets out of my extra copies. No wonder the kids couldn’t finish their homework; I hadn’t taught them how to do it yet.

So much for that. It would have been better if they hadn’t had the homework at all. I sent home a note on Monday explaining the mix-up to families. I push my students hard, but I don’t think they should have to do huge packets over the weekend. They should get to take breaks too.
(more…)

The absolute worst thing about my job, by far, is battling the copy machine. It is my arch-nemesis. I will someday evolve teacher super powers to defeat it. For now, I am left to do the job of a mere mortal.

This morning was no exception. I had all my copies ready for the entire week, except for the homework packet. Because we had 2 short weeks in a row (starting school on a Wednesday last week really threw me off), I just wasn’t organized enough to get that homework done ahead of time. No big deal, I thought to myself. It’s only one packet. Everything else is already ready. I can handle this. I went into the copy room this morning an hour and 15 minutes before school was to start, and was greeted by Jess. She had already started the packets in the machine, so I went to drop my stuff off in my room and grab stuff to laminate. By the time I got back, Jess was on the second set of copies, and left me to wait for the finished copies.

I soon realized there was an imbalance in the universe. The machine seemed to be making an awful lot of copies for the packet we were creating. And, from what I could tell, the order of copies wasn’t quite making sense. Since I was multi-tasking with my other arch-nemesis, the laminator, I didn’t realize the scope of the problem. That is, until another teacher alerted me to the fact that the machine had run out of paper mid-copy. What? I thought. Jess should have left more than enough for this! Back to my room I went, since I didn’t bother to bring any extra paper with me. Silly me. I plopped more paper in the machine and went back to cutting the laminated items. A few minutes later, I was finally able to pull a ginormous pile of papers out of the machine. I flipped through them and realized the severity of the problem. Papers were all out of order, copied on the backs of papers they shouldn’t have been, and some packets were correct and some were not. It was a nightmare, and since Jess wasn’t in the copy room any more, I couldn’t ask her what had caused this madness. I shrugged it off and headed back to my room.

Back in my room (at this point, T minus 45 minutes), I put away the stuff I laminated and realized I left the giant pile of copies in the copy room. I opened up my door to go grab them, and was totally surprised to see G, a student of mine from last year, standing in front of the door absolutely bawling.

Me: Oh, sweetheart, what’s wrong??
G: I’m (sob) a-a-afraid that my dad’s (sob) not gonna pick me up today!
Me (in my head): Your dad picked you up every single day last year without a problem! What’s going on now?
Me (out loud): Well, did you ask him about it this morning?
G (shakes her head mid-sob): My mom dropped me off today!
Me: Well, let’s just go inside and give him a call and make sure he’s coming. (Ushers child into classroom.) Here, just dial the number.
G: (Sob) He changed it! (Sob) I don’t know it!
Me (in my head): Oh, Lord.
Me (out loud): Well, we’ll just go to the office then!

We went to the office, where the secretary was nice enough to call every single phone number listed until she got someone on the phone, who then gave her the new phone number for G’s dad. The secretary got G’s dad on the phone, and then G proceeded to talk to him for another 10 minutes through her tears in Spanish. Meanwhile, I was watching the minutes that I would be able to again battle my arch-nemesis slowly ticking away. By the time the drama was over (G’s dad, by the way, was planning on picking her up the whole time), there was not nearly enough time for me to figure out the copy situation and get the last things ready for the day. I decided the next battle would have to wait until morning recess.

By the time recess rolled around, I couldn’t wait to get my hands dirty in round two of this battle. Unfortunately, though, when I got to the copy room, a kindergarten teacher was using both machines. She said she’d be done in about 10 minutes, which would again leave insufficient time to finish the battle. Foiled again…

Lunch. Surely, at lunch I would be able to put this away once and for all. At first, everything seemed fine. The copies were collating and stapling properly. But then, a flicker of the lights should have warned me that my arch-nemesis had more in store for me. Suddenly, out of nowhere, BBBBBEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOPPPPPPPP! The power went out!

I banged my head against the wall. I stood in total darkness for a couple of minutes, hoping that if I just waited long enough this would all turn out to be a nightmare. Luckily, the lights came back on. I counted how many copies I had, and realized I only needed two more. The copier, realizing it had been defeated, finally relented and gave me what I wanted.

Or so I thought! At the end of the day, I was somehow one packet short. I considered giving away my master copy, but I had kids absent today and I wouldn’t be able to make new ones for them. So, the kid without a packet waited outside after school while I made one more packet for her. For good measure, I made 10 extra copies, just in case tomorrow the copier calls in a favor with mother nature and there is an earthquake or something. At least I will have enough homework packets!