Fun Lunch

Very Important Lesson #1 (for all of you future interns out there):

You want the students to like you, right?  It doesn't matter.  Do not promise anything to your students (good or bad) that you cannot follow through on.  I'm talking about consequences and rewards.

Yesterday the school gave us (my lead teacher and me) six free passes to a school fundraiser at a local rollerskating rink.  Keep in mind that we have thirty students and I have a bleeding heart for each one of them and 80% of our school population comes from low socio-economic backgrounds.  How is that fair?  Anyway, I had to choose six kids but, I love all thirty and couldn't decide.  I decided to play a fair game of "Eny Meny Miny Moe" to choose the six because it just wouldn't be right to simply hand them to six kids who had a good day (that sounds wrong, but they all have bad/good days sometimes!).  Well, the game didn't go so well and we had kids flipping desks, bawling their eyes out, and pouting at their desks.... Not what I expected!

What did I do then?  I offered them a fun lunch, of course.  A fun lunch (I was making it up as I went) is where you get to have your lunch with the teacher (me, duh, because I'm cool) and watch something cool/not exactly what the school would deem "educational."  To qualify for this fun lunch, you had to be a good sport about not getting a pass.  Some kids were like, "I'll be fine, I have my own allowance!" and others were freaking out like the world would end earlier than December 21st.  

Did I look at the school lunch menu before making that promise?  Did I ask my lead teacher if it was okay?  Did I find out if they could even take lunch out of the cafeteria (maybe a strange thing to wonder, but I guess with Title I schools there are some rules about free/reduced lunch)?  Did I plan ahead and pick out something to watch during Fun Lunch before this morning?  Did I think about whether I'd actually want to spend an additional 45 minutes with them in the event that we had a bad day?  The answer to all of those questions: No.  

Luckily, after talking this morning to my lead teacher, she was all for it and helped me get permission from the cafeteria and track down a "special" garbage bag from the friendly janitor.  Then, while my lead teacher was talking to the students this morning, I polled them and asked what they like to watch at home and found some "Funniest Animals" Animal Planet video on Netflix (thank goodness that worked on the district computer, nothing else does!) based on their requests.  Luckily, pulling Fun Lunch together last minute was easy.

Then I saw what they were bringing into the classroom for lunch.

Remember how in elementary school you'd get at least one or two nasty lunches every once in a while?  They smelled like baby poop and looked like grey/off-white slop?  Unfortunately for me, they had my least favorite school lunch EVER; turkey/gravy/mashed potatoes.  It stank up the room and it is almost unbearable, even as I type!  What was ironic was that they were saying that my food smelled bad and was "so stinky" (it was a delicious vermicelli noodle-shrimp-red pepper-garlic-curry-stirfry thing from Tastier Than Takeout).  Basically, what I'm trying to say is that it was my nightmare lunch...  Once the first student walked in, I had visions of "gravy" all over every desk, rubbed into the brand new rug (circle time), smeared on the walls... Although I'm exaggerating, reality wasn't too different from my vision of gravy terror.

The "special" garbage bag had a hole somewhere and of course, being the genius that I am, I let it sit on the doormat while students tossed their half-full milks and trays of mush (apparently, they aren't fans of turkey+gravy+wannabe-potatoes, either!).  There were not enough paper towels in the world to clean up the spilt milk because the rug was being stubborn and absorbing the milk instead of letting the crappy paper towels sop it up!  

Aside from all of that, though, I really liked having the students eat lunch with me.  We all laughed at the silly animals and ate together and I was sad when it was time for them to go to gym (which they call "PE" here and if you refer to it as "gym" they look at you incredulously and say, "HUH?!").  I think we all felt appreciated by one another and I wish I had more time in the classroom so we could do it again!

I havae a ErasRe in my malpfe. Srooy"!

Today marks the beginning of my fourth week in my general education placement!  This is the week before "mid-point" since there 10 weeks in each placement (special education and general) and there are a lot of assignments that I'm working on.  I have to put up 2 bulletin boards, create a substitute binder, write about three classroom procedures/routines.  There is probably more that I'm forgetting, but oh well!  Maybe next time!  In the last week I recently picked up Math along with Shared Reading and Read-Alouds.

Math is not so bad, but I haven't quite mastered think-alouds to my lead teacher's liking.  She usually interrupts my lesson (before I've even moved on!) and will provide more examples.   Sometimes this is annoying, but honestly I've thought about it and I'm just being grumpy- obviously she knows what the kids need and I'm learning!  We teach math out of a Houghton Mifflan book- chapter by chapter (we also teach reading/phonics with Houghton Mifflan...).  The kids seem to get it, mostly.  There are of course, some obvious strugglers, but they receive extra help from aides and the teacher.

Shared Reading is this daily activity where the kids sit on the carpet and learn a song, poem, or read a big book.  They come with pre-made lessons that create goals like learning how to question the author, making inferences, and using pictures or headings to interpret the text.  It's not bad and the kids like the songs.  We usually do read-alouds first thing in the morning, so they're either really interested, or, really NOT!  

For Read-alouds, we have to select books from a list of "mentor texts" which are boring and terrible books pre-selected by some "expert" in the district because they model certain styles or genres of writing (example: personal narrative, descriptive writing, etc.).  So far the worst book that I've read was My Mother Has a Dancing Heart by Libba Moore Gray....LAME!!!!  Sorry, it could be the best children's book ever, but in my opinion it was the most terrible book I had ever read ("it has rhythm," my lead teacher said).  They really like authors like Donald Crews, Cynthia Rylant, and others are frequent flyers of this "mentor text" thing.  If I can't be interested, how could the kids possibly love this stuff- FYI they hated that book, too. 

*In case you were wondering, the title of this entry was determined by a letter a student wrote to their mother after my lead teacher caught him chewing a pencil eraser.  Gross!  

**Another gross thing:  another kid can almost move his front tooth a full 360 degrees!  It creeped me out!!!

Laughable Moments

My teacher was trying to get everyone lined up (there are 30 kids in our class and it's the second day, so it's rough) and was becoming frustrated with the kids because they were chatting and not following the line-up "rules."  She was saying something along the lines of, "I will take the quiet students to [wherever we were going]" and had tried making several similar statements.  One student walked up to her and said, "Mrs. ____, tomorrow I'm going to play soccer."

During a task titled "self-portraits," my teacher was modeling how to draw and what features are important for a self-portrait.  She had drawn an oval to represent her face (connected to a neck/shoulders) and asked, "what else do you think is important for a self-portrait?"  I'm sure she was looking for answers like, "eyes!" "lips!" "nose!" or whatever, but instead, the students were shouting things like, "pupils!" "a collar for your shirt!" and "a hair clip!"

Moments like these make it hard for me to keep my giggling to a minimum.