Where “he” is The Child, and the time is right after I have poked and prodded him to do his practice drills. I’d hoped for a relaxing return to work after two days out sick, but that was not what my students saw fit to toss at me. Glad to see me and profoundly curious as to why I’d been gone, I spent the entire day involved in one kind of scheme or another. With such a volume of incidents to choose from (and so little time to write about them), I would normally Quick Quips this. But a lot of what happened was situational and so doesn’t lend itself readily to Quips, quick or otherwise.
So, as of today, we have a new style of posting. I’m calling them the: “I Can’t Exactly Choose, Raccoon Enjoy All Memories”. “Raccoon” doesn’t have any significance, I just wanted the acronym to spell “ice cream” and I couldn’t think of what to do with the “R”.
So, here we go. ICE CREAM:
~ I showed my first year students Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal and was rewarded with love and adoration because we like him that much. I have no idea what cosmic forces of the universe came together to inspire such a rabid devotion to a man that they didn’t even know about this time last year (I suppose his death has something to do with this), but I do not question the phenomenon. I just find more videos for them to watch.
~ As I briefly mentioned above, The Child was in rare form on Wednesday. The students were supposed to go through a series of exercises in one of their drill books, and he wanted to copy the answers down from the answer key. After feigning complacency so that he’d put the answer key on top of his desk, I stole it and then prompted, prodded, bullied, nagged, flattered and bribed him until he actually tried the exercises himself.
It was probably one of the more glorious battles we’ve ever had, but that was because I knew that I could win so I was willing to pull out all the stops to get him to do his work. The Child has a variety of moods – sometimes he tells me that he doesn’t want to work and he really means it (and God Help Me if I try to change his mind), and sometimes (like yesterday) he says that he doesn’t want to work and what he really wants is attention. My victory was so fantastically thorough that he worked on all of his assignments until the end of the period. I was gifted with the title of Mighty Teacher just as the bell rang. I don’t intend to let him forget this – it could very well be leverage for our next encounter.
~ I had to give a speaking check to my third years during fourth period. We were working in an empty classroom, and one student came in and actually asked me to extend his speaking check so that we could chat. I suspect that part of this may have been thanks to the test that he was taking with the other third years. Still, whatever the reason, it was a most interesting chat and I had fun with it. I’d actually like to make him a character, so we’ll go ahead and call him Obama for now (because it sounds kind of like his last name). Obama is a funny guy – I’ll be sure to properly introduce him at a later time.
~Right before lunch I went to talk to Mary Sunshine and The Savant came up and snarked at me. I snarked back, and although I can’t remember for the life of me what was said, at the time it was absolutely hilarious and (if memory serves me correctly) eventually degenerated into both of us just shouting “OKAY” at each other.
~ With the powers of my laugh alone, I reduced my lunch table to a mass of giggling hysteria. That was entertaining.
~ My sixth years from the elementary schools came by today for a two-hour orientation about middle school life. I had a lot of work to do, but decided to attend the first half of the meeting so that they could see me and feel (perhaps) slightly comforted by a familiar face. I think that it worked – a number of them came up to chat and ask how my winter vacation was. I was particularly amused by how they took the opportunity during breaks to scout out the school. Some of them have never been to the middle school before and after six years at the same elementary school, they were ravenously curious about this new building. Sixth graders in the middle school setting always remind me of a bunch of puppy dogs.
~ And last but not least, one of my memories from yesterday is total dread because I have about 32 letters to write between now and 12:15 on Friday. It is going to take some divine intervention to make this happen.
It’s a new world, it’s a new start
It’s alive with the beating of a young heart
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