Yahweh is strong, Yahweh is right, Yahweh is mine tonight

Teaching social studies has been an interesting experience. Mind you, I failed almost every history course I took in college, so please don't ask me why that makes me a "highly qualified teacher" in this subject. The logic makes my brain hurt.

 This week, I stopped pretending the Diaspora Acrostic Poems I was supposed to grade were invisible and actually took a look at them. Thankfully, Ashley's poem saved me from crying, but not in the way you'd expect...

 Let me back up a bit and discuss why these poems might bring me to tears. The differences between Judaism and Christianity elude most middle-school students so I've tried to be very clear about how they're different. Jesus Christ does not figure prominently in Judaism. Drawing a Menorah or a dreidel or the Star of David to represent Judaism is fine. Crucifixes are not. To be fair, only one student ignored this and drew artful crosses all over his work. However, if I see one more Bible or Jesus-fish or Holy Grail, I'm going to scream.

 Ashley's poem provided some much-needed levity. The students had to include the four central beliefs of Judaism, including Monotheism (the belief in one God). Ashley's line about Monotheism was "All-powerful and all-knowing single God with Monotheism to prevent one person from having all the power." The spirit of Billy Mays stirred in my soul...and spoke: "All-Powerful Yahweh! Now with more Monotheism (tm)! Prevents stubborn stains to your history! Be sure to look for quality Yahweh products at your local fine retailer! Remember: it's Yahweh or the highway!"

 I need to learn not to grade at the brewery. Snarfing beer up my nose is too painful.

Wait a few minutes, I'll fart for you too.

It's time for the science fair. Trevor and Hector caught me on the way to the copy room after school, asking for a copy of the procedure-writing tips page.

As a middle school teacher, I've learned the fine art of when to be stern and when to be a goofball. Trevor and Hector's class had been particularly unruly the last couple of weeks, so I was more than a little tired of being Mrs. Grumptastic. And, as the two boys trailed behind me in the empty hall, I seized the opportunity. With skill honed during many a frat party, I relaxed my esophagus and released a long, reverberating belch that would have brought down the walls of Jericho itself.

The enthusiastic chatter behind me crumbled into shocked silence. After a few seconds, Trevor almost whispered, "Mrs. W, was that you?"

I shot Trevor a sly glance and responded, "Yeah."

His awestruck response: "That....was awesome!"

Why You Teach Speech

Welcome back to school! It's September: I hope you brought your supplies with you and do NOT ever ask me if you need a pencil for class today. I will bite you and, as Mrs. Skapinsken proved last year in her science classroom, the mouth of a teacher has more germs in it than a school toilet (no really, I'm serious: she proved this by growing bacterial cultures from swabs). Don't make me do something you'll regret.

The beginning of the school year usually involves a barrage of basic skills tests for the students. Math teachers test for basic skills such as multi-digit multiplication and long division, language arts teachers test for parts of speech and paragraph organization, that sort of thing. Things look promising this year from my point of view: most of my kids only took a couple of days to finish a 25 question basic math skills test and did fairly well. In comparison, many of my kids last year had problems calculating 14 - 8 and took 5 days to finish the same 25 question test. I wanted to stab myself in the eye repeatedly with a white board marker.

My team teacher, Dina came into my classroom giggling at break today. She'd given our kids a parts of speech test to see what they knew. Some of the parts of speech were pretty easy (noun, verb) and some were a little more difficult (like participle). To be fair, I don't even know what a participle is, and I wouldn't recognize a dangling participle if it fell off the sentence, or whatever it is they do.....

Here are some of the responses she shared with me:

Infinitive- "The number of nouns and verbs a sentence can have."
Verb- "A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y."
Preposition- "Another word for a bargain or deal."

I'm glad she's amused: it will help her next week when she feels like crying after reading their first essay.

Paradox

(ok, ok....I know it's been a while)

Connor came in to get some math help during lunch today. I'm pretty proud of that boy: he started off this year failing because he couldn't get organized, had no idea how to do the math....and now, he's trying to raise his B to an A. Good kid.

Anyways, as he was leaving the room to put his lunch away, he said to me "You know Mrs. W, I like working with you. You're my favorite teacher because you give us the least amount of homework. Or the most. I'm not sure which."

I didn't teach him that....

We were studying Athenian democracy in social studies the other day. The book made the following statement: "Only free men could vote in an Athenian democracy."

"What does that mean, 'Only free men could vote'?" I asked the class.

Michael raised his hand. "Does that mean that married men weren't allowed to vote?"

Science Instruction Fail

Missy chased me down one day as I was walking back from the copy room.

"Mrs. W! I have to talk to you!"

"What do you need, Missy?"

A look of frustration crosses Missy's face. "Well, I caught a snail the other day and it just won't do anything!"

Let me start this story by filling you in on a few things. We'd studied snails a few weeks back and the interest level in them was surprisingly high. I guess it makes sense in hindsight: they are kind of cute when you get to know their personalities better (yes, they do have personalities. Mojo, for example, refused to eat carrots, even if he hadn't been fed for a couple of days and that was all you gave him). After we'd studied snail preferences for a week, the students designed a terrarium for them and we filled it with all the things they seemed to prefer, such as dirt, rocks, sticks, and the vegetables they preferred most.

The kids forgot about the snails for a little while, but interest in them really exploded when they started breeding. We found little egg clutches buried in the dirt, which soon became droves of baby snails. The babies could unfortunately fit through the mesh of the cage top and pretty soon were cruising throughout the room and out the door. They found one on the underside of a chair in a room 50 feet away from mine. The students have been pretty good about catching the escapees when they find them and returning them to their home, but we finally had a baby snail adoption day last week to help with our baby snail overpopulation problem.

Back to Missy: she apparently had a snail issue she wanted me to help solve. I'm not exactly an expert (I know they're gastropods, they have a strong preference for cucumbers and they taste good in butter) and I'm not used to doing tech support on a snail, but I'd do what I could.

"What do you mean 'It won't do anything'?" I asked her.

"It won't go," she replied.

Great. That was vague. "Ooook. Well, they tend to be more active at night. Have you checked then?

"Yeah, it doesn't do anything then too."

"Are you misting it frequently so he doesn't go into estivation?" (The kids learned that snails go into a form of hibernation when they get too dry)

Now Missy looks really frustrated. "Yeah, I'm doing all that stuff! I'm misting it, I gave it some lettuce and cucumbers, I put dirt in the cage for the eggs, but it won't do anything!"

Eggs.....? "Wait, are you trying to breed your snail?"

I can tell from Missy's relieved expression that I've hit the jackpot. "Yes! My little brother wants a baby snail but I can't get the snail to lay any eggs!"

"You said you had A snail. You do realize it takes two snails to make a baby snail, right?"

Missy looks at me, dumbfounded, for several moments. "Oh. Never mind."

How do grades work again?

Shelli flounces up to my desk one afternoon, obviously upset.

"I have to talk to you about my grade," she huffs at me.

"Ok, what's up?" I reply.

"It says I have a zero for one of my tests."

"Yes." I say, waiting patiently.

At this, Shelli stamps her foot (stamps her foot!) and heaves an explosive sigh. "So I don't understand how I can have a zero on a test I didn't even take!"

I look at Shelli for a second.

Or two.

"You want to rethink that statement for a little while and get back to me?"

Now THAT'S dedication!

We've been studying flowers (pollination and all that) in class and let me tell you, it's been hell on the allergies. Remind me next year not to pick flowers with so much pollen. Unfortunately, it caused more serious reactions than just a few sneezes and stuffy noses.

They actually had to call 911 for one of my girls (she's ok now).

We'd been handling the flowers for about 15 minutes when Anna comes up to my desk, huffing and puffing like a five-pack-a-day smoker.

"Can I go to the office?" she wheezes at me.

Of course I'm going to let her go to the office: the girl's got something seriously wrong with her. 20 minutes pass. Then I get a phone call.

"Can you send down Anna's stuff to the office? Her mom's coming to pick her up."

Like wildfire, word passes around the school that there's an ambulance in the parking lot (how the hell does word pass that fast when everyone's in class?). Sure enough, it's for poor Anna, who's still wheezing in the office. But despite her sure-to-be-impending-demise due to a pollen allergy, she manages to convince her mother that she needs to get her homework before she leaves school.

So mom drops Anna off at her locker and stops by the language arts teacher to get the homework. How could she know that Anna would go charging back in my classroom to get the math homework?

I turn around (I'm standing 2 feet away from a large bouquet of flowers, mind you) and there's Anna, gasping something about the math homework. It takes a moment for me to realize just who I'm looking at and why I shouldn't be.

Aw, shit....

At this point, mom realizes where Anna is. She rushes in to my room and starts dragging Anna out of the room by her arm. Anna, who I would swear had barely enough air to stand, drags mom back into my room, whistling angrily the whole way about the math homework like a deranged tea kettle! Finally, I manage to lead Anna out into the hall (as the dispenser of math homework, she has to follow me) and explain to her that she has to stay in the hall: I will happily bring her the math homework if she will just keep breathing until I get back.

Thus, with the math homework in hand, Anna triumphantly leads a weary mom back down the hall and out of the school. I really think that girl would have killed herself to get that assignment.

Now that is true dedication.

Sarcasm

Do you ever remember using a pencil in school? So why do they keep asking me if they need to have one?

It was Michael today. ""Mrs. W, do we need a pencil for this?"

"No," I replied. "If you have a thumbtack, you can always write it in blood."

He looked at me suspiciously for a moment. "You're being sarcastic, aren't you?"

It only counts as sarcasm if you were joking.

Epiphany

We were discussing the speed of sound in math today. My students were having problems with the idea that sound had a speed (after all, sound is pretty fast and it seems like, when you say something, the other person hears it instantaneously). So I used the example of thunder. Most people know that, the longer it takes for you to hear the thunder after a flash of lightning, the farther away the storm. Sound travels at around 750 miles per hour (light is significantly faster, at around 180,000 miles per second), so each 5 seconds or so between the flash and the crash translates to one mile away.

One of my boys appeared to wake up at that moment. "Wait a minute! You mean thunder is the sound of lightning?"

It never occurred to me that some of them hadn't made that connection. "Well, yes."

He looked at me stunned for a second or so (meaning his thoughts were 0.2 miles away), then said. "Huh. I never knew that."

Motivations

Motivation can often be hard for a teacher. Abstract concepts like letter grades often slip right past most students. They understand much more concrete motivators, like "If I don't see an A, B or C, you don't see your PS3 until I do". Thankfully, most parents come through wonderfully with concrete motivators to match our abstract ones. Occasionally, however, other motivators need to be found. Sometimes it's even the child that hopefully motivates the parent to do something.

Take, for example, this conversation I had today with Andrea:

"Andrea," I said, "you haven't done anything in the last 2 weeks. If you don't make up the work soon, you'll end up failing this trimester too and you might have to be a 6th grader again next year."

"I don't care. I'll just learn the same things again." Andrea continues to doodle in her notebook.

"You don't mind being a 6th grader again? But you won't be able to talk to any of your friends."

"I'll see them after school."

(long pause) "Once you get kept back, you usually don't get caught back up again. You probably won't even graduate high school with your friends. They'll be talking about jobs and cars and you'll still be stuck in school."

"Oh, I'm not graduating."

I'm confused now. "But what are you planning to do when you grow up? Most jobs want a high school diploma."

"I'm not going to do anything". Andrea continues to doodle.

(very long pause now. Apparently only one of us has thought this plan through to its logical conclusion) "You need food to eat and a place to live. You want a car? (Andrea nods) Well, that all takes money. How will you get what you want without a job to pay for it?"

"I'm going to live with my mom."

"Until when? 20? (Andrea nods) 30? (Andrea nods) 40? (Andrea nods) You know, your mom probably won't let you live with her when your 40. Most parents expect their children to move out when they're not going to school."

Andrea shakes her head. "No, my mom will let me live with her. She can pay for everything."

(very)

(long)

(pause)

................. and then I walked away.

No matter what Andrea says, I'm pretty sure mom won't be happy with Andrea's "mommie will support me" plan for life. And I sent her an e-mail detailing this conversation, just to be sure.

Substituting Videos

So I was out of town from Thursday until Saturday, helping out at a new teacher retreat. Our local union every year pays for 15-20 new teachers to spend 3 days at a secluded location and they learn techniques about classroom management, dealing with trouble parents, managing stress, planning for retirement, that sort of stuff. Along the way, they get to bond and talk about how they're feeling doing, etc. It's a great opportunity to shake off the stress of the year and realize that everyone else hates their job at this time of the year about as much as you do.

Since we left Thursday night, I needed a sub for Friday. I figured my social studies kids could watch a movie on something they were studying or had studied. Since I had a new mummy video and we had studied Egypt, I thought maybe I would show that.

But I'm no dummy. Remember the pornographic Pompeii video I mentioned in an earlier post? I never show any movie without previewing it first. In this case, I'm glad I did: the movie was waaaay not appropriate for 6th graders (there goes another 15 dollars down the drain, sigh). In the video, they mummify a corpse. Amongst other things, they show the doctors ramming a hook into the corpse's nose, scrambling the brains, and allowing the resulting mess to leak out the nose. I was grossed out, and I usually like gross things. Way over the top.

So I found a video online on the silk road, which we're studying now. I left careful directions for the sub on how and where to find the movie on my computer desktop, what video player to use, and anything else I thought could go wrong.

The one thing I forgot to do was take the mummy video out of the VCR.

You can probably see where I'm going from here. When I returned today, my instructional aide pulled me aside and asked, "Did you preview the movie you asked the sub to show?"

Of course I had previewed the silk road movie! Like I said, I'm no dummy. Then she explained that the substitute had not shown the movie on the computer like I'd asked, she showed the mummy video in the VCR. Aghast, I asked what the student reaction was.

"Traumatized," she responded.

This is why most teachers don't take days off. It's hard to predict what's going to happen when you let someone else in your classroom unsupervised. Hopefully I'll get off light: the movie was a bit graphic but very scientific in nature.

Puppy Training

Students come up to me all the time having to go to the bathroom. I get like 10 a day. I wish they'd go during lunch or something (I have to) but I guess when the teacher lets you go to the bathroom, you don't waste precious socializing time going when you could be spending precious instructional time instead. However, I usually don't deny the students the right to go, though I may make them wait until I'm done teaching: the last thing I need is to have some kid pee on my floor!

Anyways, I had a student ask if he could go to the bathroom. "It's an emergency!" I hear this all the time from students who forget their hall pass. This student had his hall pass though, so I told him to fill out the date, location and time and bring it up to me for a signature. 5 minutes later, I noticed that he hadn't come up yet. So I walk over to him.

"You didn't get your hall pass signed. Didn't you want to go to the bathroom?"

"No, I don't need to go anymore."

This line always cracks me up. When you think about it, it's a funny statement coming from someone who swore it was an emergency. It's not like the urge suddenly goes away or anything. I laughed, told him that saying that was scary and left.

It never occurred to me that there is one time when you don't need to go anymore. When you've already gone.

Since I was cruising the opposite side of the room for most of the period, I didn't notice the large puddle that had formed under the boy. And he never raised his hand or said anything else. Until 20 minutes later. At the end of the period. He'd been sitting in a pair of soggy pants waiting for the end of class. Ugh. Needless to say, I sent him to the office and I'll think twice when the student swears it's an emergency.

WASL fun

So we are taking the WASL )it's our excuse for a state standardized test) for the next two weeks and it's got its good and bad side. On the good side, I get three hours of proctoring a test that requires me to do next to nothing, so I get all my other work done. On the bad side, three hours of silence is too much for a middle school kid, and they go nuts the rest of the day.

The teachers have been sharing their humorous WASL stories. One teacher noticed a student covering his eyes and wandered over to see what he was doing. He covered his eyes, poked his pencil on the test booklet and bubbled whatever bubble was closest to his pencil. Yeah, that one's not going to pass.

A different teacher walked past a teacher and noticed that they were drawing all sorts of pictures in their booklet. The teacher told the student, "You can't draw in the booklet, you're supposed to be answering the questions!" The confused student replied, "But the book told me to read the story and draw a conclusion!"

It's like I have no life...

I went to a production of the Music Man the other day (I'm a sucker for musicals) and, as chance would have it, Dave and his parents were there. Dave is one of my more vocal students: I had a conversation with mom about how demanding to see my teaching credential in the middle of class is beyond rude and would she please have a talk with Dave about doing this.

Of course I went over to say hi! It would have been rude not to. As I greeted mom and dad, Dave turned and noticed me. His jaw dropped, like past the bottom of his chin. I said hi to him but he continued to stare at me with these huge eyes and wide-open mouth. It reminded me a lot of coming face to face with a sunfish at the aquarium once. The whole time, he never said a word to me.......just........stared.

This is not as unusual as you might think. Most students respond with shock when they see their teacher in a mundane location like the grocery store (one of my students actually asked me what I was doing there). I call it "teacher in a box" syndrome. Academically, they know that we are humans with real lives, but on a more primitive level, their id thinks differently. Their id tells them that their teachers never actually leave the classroom. We have cots that are stored in a storage room during the day and we pull them out at night. The cafeteria feeds us our dinner, or even better, we have a plug (stored in our left foot) that we use to recharge our batteries overnight.

Sometimes, I almost wish it were true. I went to my local pharmacist once to pick up some prescription birth control, and discovered that her daughter, one of my students, was sitting behind the counter.

Wanna get away?

Vacation is winding down (technically, today is a work day for me. I'll tell you about that in a later post), so I figured I'd share one more humorous story from the past before I start back.

One of the teachers came into the staff lounge with a quarter and an interesting story. Turns out, the students had created a new game. They draw circles on a sheet of binder paper with point scores (smaller circles have bigger points). Then, you color one side of a quarter with a marker. You slap the quarter on your forehead, color side against your head, and lean over the paper. if the quarter lands inside any circle, you earn that many points (but the entire quarter has to be inside). If the color side landed up, you double the points in the circle. The person with the most points at the end of the game wins.

"But here's the catch:," she said, "the game is actually a practical joke. By slapping the color side on your forehead, you transfer the marker to your skin, and that means you have a big, colorful circle on your forehead until you realize this and wash it off."

We all laughed, and I asked the teacher if the students had found anyone stupid enough to pull the prank on yet.

The room suddenly became silent, and nervous eyes turned to the side of the room. I followed their gaze and saw the vice principal, mercifully oblivious to our conversation, furiously scrubbing a large, red circle off his forehead.

Since I'm on vacation...

I'm currently out on mid-winter break (often referred by teachers as "ski week"), so the posts may be a bit thin this week. Since I won't have any new stories to share for a while, let me relate an old one that I haven't yet gotten to.

We were doing an experiment based on bubble gum. The students weigh several pieces of bubble gum, then chew the gum for 10-15 minutes, or until the gum loses its flavor, then weigh it again to see how much sugar was in the gum before. Yes, spit does add some mass, but gums like Fruit Stripe and Hubba Bubba lose up to 75% of their mass, which surprises most people. You see what a fun teacher I am?

Anyways, part of the unit requires students to research the history of gum, and I allowed my students access to a computer to do this. I had a couple of students on the computer, when one of them came up to me with a funny expression on his face. Like he was nervous.

"Mrs. W, could you come see our computer? We didn't mean to go there, but I don't want the school getting mad at us."

Mystified, I followed the student.

"We typed in 'bubble gum' and this picture popped up."

Apparently, our pornography filter doesn't work on images. The title of the picture was "bubble gum" and the woman in the picture, blowing a bubble, was stark naked. All the boys looked really nervous now.

"Ok guys, I understand," I replied. "Turn it off and I'll be sure the office knows it was a mistake."

Relieved, they closed the picture and moved on to more legitimate sites. Proof positive that the internet is mainly used for porn, methinks.

Now I know the district checks on less than 1% of the sites viewed in schools, and they're usually looking for sites with obvious porn names, like "hot asian sex" or "lesbians" not "bubble gum", but I did let them know, just in case.

At least I know now that they got an education in my class that day.

I have cool eyeliner

I was in Deanna's classroom today observing her class (she has several of my students and I like to see what goes on when I'm not teaching them) when one of her students gestured me to come over. Since it wasn't even one of my students, I was confused, but I went to see what she wanted. She waved her hand to indicate I should come closer so she could whisper something. I came closer and leaned over.

"I wish I could be in your class," she said. "You have cool eyeliner".

Eyeliner?

I double-checked to make sure that was what she said. She waved a finger back and forth over her eyelids. Yep, she said I had cool eyeliner. Now thankfully, I was wearing eyeliner today, or else I would be completely baffled. Instead of only confounded.

Things you can't plan for

So I was doing an experiment in my class where my students discovered air pressure. You take two syringes (needle-less, of course), fill one with air, then connect them with a piece of plastic tubing. When you push on the plunger of the syringe filled with air, there's a bit of give, then the other plunger pops up. Voila! Air pressure! This experiment has all sorts of other uses too: fill up the syringes with water instead of air, and you discover quickly that water isn't compressible. It's the reason why we fill brake lines with fluid instead of air, and why air in your brake line results in your brakes not working anymore.

Oh how was I supposed to know what my students would do with this?

Someone in class figured out that, if you take one of the plungers out, you create a mini-vacuum chamber. They experimented with picking up papers, books, and eventually discovered that creating a vacuum on your arm leaves a perfectly circular red spot (see: hickey) on your skin. Next thing I know, several of my students have given themselves perfectly circular hickeys on their arms, necks, and even one particularly red on on the center of a forehead.

So that's why I'm sitting in a bar right now, drinking. Because I need to write a letter to my parents about how their child got a hickey in science class. And because days like this require a drink. There ought to be a law saying that.

WTF?

So I was walking around the class today, minding my own business, when one of my good kids suddenly explodes.  You know the type: always helpful, gets A's without trying most of the time, and usually is the calmest kid in the bunch.  So it's always pretty weird when that kind of kid goes bat-shit bonkers.  He just looked at the boy sitting next to him and told him in that freaky I'm-not-taking-any-more-shit-from-you-so-shut-the-fuck-up voice to "cut......it.......OUT."

I went over to see what caused the entire commotion and got this baffling story.  Apparently, Paul was trying to focus his microscope while Ben, sitting next to him, started to violently and noisily choke himself around the neck with his own hands.  Paul tolerated this behavior as long as he could before exploding.  

Why the hell do I always get the weird ones?