just waitin' for a pardon

my name is matt. some days i'm a glorified babysitter. some days i'm a guy who points at numbers and shapes on a board to try to make sense out of them. and some days, i'm a guy who just takes naps. var sc_project=6399387; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="0d28fe29";

[resttheweight]

Last Friday a student had a question and raised his hand. I was behind him for a second and he didn’t notice. As I leaned over to talk to him, he switched the arm he was raising and smacked me in the face. He made that inhale-through-your-teeth sound people make when they see or receive an injury, then said “AHH, MISTEERRR, YOUR MUSTAAASH, SORRY!”

Then today, I’m talking about box-and-whisker plots and I say “it has 2 whiskers, one on each side.” And a student was like “hey, it’s like your mustache!”

I don’t even have a mustache!

Box-and-whisker plot for reference, since I’d never heard of these before teaching 6th grade.

[resttheweight]

Student: Can I go to the nurse?

Me: What for?

Student (who is sitting 6 feet away from me): I need to get my allergy medicine. I’m allergic to cats and I think someone around here has them.

That’s a new one. Also I’ve literally had a cat the entire year and it’s never seemed to be a problem. But also I don’t want to say no and then you end up actually suffocating because your throat closed up, so I guess you should go.

[resttheweight]

Ah yes, this is exactly what I was looking for when I searched for “percents reference sheet.” What luck that I only had to go to the fifth row of pictures to find it!

Think I’m done with google images for today.

[resttheweight]

So I went to Kroger this morning, thinking, hey, it’s Saturday morning and it’s like 8:30, it’ll be great because there are no people there. Which turned out was a mostly correct assumption, but there were still enough people there to have one person at each self checkout and 2 people on standby (aka quiet yet crowded enough to draw unwanted attention to yourself).

Come to find out, all of the checkouts have been recently upgraded and the computer now aggressively yells “TWO. SEVENTY FIVE” so everyone around you knows how much you’re gonna pay for the box of Ritz crackers you just scanned. That’s a change I’m willing to live with, but apparently was not the only new feature of the checkouts.

At one point I tried to scan a cucumber but the sticker was all folded on itself and the machine couldn’t read it. Now, as a matter of convenience, I buy the fancy cucumbers that come pre-wrapped in cellophane because those have a sticker you can scan and I don’t have to worry about embarrassing myself because I can’t figure out how to look up cucumbers on the self checkout. I spent like 20 seconds trying to fix the sticker and ended up basically tearing the sticker apart, so I figured I might as well try looking it up by the little code on the sticker since it couldn’t be much worse.

Thankfully I entered the code and did everything correctly, which I knew because the machine shouted “ENTER. QUANTITY. OF. ENGLISH. CUCUMBERS.” It was just the 1, but that wasn’t the end of it because the machine then also said “PLACE. ENGLISH. CUCUMBERS. ON. SCANNER.”

It sounded so ridiculous, way more absurd than the old calm, quiet instructions it used to give to “place item on scanner.”

[resttheweight]

I’d just like to point out that apparently I have the same taste as whoever was buying set items for New Girl and The Walking Dead circa late ‘11/early ‘12. My pillowcase is practically famous.

[resttheweight]

ty microsoft

[resttheweight]

So I found out that not only does my phone have a pedometer, but the pedometer is on by default and has been tracking my steps without my knowing. I feel like my job is super obvious based on this graph.

[resttheweight]

Huh, a Hans Andersen fairy tale inspired a k-pop song? 

Wait, are they sure they got the right fairy tale? This doesn’t sound like...

Ohhh, here we go!

Nooow we’re talking!

Oh, of course there must be some kind of disfigurement involved before the end.

Soooo let’s go back to square one on this one?

[resttheweight]

This arrived in my work email. Between the sender name and salutation, I feel like I’m being propositioned by a Harry Potter character.

[resttheweight]

In about 18 hours I will finally begin what’s probably the most-needed spring break I’ve ever had.

Of course I thoroughly enjoy my job, but damn it’s exhausting. And the less energy you have, the more exponentially difficult teaching becomes. My poor students took TELPAS tests Monday, a math STAAR benchmark tuesday, a reading STAAR benchmark Wednesday, and then a unit exam in my class today. I had to bribe them with candy because a reasonable person can’t expect 12-year-olds to spend 12 hours silently testing in such a short number of days.

That being said, I’m looking for videos to let them watch (that are also at least somewhat relevant to school) and thought of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. It’s rated PG, but, dutiful teacher that I am, I went to research incidents in the movie that might be inappropriate. What I found was so much better than I could have predicted.

[resttheweight]

Sixth grade has such a wide range of maturity.

-On one side of my class, I’ve got a student who is working himself into a rage because another student is berating him with “your mom is stupid”-level insults. Like, he was actually shaking with anger when we had a conversation.

Me: What’s going on, what’s got us all upset? Student: _______ keeps talking mess about my family! Me: Uh oh, what exactly is he saying? Student: He keeps telling me things like my mom is stupid and he keeps acting like he’s so cool but you KNOW he’s not!

-Then on another side of the room, I have a student who is making random loud noises as he works, basically oblivious to the fact that he’s making helicopter sounds that are making it difficult for other people to concentrate.

-Then I’ve got a student who is on the verge of tears, spending 20 minutes with their head down because they busted a flair pen open and I threw it in the trash before ink spilled everywhere. I still don’t understand why he was upset. He broke the pen, it was no longer functional.

-Then I’ve got another student, who is sitting quietly at the back, run up to me with his mouth over his hand giving me a garbled request to let him go to the bathroom because, turns out, he busted a pen INSIDE his mouth, and his mouth looked like he just spent half an hour making out with a squid.

-Then on another side, I’ve got students playing the “hump game.” If you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing the hump game, players take turns waiting until the teacher turns around. When the teacher is no longer facing a player, they stand up and furiously hump the air. Bonus points if you can manage to hump a desk or table. Whoever humps longest wins. I’ve already caught 2 students. I don’t know if it’s because they suck at the hump game and I just haven’t caught the other more talented players, or if it’s because my omnipresence in my classroom has shut the game down.

[resttheweight]

1.8 mm? Is this for people who like writing with pencils, but want it to feel like they are writing with a crayon?

[resttheweight]

I was informed today (in a less than polite manner) that I occasionally spit when addressing the whole class.

UGH. I’ve only been doing this 2.5 years, I can’t already be the teacher who spits. That shouldn’t start until I’m least a decade in.

[resttheweight]

I decided I want to give out a little positive blurb to one of my students before the end of class just to keep our spirits raised throughout the tumultuous month ahead as we go into our second trimester assessments.

Because everything has to be catchy and filled with alliteration, I started looking up M adjectives so I can call the blubs “_______ Mathematicians.”

While not really applicable to what I need, here are some of the more interesting M adjectives that for whatever reason I have not managed to learn in 25 years.

mastoidal

1.Definition: relating to or resembling a nipple

mensal

1.Definition: pertaining to or used at the dining table

monocarpic

1.Definition: dying after bearing fruit only once

myrmecophagous

1.Definition: feeding on ants

metameric

1.Definition: having the body divided into successive metameres or segments, as in earthworms or lobsters

meretricious

2.Definition: like or relating to a prostitute

[resttheweight]

This has a happy ending

This 4 day week has easily been one of the most difficult so far this year, despite the fact that Wednesday was a field trip. Thursday afternoon, I had to pull 7 kids from my 0/5th period class (they come to me in the morning and again in the afternoon) and have an exhausting conversation about the choices they are making and the long term consequences. It felt like a flashback to my first year of teaching. Convincing a 12-year-old to not do something they really like doing (talking instead of practicing, sitting instead of taking notes) is hard, and I was trying to do this with seven 12-year-olds. Friday morning, I went out of my way to talk to each and every one of them before they came into my class, to look them in the eye with a smile and tell them that today was going to be better. And to my great relief and satisfaction, 0 period went off without a hitch, and all 7 of those students were killing it.

Then 5th period came, and they returned. I again went out of my way to compliment them and make sure they knew that I noticed how hard they were working and how proud I was. But for whatever reason, when they come back in the afternoon, it’s a much bigger struggle. Two of the seven were throwing foam counters we were using in the lesson across the table. Another two were constantly rotating their body backwards to talk with another student at another table. One kept shouting “Mister!” over and over during whole class discussions, derailing the entire class, and one kept throwing their pen up in the air. Only one of the 7 consistently made great choices.

It’s so frustrating. I have 30 kids in that class, 12 more students than my smallest class. I have 23 other students who sit, who work so hard to learn everything that they can. There are 23 students being shorthanded on their hard work because I can’t provide the attention they deserve. And it’s all because I can’t convince these other 7 to make the right choices, I can’t manage them towards success. All 30 of those kids, even the special 7, aren’t able to live up to their potential and it makes me feel inadequate.

5th period ends and I’m struggling to not feel defeated because I’ve still got 2 more classes and 45 more students who deserve to learn from a teacher functioning at 100%. My 6th and 7th period classes almost always feel successful just because of their juxtaposition with 5th period, but 7th period went off particularly well.

Then, as the bell rings, I shout “FREEZE” because there’s still some mess to be picked up. All 18 kids stop moving, and after a beat, one of them says “EVERYBODY CLAP YOUR HANDS!” and all 18 of them proceed to clap. I’m not sure if I could think of a more ridiculous way to end the week, but it was hilarious and perfect. 

[resttheweight]

We took the students to the zoo today. One student in my group excitedly pointed at a lemur, and I said, “yeah, like Zoboomafoo!”

They just kind of stared at me for a few seconds waiting expectantly, like my sentence wasn’t over and there was something else after the random noises I made.

“You know, Zoboomafoo the lemur! From TV!”

“Is that one of the lemurs on The Penguins of Madagascar?”

Then I looked it up and Zoboomafoo apparently ended in 2001, a solid 2 years before any of them were born. Whoops.

[resttheweight]

5 amusing things from the first 5 days back at school

1) While talking about the Distributive Property, I asked if any students knew what the word distribute means. One student said, “it means like you give something out. Kind of like how you give out marks when we’re bad.”

2) While talking about the Associative Property, a student complained about how long the word is and how hard it is to spell and asked if they had to write it all the way out. I told them to be “very, very careful with how they choose to abbreviate it.” Over the next 20 seconds random students all over the room went from confused to drawing out a long, dramatic “oooooooh I get it.”

3) I watched a student at lunch open a bottle of Sprite, tilt his head up and pour the drink into his mouth. No, not sip, not take a swig, he actually poured it into his mouth. Which ended exactly as expected: with a lot of spit-up Sprite on the table and down his shirt. Then, while he went to get a rag to clean up his spill, the person next to him reached across the table to grab something and proceeded to accidentally mop up the Sprite-spit with his sleeve. Because I guess he forgot the Sprite was there even though the spill had just happened like literally 20 seconds prior. The best part was the conversation taking place right after. Me: So, why exactly were you drinking it that way? Student: I didn’t want to put my mouth on it, I was trying to water-fall. Other student: Yeah, well the water fell, right out of your mouth and onto the table.

4) Students were discussing the independent and dependent variables in a problem. The variables were the number of games played at a bowling alley, and the total cost. To most adults it’s intuitive that the cost depends on how many games you play, but one student argued, “Well, what if I’m broke and I’ve only got like $5. Then the number of games depends on the cost.” [This is not so much funny as it is entertaining that a 12-year-old schooled me on perspective.] 

5) I had a student who waited for me to turn around, then pulled their chair out and got caught halfway crawling under the table in the middle of a quiz. When he saw me looking at him, he paused and said, “I’m picking up my pencil,” which was actually in his hand. He then tossed it under the table like I hadn’t noticed he was holding it the whole time.