nobody’s perfect

I’ve had exactly two successful classes with the kids I see once a week for Regents’ tutoring. They don’t get grades for the tutoring, so they don’t care, and I only see them once a week so I’m not great with their names/personalities/needs. It’s a terrible class. I admit that. I am terrible at teaching it, and they are terribly behaved.
Today we played Jeopardy! (always my favorite multiple-choice review method). I love listening to the teams whisper angrily “No, stupid, she said Meiji Restoration, that’s when they modernized!” It gets me all giddy when I can hear them remembering what I’ve taught. So that’ll be something nice to take with me over break when I grade 140 essays. (Please kill me.)

BREAK BREAK BREAK BREAK BREAK!

bad choices

Dear Cheater Cheater Pumpkin Eater in 6th Period,

You have a 41 average. You have bombed every quiz. You did not hand in a project. You do not write anything down in class. When called on, you make a joke to quickly deflect from the fact that you know nothing about what we are discussing.

So next time you decide to copy someone else’s test, aim a little lower than a 94%. I have trouble believing the same kid who told me that “Jews believe in Christmas and wearing hats” aced every single multiple choice question.

Kisses,

Ms. A

Whoops

Speaking of “unintentionally dirty” things that happen in class, which I was a few days ago, the prize goes to my friend who was teaching 9th graders about Papal corruption during the middle ages, and who announced to a class of 9th graders that “The Pope had really huge balls!”Understandably, nothing else got learned that day.

But why do we even HAVE ten reams of it?

God, it’s still September. How can I already be hearing those awful, terrible words?

“Sorry; there’s nothing left but the long paper.”

Augh.

operation Guatemala: successful! (kinda)

Apparently 3 weeks in Guatemala is just enough to squeak by. I called parents today and got — naturally — the grandmother at home who spoke no English. But I knew enough Spanish to understand that, to tell her I was the history teacher and her grandson has done no homework and plans to skip tomorrow (he’s the dumbass who told me that in class). Giving her my phone number was quite a bit harder — I started to read her own phone number back to her, which was awesomely stupid, and then panicked and got six and seven mixed up. The other teachers were very helpfully prompting me through their giggles.

Still! Marginal success! That’s all I expected! Huzzah!

cough. hack. sniffle.

I’m sick! Of all the things I anticipated going wrong with the first day of school “sore throat I can barely speak through and constant horrible nose-blowing” wasn’t even on my mind.

faux pas

I don’t want you to think I just pick on students when I make fun of people. I make fun of everyone. I believe in equal opportunity mocking. Perhaps I will spend the summer telling stories of all the insanely stupid things I have done while attempting to teach.

In the meantime, there’s this:

As we graded the Global Regents one of my fellow history teachers turned to me. She’s taught all 8 semesters of history at some point, and most recently global.

“This student wrote his essay about Robespierre… He’s that Russian guy, right?”

If we’re going to ask the students to know these things, we should probably learn them ourselves.

abusing the system

When I was an undergrad, a lot of my friends were in a cappella groups. I found I could only sit through so much a cappella music before I started to lose my mind, so when we went to their concerts we’d bring a bottle of juice with us, only half the juice would be vodka, and everything would seem much, much easier to take. (Hi, mom. I am totally kidding about that.) (No, I’m not.)

I bring this up because tomorrow is the all-PD day. Every school is different, but we’re having a full day of PD from 8 to 3, including 45 minutes designated (I kid you not) “sharing is caring 🙂 🙂 🙂 :)”. I am considering taking up my old, alcoholic ways. C’mon; grades are due Tuesday. My Regent happens Wednesday. Isn’t there anything else I could be doing?

In unrelated news, I may have forgotten to turn in a piece of paper for the Teachers of Tomorrow program which will now cost me my $3,000 grant. I had it in my head somehow that it would automatically renew from last year. Augh! Argh! Grrrr! Why am I so bad at organizing giant piles of paper?

whoops

I student-taught at this school:

When the city’s Education Department said it would not let students from the [X] School on the Upper West Side take a spring break trip to Cuba this year, the school turned to a powerful friend for help: Lt. Gov. David A. Paterson, whose stepdaughter went on the trip as a [X] student in 2005. His call did not make a difference; city officials would not budge.
But the students went anyway, chaperoned by one teacher and two parents. And yesterday, city officials, including Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, were left struggling to explain why the trip went forward, and how students had managed to get to Havana again this year in defiance of the government’s ban on travel to the Communist nation.

(From today’s New York Times.)

It goes on to explain how the Principal said she didn’t know. Um. She knew. I knew. Everyone there knew. I had no idea it was even supposed to be a secret.

And I hope they get busted for the full fine amount, frankly. I think what every beginning teacher needs is a class all of her own, with no supervision and no curriculum, and then to be observed by a teacher who isn’t even her cooperating teacher, and then, in front of her peers, to be subjected to an excruciating 45 minutes where she is told everything she has done wrong in great detail, and that she will “never be a good teacher.” I really found having my every flaw pointed out in loving detail (while I cried and tried to pretend I wasn’t) in a nice public setting got me all psyched up to be a teacher.

Not that I’m still bitter. At all.

bad timing

Our AP came in to my classroom today to show a prospective teacher for next year around. He likes to do that, and I take it as a compliment.

Today, however, he came in during my insanely horrible 5th period class, just as I was starting to holler at them. Now, I could have stopped, and they probably would have understood. They know things get a little weird when administrators walk in. But I decided it was more important to make them understand that being inconsiderate jackasses is NOT what my class is about, so he and the possible-teacher got to hear all about it. At top volume.

I wonder if I will be getting a memo about this.