Ok. I skipped entries for weeks 3-4. I could say I was busy, but I was just lazy.
This happened on Friday–the afternoon of the retreat.
In the 8th grade currently, there are only two girls enrolled. They spend all day every day together travelling from class to class. You can imagine that this is, in turns, wonderful and terrible for them. Thirteen-year-old girls are ninety-percent whim.
It’s a big deal for them to get to lay down on the tables instead of sit at the desks to do their work. It’s my main negotiating tactic. “If you’re good and doing your work, you can lay down on the tables while you do it.” It’s a small privelege, and probably not the best policy, but it works.
So, it’s the end of class and they’ve been laying on the tables across the room from each other while I make like a hummingbird walking back and forth helping them with their assignment on adjectives. Finally, they both finish and I’m taking up papers. One student says that her stomach hurts and she wants to go home. I tell her that she seems all right to me, so why doesn’t she just wait it out? The other student says that her stomach doesn’t hurt, she is just supposed to go to the Mall after school and wants to hurry up and get there.
They start to argue.
Now, it’s not a big argument. More of the “Uh huh”/”Nuh huh” variety of human discourse. I was content to just let them sort it out. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing where I needed to waste time intervening.
But after a few minutes, one student just completely blows up. Throws her books across the room and storms down to the office.
I feel terrible about this. Generally this happens about once or twice a year to me. Some kid gets in some amount of trouble because of my laissez-faire class room management style. A simple, well-timed, “It’s none of your business why she wants to go home” probably could have avoided the whole affair. Argh.
Right now, we have a little down time because we were taking a standardized field test this morning and its the garbage time between the end of the test and lunch.
I explained to one student how, genetically, two little people could produce a child of normal height. It’s always fun to draw a Punnet square, and I thought I was quite tactful in my avoidance of the word “midget” in answering his question, “How come two midgets can have a normal kid?”
(He spotted a little person while he was wandering around town after school yesterday. This seemed to weigh heavily on his mind.)
Now, everyone (including Mr. Nolte) is having a little independent computer time. One student got bored, walked up to my board and started making an idea map eerily similar to the one we’d been working on in class for our literary analysis papers for an entirely extracurricular short story he has been working on.
Do you know that feeling when you blow a soap bubble and you try to push it around with your hands a little bit so it doesn’t touch the ground and burst but you don’t want to graze it too hard because it will burst then too? I have that feeling right now while he covers more and more of my board with red marker.
