Today's Lesson: Identify yourself immediately when calling parents.

Otherwise they think you're a bill collector and won't talk to you.

today was utterly lousy.
yesterday morning was all right. we did Common Nouns and Proper Nouns, (i have yet to follow up; maybe tomorrow?), and again I let them get up and wander around collecting nouns. I think we'll make a list tomorrow, put it up on chart paper next to our list of measurements. If I can get them to sit still long enough.

The note passing thing in my classroom is getting out of hand. Two of the worst offenders (girls, of course, one of previous note-passing notoriety) today passed each other a note (intercepted and handed to me by a third girl) saying, essentially, "I'm gonna fuck that b*tch up," and "I'm right there with you." Since they both got in a good deal of trouble today, I can only assume they meant me. Unfortunately for one of them, she has distinctive handwriting. The counselor will be hearing about this, oh dear me yes.

I need to find a way to make these lessons engaging. The more reading they have to sit and do, the less I can keep them focused. Unfortunately, a good portion of the science curriculum is based on reading a textbook, and I have yet to figure out how to get them to do the experiments without collapsing into chaos. They won't work in groups, they fight all the time... ARGH.

I'm starting to really feel badly for A, one of the few good boys in my class. He's pretty smart (possibly gifted), obviously bored, and utterly fed up with the shenanigans of his classmates. He's the substitute on the job board this week, which meant that today he was both line leader and librarian. He actually sorted the books according to my baskets, did a quick, neat, and careful job, and went back to his seat when he was done. When the other line leader lost his job, he came immediately to the front, saying "excuse me" the whole way, and stood quietly. I need to call his parents and tell them how much I love him.

I'm trying to decide whether to allow him to sit alone, or at least to switch his desk to another team. He asks me every day if he can move his desk. The problem of course -- well, there are two problems, which have their own sub-problems. One, if I let him move his desk everyone else immediately wants to move theirs. Two, anywhere else I could put him will have an equal Shenanigans quotient as he's dealing with now. I'd love to put the quiet kids together, but of course if I did that the obnoxious ones would also be together. And obnoxiousness, as we all know, increases geometrically as the proximity to other obnoxiousness increases.

Sigh.

What I really need to do is just put the other boy at his table at his own island. That would probably solve a whole bunch of problems -- if, of course, I could get him to go without destroying things on the way.

Argh, argh, argh.

It's almost 11, and I'm still kind of sick. (That's been the other fun part of this week.) off to sleep with me.