Hanging on by my fingernails.

Three more days until break.
Kids are bonkers this week. We expected this. We haven't been doing a whole heck of a lot in the way of teaching. A little, but not a lot.

I keep trying to remember all the not-yelling things I can do to get them to listen. The problem is that I do them, and they quiet down for the length of time it takes for them all to be paying attention, and then as soon as I start to give instructions they start talking again.

I am also going crazy on the subject of name-calling. "He called me a _________" is an almost constant refrain. I am starting to wish I had a fifteen-cornered classroom so I could put them all in their own little corners, away from everyone else, and they could just NOT TALK TO EACH OTHER. However, the room is how the room is.

Tomorrow morning there will be masking tape on the floor, showing where the desks should be. They move them around almost constantly during the day, and wind up bumping into each other, or smashing someone's fingers, or running their chairs into the desks, or what have you. Masking tape. Maybe even masking tape covered by packing tape, except that would probably pull up the finish on the floor. I shall have to ask the teacher across the hall for suggestions about this (or if anyone would notice, on my already-messed-up floor, if a little finish got pulled up.)

They have transferred Victim Girl out of my class and into the third grade downstairs. Intellectually, I realize this is a positive thing: I have a lot of crazies in my class, who were fighting with her ALL THE TIME, and it's unacceptable to have a child too afraid to come to school. On a gut level, however, I am having difficulty not feeling like this is my fault, like I should have done X and Y and Z differently so that these girls would not beat up on her. Sigh.

And of course, what this means now is that the classes are EXTREMELY unbalanced. The teacher downstairs has -- I think -- eight more kids than I do. I wonder if they'll do anything about this, or if I'll just have a teeny-weeny class, at least until someone moves into the catchment.

I keep hearing, in the back of my mind: "If I'm having so much difficulty with this small a class, what am I going to do when I have 25?" What if I'd gotten the (ridiculously huge) fifth grade instead of the third? Augh.