If You Give a Kid a Paper -by Every Teacher of Teenagers

If you give a kid a paper and you tell him not to write on it, he will draw penises all over it.

The end.

Today I nearly had a heart attack

when one of my students started running straight for a wall and then ran up the wall and did one of those wall flips.

He looked like this:

I looked like this:

Teenagers say the darndest things (5).

"Ms. teacher, don't you think it's ridiculous that I got grounded for telling my mom that she sounds like a squirrel when she yells at me?"

Teenagers say the darndest things (4).

"Shut up bitches! *GASP* I'm SO sorry Ms. Teacher, it just slipped out."

I totally understand.

That Time We All Went "Au Natural"

The health classes were learning about natural beauty and the health teacher challenged the entire school to go "au natural" yesterday, meaning no make up, only simple hairstyles, and simple clothing. You can imagine what a challenge this was for a junior high school population. The interesting thing is that most girls didn't do it. They just were incapable of coming to school without make up on.  The other interesting thing is that I was one of those who couldn't do it. I tried, but when it came right down to it I was not comfortable enough to walk out of my house without make up on. I kept asking myself what the issue was and who I was trying to impress at the junior high, but I just couldn't talk myself into it. What does that say about me and also our society?

The feminist in me was also pretty frustrated that the boys looked exactly the same as they do on any other day.  This is a difficult world to be a woman in, where we literally have to wear "masks" every day.

I don't know if this qualifies as one of the struggles of teaching, but it's a struggle in my life and I'm a teacher so I'm posting it.

How I feel when I come to school and find out my projector lamp burned out:

It's like a piece of me died. I don't even know who I am without a projector.

Teenagers say the darnedest things (3).

"Yesterday I stepped on my own finger.  I was leaning down to pick up something and just took a step and stomped right on my finger."

This is creepy but also really accurate of how my feet feel by Friday afternoon.

That Time I Subbed for the PE Class

My first hour is prep which is a little rough because anytime a teacher calls in sick at the last second and the office can't find a sub immediately, I get asked to cover their first hour. Yesterday I was covering for a girls PE class, which was something new for me for sure.

It started out okay, I took roll, they did their warm ups, I split them into teams, they started playing basketball.  About half way through class a girl slips on her shoelaces and crashes to the floor. It was obviously not a bad fall, but still an embarrassing one (because everything is mortifying in junior high) so I watched her to be sure she would shake it off okay.

She didn't.

She let out this ear piercing WAIL and then launched into full blown sobbing. As I run over to her I am thinking in my head "Great job, you sub for the PE class and you break a girl." She is literally thrashing on the ground when I reach her and I ask her what hurts. "My back! I think I broke my back!" I quickly check her, no signs of broken things, and at this point I'm pretty sure that anyone who is actually injured isn't going to be thrashing around that much anyway. I look around at the other girls trying to gauge if this is the usual in their PE class or if they're concerned. Most of the girls paused for just a second and then carried on with their games so I'm guessing this girl "breaks her back" on the regular. I help her up and she limps her way over to the bleachers (so, it was her leg that hurt?).  I tell her that I'm pretty sure people with broken backs can't walk and ask her if the pain is going away. She is still literally wailing and she says no and tells me (between sobs) "My hip is broken!".  Again I reassure her that people with broken hips can't walk, but we'll call her mom anyway.

The "broken" girl wouldn't walk to the office ("I need a wheel chair.") so I had to send another girl down to the office to tell someone there that a girl got hurt in PE. (While she was gone broken girl started massaging her arm and telling me "I know my arm is broken, I heard a crack.") I don't know what the girl said to the office, but the secretary came running down to the gym in a panic. When she got there she must have recognized the girl from previous injuries because she just said "Oh". She got the girl to (fake)hobble to the office and the rest of the class went on without incident.

Sometimes I wonder why I am a math teacher, but now I can say "At least I don't teach PE".

Teenagers say the darnedest things (2).

"Stop flicking my adam's apple! It's very sensitive."

Woops.

I accidentally left the windows in my classroom open last night so if you don't hear from me later it's because I froze to death.

Professional Development

A lot of teachers complain about having to go to professional development. They say it's boring and a waste of time. They are probably right but here is what I know: it's way easier than teaching.

I am supposed to be at a training right now. I put in my absence and requested a sub literally a month ago. No subs will fill it because subs don't want to teach at the junior high and subs don't want to teach math.  Other teachers at my school put in their subs a week ago and got their sub jobs filled. Not cool man. Everyone got an email yesterday explaining a little bit about the training. They don't have to be there until 8am (one hour after I was here this morning), they get an hour and half for lunch (an hour and 10 minutes longer than my lunch is today), and they're done at 3 (half an hour before I am allowed to leave). And the training is supposed to last two days.  That sounds like a lovely vacation. I want to goooooo.

Past students make me sad.

On the first day of my second year of teaching I found out one of my students from last year died that morning. The teacher who told me said "It's always so hard when one of them dies."  That wasn't something I had thought to worry about. I had spent all summer worrying that I didn't actually like teaching that much, I just liked that particular group of students I had my first year. I worried that the next group would be as annoying as people say junior high students are and we wouldn't get along and teaching them would be awful and tedious. I didn't worry that the students I loved so much would die.

Yesterday I found out that one of my past students is missing. He got sent to rehab and he escaped and ran away and no one knows where he is. He was a handful for sure. He's the one that we would all talk about in the faculty room and sing praises if he ever decided to be absent, but we were secretly sad on the inside because we know his home life is awful and he just needs to be loved. 15 is too young to be missing.

Why are some students' lives so sad?

I got a kid suspended yesterday.

So that's how my Monday went.

To be fair it wasn't TOTALLY my fault. In teaching we talk a lot about students who are "can't's" and students who are "won't's".  This kid is definitely a "can't". He can't sit down, he can't do his work, he can't stop talking, he can't stop singing, he can't stop whistling, he can't stop yelling, he can't function unless every single student has their attention on him.  He gets kicked out of my class more often than he lasts in it because I can't teach with that kind of a distraction going on. Finally yesterday I tried to kick him out (we have a system where disruptive students get sent to sit in another teacher's room) and he got mad for getting kicked out so often and refused to go and said he was going to the office instead (which is hilarious because as if the office is going to be like "You're right man, that was so unfair of your teacher to kick you out. You just march right back there and tell her to straighten up.") and was apparently a punk to them too (surprise, surprise) so he got suspended.

I would be completely lying if I said I wasn't completely excited to teach today without having to deal with him.

Update: In a very strange and awful turn of events the suspended student showed up for school today and since the administration was all gone at meetings the secretary didn't know what to do with him so she sent him to my class for In School Suspension (ISS) all day.  What fresh hell?!

He made this to flick little paper footballs through, which from a STEM perspective is actually pretty impressive, but from a do-your-math perspective is not so great.

We survived, but by the time 6th hour came around both of us were sick of each other.  Mein leben.