Today I met my summer school class. I think it is going to be a great experience. I already want to adopt five of them into our AVID family. I ran into 3 of my Saturday school kids ... Jessica said I was her favorite teacher ever and that she has completely stopped using the word whore. Derrika was saying that her new class wasn't anything like our Saturday school class. The boy in the middle showed up for about 3 weeks before he disappeared. I can't honestly even remember his name...he's back to finish what he started and wondered why I wasn't teaching English 9. I hope this time he sees it through to fruition.There was of course one student in my group of 24 that I wanted to trade after 5 minutes. And guess what - he goes to New Town. He has placed his hand in front of his face to protect his identity. It cracks me up that everyone else was completely OK with my taking their pictures. No - not this one - maybe he knows all to well that film catches people in the act.... During our very first activity he was supposed to be writing but gave up after a sentence. He said just loud enough for me to hear him..."yo - this class is boring as sh*&!" I think he was going for a record on how quick he could get kicked out. Rumor has it he has been going to summer school since it was invented. I just took notes - I'm going to record all the things he does in our 5 hours together... He refused to read, kept putting on his hat, and fell asleep during our reading of Kindred. He did ask a question - "yo - do you have any snacks?" ... of course I did and of course I was going to give him something but he had to produce first. I asked him to give me one of the 5 new words we just learned. He produced a mix of tout and brawn to get brout...I kept my snack and he kept his hunger. Towards the end of class I told him that instead of kicking him out I was going to pray about how to deal with him. Mr. Mustipher told me that if I can't reach him then there is no hope. He gives me far too much credit but his compliment got me thinking that maybe this child was placed in my room for a reason and while I wanted to kick him out at least 5 times, he is now my official project. If I can get Jessica to stop saying whore then I can get this child to pass English 11. Pray for both of us....please.
lol summer school is way more exhausting than it should be...I don't understand it. We teach for 5 hours straight...5 FRIGGIN HOURS! They get a 20 minute break in there, but all in all, 5 hours is rough for them to be here and rough for me to plan for. Overall, I love the class...some kids I hope I can reach (like you). Although...they don't use the word "whore" with regularity. Might I inquire as to who this upstanding young man from New Town is? Maybe I've had the pleasure of teaching him in the past. Yes, we already have tickets...more so because we went to see Transformers and the Harry Potter tickets were on sale rather than any overt waiting in line on our part...we just grabbed them with our Transformers tickets and called it a day. I LOVE doing the blog thing. Once I find my digital camera chord (I am suspicious that it, and our printer A/C power chord were lost in the move somehow) I can finally start putting more photos up. Right now I'm limited to my Macbook camera and whatever my Mom or sister uploaded from this past weekend to my sister's blog. I really got into not just blogging myself, but READING them. I checked out this guy who had a novel that came out that I absolutely loved, and I was dying to read the 2nd in the series...yet somehow it keeps missing it's release date that is listed at B & N...so I checked this blog out. I read it for like hours. It's just really interesting getting little snapshots of people's lives to see how similar and dis-similar humans can be! Well I've got about 25 minutes until summer school starts and I've got a couple students here early...good kids who just have slipped up (aka were lazy during English 10 and got stuck here), not the variety that seems to be permeating your room :)
ReplyDeleteHang in there, Jodi. The boy just doesn't know who he's up against yet.
ReplyDeletehey ms grosser i found it too be very funny that you wrote a blog about parris which i didnt belive but its cool how you can change how a person talks or says things maybe you can change parris but i think its to late lol... i dooubt that he changes...
ReplyDelete-your student Thalia