Learn Me Gooder (2 page)

Let me tell you, my kids have some VERY convoluted ideas about how their bodies are put together.

One group immediately tried to fasten the pelvis to the base of the skull. Every group in my afternoon class thought that the arm only had one bone, so they had the hand approximately where the elbow should be. The part of the spinal column that was supposed to go between the rib cage and the pelvis was instead placed by one group on the underside of the pelvis. I didn’t have the heart, or the guts, to tell them that there is actually no bone there.

The skeletons weren’t the only things not making sense today. Class sizes have gotten a bit uneven. On Monday, I had 13 kids in my class. My other class, Mrs. Bird’s homeroom, had 12. The other four third grade classes had similar numbers.

Today, I have 20 students in my homeroom. Mrs. Bird has 14, and the closest other class has 15. For some reason, our enrollment person, Mrs. O’Reilly, keeps depositing all of the new third graders into my homeroom!

This might not be so bad if they came bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh, but most of them haven’t even borne pencils or notebooks.

Maybe Mrs. O’Reilly is sending so many students to me because I’m the grade chair this year. This means I get to keep track of things for the grade level and be responsible for receiving and passing on information from the administration. And this year, grade chair is an unpaid position! Woohoo! This is of course why I have the honor of serving in this capacity. The third grade team was asked to choose someone, a vigorous game of rock-paper-scissors ensued, and my strategy of “always go paper” did not serve me well.

But at any rate, even with all of the new kids coming to me, I can be thankful that one holy terror was already firmly planted in another third grade class. His name is Roy’al, which is ironic, because he is a “royal” pain in the buttocks.

This kid has already been sent to Alternative School THREE TIMES!! Once as a first grader and twice as a second grader. Naturally, if he hopes to follow the established mathematical pattern, he’s got to step it up in order to visit “baby jail” three times this year as a third grader. And he’s already well on his way.

We are only midway through the first week of school, and Roy’al has already been suspended for the rest of the week.

You may be wondering, what could he possibly have done to warrant a suspension this soon?
Chewing gum in class?
Nah, too mundane.
Playing in the bathroom?
Not adventurous enough.
Running down the hall, wearing a cape and underwear outside his pants, screaming, “Look at me! I’m Master of the Marble Men!” while sprinkling fresh-grated parmesan everywhere?
Of course not – nobody does that!

No, Roy’al decided to cuss at a little girl in his class and then punch her in the stomach. Or maybe he punched her first and then dropped the F-bomb. Either way, it was two wrongs, which never make a right. However, two wrongs CAN lead to a suspension.

I feel bad for Mrs. Fitzgerald and Mrs. Frisch, who will have to deal with this kid all year. Still, I will gladly take an overload of students and push the boundaries of maximum kiddage rather than have Roy’al in my class. After all, if our skeleton project today is any indication, I already have enough kids trying to put their heads up their rear ends.
Later,
Pat Tella

Wow, what a first week of school! They still haven’t fixed the air conditioning in our wing, and I saw the classroom thermometer as high as 85° today after recess. The sweltering heat makes it nearly unbearable, but I guess I’ve never fully appreciated the HVAC’s secondary function, which is to carry away undesirable odors. Without a working A/C, the classroom is RIPE with sweaty B.O. after recess!

To answer your question, yes, it’s a huge difference between classes now because of the numbers. After my homeroom 21 (yep, got a new one) leave at 10:30 and Mrs. Bird’s 14 come in, it feels like there are miles between populated desks. Of course you’re right, it makes sense to move a few kids over to 3B and even out my classes, but we can’t do that just yet. Every year we level things out after the first six weeks. By then, the numbers may very well have evened out a bit. At the very least, the kids should have a better grasp of their bone system by then.

Speaking of which, now you’ve got that song “Bad to the Bone” stuck in my head. Thanks a lot. Expect an a cappella version of “MMMBop” on your voicemail real soon.

No skeleton puzzles in class today; instead, my kids made science safety posters. Each group of two or three students had chosen a slogan such as “Always cover your clothes with an apron,” or “Always wash your hands after an experiment.” The posters were not exactly OSHA-quality, but they definitely provided some grins and giggles (griggles).

The early morning group who had chosen “Be careful around sharp objects” drew some very colorful pictures of kids having their eyes stabbed out, their hands cut off, and their backs punctured with forks.

Clear message? Check.

Another group, who had “Always wear safety goggles,” drew a tiny figure with goggles atop an erupting volcano. If only the poor citizens of Pompeii had worn safety goggles.

I found myself almost wishing that the old lady from the district office would stop by again, like she did my first year, to proclaim, “I think safety goggles are SEXY!”

In the afternoon class, a couple of girls had written a very confusing slogan on their poster – “Mittens with hands always wear bad.” They had drawn an equally confusing picture that seemed to show chemicals dripping on someone’s hands, causing bloody stigmata to bloom.

Before you ask, these girls are NOT from Japan, so we can safely assume they had nothing to do with the instructions that come with every batch of solder at Heat Pumps – “Must do not lick up solder unsafe.”

Later in the afternoon, we had a couple of incidents that flew in the face of those safety posters.

At recess, one of Mrs. Frisch’s boys jumped out of a swing at its highest point. Displaying incredibly anti-feline tendencies, he did NOT land on his feet. Instead, he served as a cautionary tale in a new video safety series I’m creating called “The Playground Is Red.”

In all seriousness, it was a relatively minor injury, and I think there was a much larger quantity of tears than blood that came out of the boy. The school nurse took a look at him and sent him back with a wet paper towel and a bandage on his noggin.

The other unsafe moment came at the end of the day, when I almost lost a student.

Because of the high temperatures and the lack of rain, a lot of the earth out by the buses has separated, creating narrow holes, some of which are about a foot deep. I was leading my kids out to the buses when I suddenly heard a yelp from behind me. I turned around and saw that one of Felipe’s legs had disappeared up to the knee! He had stepped in one of the sinkholes and now looked upset, hurt, and confused all at once.

He’s not a tall boy to begin with, and everyone standing around staring at him now appeared to be twice his size.

I hooked my hands under his armpits and lifted him out of the hole, but his shoe remained wedged in the earth! I had to get down on my hands and knees to reach down into the pit and work it free.

Thankfully, I got all of the kids to their buses without further incident. I’ve never lost a student in my teaching career, and I wasn’t about to let some wannabe Sarlaac Pit ruin my track record in the first week of school!

Mrs. Frisch later commented ominously that she hopes the sinkhole will still be there when Roy’al returns from suspension. If it is, I may need to provide safety goggles to my students for that perilous trek out to the bus. Let’s just hope there are no dormant volcanoes waiting to erupt.
Talk to you later,
Hole-ly Moses

Either it’s an incredibly eerie coincidence that your A/C is out at work too, or you should be very concerned that my school district has taken over HPU. Either way, it’s going to get real hot, real soon, so I hope for both our sakes that the problem is fixed quickly.

By the way, your (far too vivid) description of a sweat-soaked Larry will give me nightmares for weeks to come.

I’ll see what I can do about getting you a few of those safety posters to put up around the manufacturing floor. No doubt seeing those crayon-rendered depictions of tragedy will inspire the assemblers to follow their safety procedures more cautiously – AND make them fearful that management has lost their marbles.

I’m about to lose my own marbles here. Only seven days into the school year, and already I’ve received about 800 requests to go to the restroom. This is in addition to our regularly scheduled class bathroom breaks, mind you.

Breaks which usually take three times longer than they should, courtesy of the girls.

When we take our class breaks, I send four boys and four girls into their respective bathrooms. As each child comes out, another goes in, until everyone is finished. The entire group of boys is usually finished before the first girl has even exited. This is not the case with my afternoon class, which includes a couple of boys who sit in the bathroom for nearly ten minutes after lunch each day. I feel like I should start offering Tyler and Antonio a copy of the Wall Street Journal to peruse during their “thinking time.”

Back to the morning class, though, and the girls. After a few bathroom breaks that seemed to last longer than The English Patient, I asked Miss Palmerstein, another third grade teacher, to stick her head in the girl’s restroom and find out what was going on with my kids. She told me that she saw a girl walk into the bathroom, push open the first stall door, give a long, lingering look at whatever was inside, and then move to the next stall to repeat the process.

Now that I know what they’re doing, when things seem to be moving slowly, I shout in at them, “Just pick one and go! Stop comparison shopping!”

We take our class break around 9:00 each morning. The kids know that. Still, it doesn’t stop them from asking individually if they can make the trip, sometimes as early as 8:05!

Today, I finally decided to take a moment of class time and read to them “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Primarily so that I could follow it up with my own version of the story – “The Kid Who Cried Bathroom.”

It’s usually fairly obvious when a child is truly having a potty emergency and when they are trying to fake it. Especially when they feel the need to accompany their request with an exaggerated version of the Pee Pee Dance, suggesting that if I don’t immediately say yes, the room is going to be flooded.

However, I have had kids leak on themselves – remember “My bowels be runnin” from long ago? – and that is never a good thing. So now I am always leery about what basically comes down to a game of “bathroom chicken.”
Student X: “I gotta use it!”
Me: “We just took a class bathroom break twenty minutes ago.”
Student X: “It’s an emergency!!”
Me: “Come on, you just went. You don’t need to go again.”
Student X: “Oh yeah? Watch this!”
[Student’s face starts turning red, grunting sounds begin emanating, thin sheen of sweat appears on student’s brow…]

In my never ending quest to prevent self-soilage AND deception, I have found two tricks that usually work pretty well. The first is to give the student a choice in the matter. “OK, you can go to the restroom now, but you’ll have to sit out for five minutes of recess, OR, you can hold it.”

I call that my “Sponge Statement,” because it’s amazing how often those words will seem to immediately soak up the impending deluge in the kid’s bladder and allow him to resume his class work with ease.

The second trick, when I’m pretty sure that they really do need to go, is to time them. I usually give the boys one minute and the girls two minutes, and I tell them that if they’re not sitting back at their desks again when that time is up, they will miss 10 minutes of recess (or 15, or 22 ½, or whatever strikes my fancy at the time).

Of course there are some kids who couldn’t care less about whether they have recess or not. These are usually the same kids that consistently do not do their homework or bring back required signatures from their parents. But those kids are the exception, and those two tricks have worked pretty well for the majority of my kids.

For the others, I’m thinking about printing out a copy of “The Kid Who Cried Bathroom” for their lengthy stall visits. If they’re going to miss math instruction, they may as well work on their reading skills.

Though it might seem fun, I don’t know that I’d suggest giving Larry a time constraint when he goes to the bathroom. Isn’t he the one who boasts loudly about staying in there until his legs go numb? You may as well put a copy of War and Peace in there.

And leave it to Tom Winter to mix up his stories. The REAL story is “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” MY story is “The Kid Who Cried Bathroom.” Tell Winter to stop crying “WOLF!” while IN the bathroom!

Enough potty humor. Let’s move on to one of my favorite subjects – money, money, money!

Our topic for the week has been counting and adding money. The kids have to identify a collection of coins in a picture and then find the total amount of money.

I have bucketfuls of fake money to use when I teach this topic. I’ve got plastic coins of all denominations and bright green paper bills. When I first pass these out and let the kids begin using them, I always make the announcement, “This is not real money! Please do not steal any of it from me and then try to go buy a Slurpee with it!”