Thursday, October 01, 2009

Day #22

Fairly typical week at the March. A child died of H1N1 up the road from our school. A 6th grader's mother was shot and killed by her boyfriend. I had a knife in my room last period, and was told "get out my face" by a 6'1" child as I was talking to his mother on the phone. I brought my last period class back from a half-hour session in the computer lab and they went nuts during transition, and it took ten minutes to get them in their chairs. While this chaos was going on, two administrators were in the hall watching me, waiting to do a walk-through to see if I had all the required shit up on my walls. I'm like "little help here?" and they just stood there watching. Ridiculous. This is the class with 30 kids, the one I'm supposed to have a co-teacher and special educator for, but I will get reamed out for classroom management tomorrow I'm sure.

The kids continue stabbing each other with pencils. A girl got stabbed in the face and the tip broke off. Her mother is furious, and rightly so. I've called several houses about kids who stab each other. The parents promise it will stop but the same kids keep doing it. They are all going to get MRSA.

My classes in the computer labs went pretty well today. One suggestion: ditch the fucking chairs on wheels. That is a recipe for disaster in any B'more classroom, let alone a middle school classroom. Wheeled chairs are too much fun. Kids use them for jousting with sharpened pencils and shit. Maryland state sport and all.

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