Posts Tagged ‘five’
It’s my water bottle. Quiet.
No it isn’t.
Be quiet and do your test or leave.
Okay.
He left, very noisily bouncing his basketball on his way out. The RSP coach left her assigned student, writing Mr. Balla up for referral to a vice principal.
Because he never shows up, I didn’t even know what name to tell her to put on the referral. Naturally.
This class is usually trouble, as the RSP coach is well aware. She’s been here before. Patronizingly, she leans and whispers hoarsely into my ear.
I know they’re bad and how you’re just a student teacher, so maybe I might have an idea that will help you. All the ringleaders are next to the window, so maybe a seating chart? I don’t know if you’ve thought of it.
Yes, I have. Given a warning, they behave themselves just enough so I don’t have pretext to mess with the seating chart. I would have told her that, but she went on to repeat herself for a good minute or two, in the same patronizing whisper. She tells me nothing I don’t already know, nothing I haven’t already thought of.
I’ve already asked myself: Is there something I’m doing wrong, something so seemingly small or insignificant that I don’t even remember it, or to mention it here in the blog? I don’t suppose the reader would know the answer to that question.
This is the same class where even one would-be gangster who shows up regularly will very casually bump into me while walking by, where two girls who love talking back will waddle in five minutes past the lunch bell, noisily slurping their Icee.
I can’t very well lay down the law — my master teacher never minded these habits at all, and the students know he’s really the teacher of record. I’ll be the mean teacher and lose the efficacy I already have.
They can sense that he knows what he’s doing and I don’t. Every week, someone in fifth period tells me:
You’re not a real teacher.
With less than a month of instruction left, it’s too late to fix this class. I just can’t shake the feeling that it would have been so much easier if I had started off the year with them, rather than coming in halfway.
Half of my fifth period class is consistently studious. The other half might as well be the half-of-class from hell.
I usually chalk this modern world history class’ horrible-osity to that it is full of sophomores, fresh from lunch, or the at least one charismatically obnoxious RSP kid who steals attention from the lesson whenever possible.
Today, the class was worse than it had ever been.
There are 36 desks in this fifth period classroom and 39 kids. If you believe everything you read, that’s an overcrowding worthy of New York City.
Strangely enough, I don’t usually have a problem with this. Though the room is a swamp cooler away from being a sweatbox half the time, chances are that no more than 29 students show up on any given day. The 10 students missing tend to be the sort of students who don’t mind missing or disrupting class at the slightest provacation.
Except Thursday.
This was the day we did our benchmark tests. This was also the day that 37 students decided to show up, including the all but one of the aggrivatingest hellions who never show up.
I asked them to shush. They didn’t. Overcome with student snottiness, my voice grew in volume until I practically barked at them to be quiet in the manner of my master teacher, but without the months of street cred.
Rookie mistake, but it seemed to have worked this time. Temporarily, they got mostly quiet. Temporarily, they mostly followed instructions for the benchmark tests.
I took a swig from my water bottle, and an otherwise perpetually absent hellion responded.
What the fuck?
The class erupted, again. Hell.
First Five Minutes of Class
April 7, 2008 in The Way It Were
Tags: amendment, black, class, classroom, cnn, comments, crazy, culled, establishment, first, five, government, history, journal, management, minutes, obama, packet, pastor, preacher, quiz, relevant, religion, sciences, snagged, social, studies, thursday, white
Good morning, class. I know that it’s a pleasure for me to see each and every one of you, but I know it’s even more of a pleasure for each and every one of you to see me.
Don’t forget that on the board is today’s journal. I’ll read the prompt:
Continue writing if you haven’t finished your journal already.
Be sure to pick up this week’s packet. Don’t forget that to more than one point on Thursday’s quiz, you must turn in this packet completed. For every opinion article in this packet, remember your Read and Response. For those of you who are new, that requires you to write one paragraph summary and one paragraph reaction. Easy cheesy.
One of the columns is about Martin Luther King, Jr., and is especially appropriate as we begin our week studying the Civil Rights movement and the development of its constitutional basis. We’ll segue into this movement using a fiery pastor with ties to Barack Obama and a discussion of both their free speech and free religion.
I’ll be passing out actual responses to the sermon I culled — that means “snagged” — from comments at CNN.com. If you get one, you’ll get to read it aloud. Be sure you act it out passionately, as if you actually believe it. That way we get the real feeling of what that person is saying.
Say, for example, you get this:
If you’re mumble and monotone when you read it aloud, I’ll make sure you have to get up and do it again. Raise your hand if you’d like to volunteer. Okay, that looks good.
Just a hint: You should probably read it while we wait for the last few people to finish their journal. You’ll have a little bit of time to prepare while we watch and discuss the six-second soundbite version of the sermon. Depending on your quote, you’ll go before or after we watch the seven-minute version of the same sermon and discuss it.
Before we get to that, go ahead and take a minute or two finishing up your journal. I’ll pass out the comment slips, and finish getting set up.
I’ll be here if you have any questions.
****
In other news: George Washington is just too vulgar for school, sometimes; same with JFK.