yay, march!!!

So evidently it's March. Let's celebrate by playing "teacher" in a classroom full of ROWDY, HYPER, CRAZY students. Yucky!! My kids were off the wall today. The WHOLE day. We hit the ground running this morning, and it went that way all day. I'm SOOOO incredibly relieved that today's over!!

In the morning, we practiced our readers' theatre scripts. Our class is performing 3 different plays (they're broken into groups), and we did a read-through today. It'll be interesting to see how their performances go tomorrow. However, I was pleasantly surprised by a few of my "lower" kids' reading!! Some of them really got into their characters (imagine a shy girl shouting out lines in a good Southern accent and a boy who "hates" reading passionately crying out his lines with hand motions). It was really cool at some points. However, the kids who weren't reading at any given time felt it unnecessary to pay attention or at least be quiet. I had to continually stop, redirecting my noisy little monsters.

In the afternoon, a mother came in to help out with a social studies lesson. I did what *should've* been a cool lesson on explorers. I did it during my student teaching (5th grade), and the kids loved it. I learned today that the material was a bit too intense for most of my 4th graders. Live and learn, right? The kids were just out of control, so I had to have them work absolutely silently for a while. Even the mother commented to me, "They're different kids here. This is a rough area." I couldn't help but nod enthusiastically in agreement. Oy. I'll grade their papers either tonight or tomorrow, and see how they did. We were *supposed* to play a game as a culminating activity, but the kids were just too loud. It sucks. And I can't help but think it's me failing at maintaining order in the classroom. So many of the other teachers blame the kids, the parents, and the area, but I tend to take it pretty personally. I feel like an effective teacher a.) presents good enough lessons to maintain a lot of control in the class, and b.) is able to keep the kids relatively quiet and on task for the majority of the day. I feel like I do neither, but that there should be a way to do it. Arg.

The day ended with NO recess because it took the kids forever to clean up the classroom and stand silently at their desks. Grrr... I also had to tutor after school. SO not worth the $20, but oh, well. I usually work with grades 4-6, as I have material for this age group. However, due to scheduling issues, I worked with the kids in grades 1-3 today. They were SO impatient!! Every few minutes, one of them would ask, "Is it time for us to go home yet??" :P We even played a game for the first 20 minutes, but one boy kept running around the classroom. Awesome. Finally, when the time was up, I walked them over to the other building to wait for the activity bus. The activity bus showed up 30 minutes later. Yuck!! I waited with another teacher, supervising 15ish kids who were wound up from the day. When the bus FINALLY came, I felt like taking a 3-day nap. However, there was still PTO-related work to do, and now I need to wrap up in the classroom before heading home.

In other news, my little sis will be here in 2 days!! :) She's coming to visit for a week for her spring break. I'm pysched!! I'm even more excited because we have TWO field trips next week (which the sis is unvoluntarily chaperoning!), AND I have a conference on Monday. All said and done, I'll only be in the classroom 2 and a half days next week. Pretty sweet. Then it's spring break!! Two of the other newbies and I are finalizing our Vegas plans, so it'll be awesome.

Tomorrow is the culmination of "Read Across America" week. To "celebrate," we're letting the kids dress up as characters from their favorite books. The other 5th grade teacher will be going as Mrs. Nelson from the series about the nasty substitute. It'll be awesome. I'll see if I can pull something together. Also, in the afternoon, we'll have a schoolwide parade on the playground with posters and books and costumes. The local newspaper may be coming to document the insanity. Finally, we'll be both performing and watching readers' theatre with other classes in the afternoon. I can already tell that tomorrow will be CRAZY. Wish us luck!

For now, time to wrap up and go home to clean! Peace!

P.S. Some food for thought... I was on The Hunger Site today, and there was a provocative quote on it... "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we do about living." - Omar N. Bradley

Amen, brother.