Friday the 13th

I'm not superstitious but I think one of Hell's minions escaped on this accursed day, this one in the guise of a 7th grader named Chad:

"I just wanted to properly greet you and let you know that the only reason I'm here is to make sure you earn your paycheck."

Well, Chad, I can always send you down to the office and make sure the principal earns his ...

Comedy

Scene: AHS, special ed room. Students are supposed to work on homework or in-class work with my help. One student won't do anything, and won't do the default activity of reading a book.

Me: Will, I'm going to ask again if there is ANYTHING you can do right now to be productive?

Will: Nope. Just wanna sleep, or go home.

Girl Across The Room: Will, you are so lazy that when you die they need to bury you on your stomach to give your ass a break!



I just about died trying not to laugh.

Don't see this every day ...

Usually my "normal" friends get to discuss their day at work like this:

"Today someone brought cookies!"

Or,

"Today our servers went down, luckily I had some filing to do!"

I get to say:

"Today two 8th grade boys performed for the class, one rapping and the other providing the beat with a dingeridoo!"

My day ruled!

(Confused? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didgeridoo )

Good Things.

So, those of you who know me know that I had one particularly awful day on Tuesday and that the fallout is still ... falling. I will post about it once all the chips are down. Anyways, the rest of the week was spent at different assignments at OHS and boy was I glad!! It's like going home. And the kids are so awesome. A few examples from today:

I wore my "Queen Bee" costume and got lots of laughs and compliments. I even got one "Your Highness." And a drawing!

Not bad for a 17 year old, right?

One of the girls dressed up as Tank Girl. So rad.

One of my former students offered to organize some sort of march on the school district office to get me my job back.

A special ed kid told me that there is an eagle in his head that is controlled by the GPS and other machinery in his glasses. Only not really! Ha ha!

AND one of my former co-workers bought me a beer after work. TGIF!

He was so quiet ...

... kept to himself a lot.

So this is a post about an origami lesson gone a bit awry. Middle school, the class was called "Explorations" or some other such nonsense, pretty much it is what passes for an elective in a K-8 with no art teacher. So, the math teacher I was subbing for was supposed to do art projects with a random group of 7th and 8th graders. She thought it would be easier on the sub to have them do study hall while she was away but previous experience with this group taught me otherwise. So, I busted out some copy paper and the one tupperware of lost little colored pencils and came up with an origami lesson.

Step 1: Fold a triangle across your paper and cut off the excess to make a square. (This takes them more than 5 minutes, I swear.)

Step 2: Select two or three colors and make a spring-time pattern all over your paper. (I demo with pink cherry blossoms and orange dots.) Remember! Do not draw a picture, just repeat one or two elements all over the page!!

I give them 20 minutes or so and circulate while they draw. Bunnies, lines, polka dots, leaves, flowers, birds start to appear on the papers.

Except one kid.

Who has drawn, in startling detail, a dead bird in the center of his page. He took a red colored pencil, drew the blood pool coming out from under it.

Now, I'm 99% sure that he did it just to get a rise out of me and the other kids, a small rebellion against cheerful lesson plans and limiting instructions. But 1% of me? Not so sure.

And that's the thing about substitute teaching. You see the tiniest slice of what a student is all about. You can go on your gut of "is this kid going to be a problem for the next 45 minutes?" but you really know nothing about them. All you can do is your best with a smile, and hope that someday in the future you won't be reading the newspaper and find yourself saying "but he was such a nice boy...."

More found objects

OK, to lighten the mood after Friday's disaster of a day ...






Why does emo Jeff draw vaginas? The world will never know ...

Kids say ...

The most bizarre things.

Overheard 5th graders chatting (and started taking copious notes)....

Boy 1: Pulls something small out of his pocket. OMG! The tracker! They're sending banshees after us!

Boy 2: How did you get that?!?!

Boy 1: I put it in my pocket when I was pretending to throw away my plasma gun in the forest ...

Boys continue to discuss the epic battle in the forest while I grab furiously for pencil and paper. An important point of order arises: are they called force fields or bubble shields? And, how much does it protect you from things with blue tentacles.

Boy 3: What if you had a Breeder on your team? That would be awesome.

Boy 1: Yeah, but they don't have tentacles ...

Oh man, do I wish I had a plasma gun, if only for pretend.