Sad Afternoon

An aspect of my job that I hadn't really planned on doing was being mommy/counselor when things go wrong. I knew that kids could be mean, but I didn't realize they'd be so mean. Today, for example, when I went to pick up my kids from Gym class, I noticed that two of the girls were crying. Both girls are fairly overweight, but it's never really been an issue in our classroom - by that I mean no one has teased them or given them any cause to feel bad about their size.

Today, however, some fourth grade boys decided it would be funny to call the girls "hippopotamus" and "elephant" in front of the other kids. When we got back to the classroom, I stayed in the hall with the girls to find out what was going on - to find out why they were crying. It took them about ten minutes to get the truth out. I imagine it was pretty humiliating for them to relive and recall what had been said, and they might have even been scared that I would laugh, too. After all, they're only eight years old, and if their fellow classmates would laugh at them, why wouldn't I laugh at them also?

Figuring out what to say and do was so scary. I found myself starting to cry as I watched these two scared girls break down into sobs. I wanted to just hug them and tell them they were good girls and that everything would be alright, but I know that's not true. Realistically, if these girls stay heavy, they will continue to receive cruel treatment from their peers, and as they enter junior high it will only get worse. I didn't share that information with them, of course, but I was honest with them.

First I explained some people are just mean. When I was little, I told them, kids used to make fun of me for being too bookish and too white. I got called four-eyes, nerd, albino, Casper, and probably a bunch of other things I don't remember. It was my hope that by sharing the fact that I had been teased as well, they would trust me more and take my advice more seriously. Then I told them that there would always be someone mean that would pick on them, and that instead of giving the person the pleasure of seeing them cry, they should just hold their head up and walk away.

It got even more fun after school. I had to apprehend some sixth graders who used more profanity in the span of 30 seconds than I've ever heard anyone use. Right in the middle of the hallway, when there were still some little kids left in the building. It's rather scary to reprimand the older kids; they're likely to do something to your car, your classroom, or even to you. Some of them are bigger than me, but, I must remember that they are still kids, and still see me as an authority figure [which is just downright hilarious to me since I am anything but authoritative].

On the good side of things today, my new car still blows my mind and my paycheck was a hundred dollars more than I expected it to be. Plus I still get to sell the old car, which will net enough money to pay my car insurance for the entirety of 2003. Should, I should say. The car's in fairly bad shape, but it does have a solid engine, fabulous air conditioner and best of all, a good stereo. Ignore the dent in the front and the warped rotors on the two back tires and it's a fine automobile. All I think about now is my car. I just want to go out and drive it all the time. Sad, really, that that's the best thing in my world right now, isn't it? That's really not true, now that I think about it. The best thing is that I have a grandma that loves me enough to drop a huge amount of money on a car she'll never drive and will ride in only a few times. I'm really lucky.

Classroom Drama

More drama in the classroom. I've had a weird situation going on in my class; I probably shouldn't go into too much detail, but the basic story is that there's a boy in my class who has been "touching the girls inappropriately."

Yeah. In third grade.

So, I thought I had the situation under control - his parents took him to a counselor, he got in trouble, etc.
Well, yesterday morning, I got called to the principal's office for an emergency. I was freaked out to say the least - I thought someone had died. I didn't expect to go in and find one of my students along with her whole family wanting to know why I hadn't let her tell me that the boy had been bothering her. It was regular slam-the-teacher fest. I was angry. This little girl has had many opportunities to tell me what was going on [if it's even true; I don't believe her.] after school or during other times of the day. She's come to me about other things, and, on top of that, I specifically told the girls that they could tell me they needed to talk to me privately if a situation arose.

Two things bothered me about this more than anything else. Well, three.

1. This little girl is a liar, one way or the other, and she got away with it.*

2. I was called into the office having no idea what was going on. Enough people knew who was in there and why that they could have given me a little advance notice so I'd be able to prepare myself.

3. I really don't think he did it this time. He's been really good since the prior incidents, and I keep him separated from the girls.

Which leads me back to the lying. I feel so sorry for anyone that's falsely accused of rape, sexual harassment, or some other pervy crime. It's such a hard place to be - someone comes to you with an accusation, and you have to take it seriously, yet you doubt there's any truth in the statements. You can't just blow it off, because on the off chance that it is true, you could get sued, which could lead to the loss of your job, and so on. So this kid, who might be totally innocent this time, gets all sorts of punishment and makes it to where I have to give my class a little seminar on sexual harassment complete with one of those terrible videos meant to make the viewers better people, but really just make them hate whoever shows them the video for making them suffer.

I can't think about this anymore. I have to give a sex talk to eight year old children. Gross. I just thought about what kind of awful Google searches that sentence will turn up. Gross, gross, gross.

*Post Script - she did end up admitting to making the whole thing up to get attention.

Visitors

It has been such a wonderful weekend so far. I had Friday off due to Fair Day [a day for all the kids and teachers to have a chance to go to the State Fair, which ends tomorrow] and, of course, I did not use it to go to the fair. When I woke up I started cleaning right away, and literally cleaned all day long. My apartment looks amazing. Everything is in its place. All my clothes and linens are clean, the floors are clean; yes, there is extrinsic motivation for this. My mom and grandma are on their way here right now.

Last night I made the mistake of going out - I went with my neighbors to Monica's, which was wonderful - there was this fantastic Flamenco-sounding band playing, and the food was good, yet not too expensive. The night went downhill after that though. We drove all the way out to Mesquite to go to the BYOB bowling alley. BYOB bowling. It doesn't get much better than that. Anyway, when we got there, there were no lanes open, and we'd have to wait an hour and a half to get one! We ended up bringing the beer suitcase [that's really what this thing is that my neighbor has] back here to the complex and I stayed up way too late. I'm hurting this morning.

Letter

This is probably the nicest thing anyone's ever written to me, but, well, just read it. Parts of it are so odd. But nice of course.

Dear Miss ____,

You are the best teacher I ever had, and the nicer teacher. You have cute eyes like the rainbow. I like your hair and is red like the flowers. I wich I could be a teacher like you because you are smart, nice, and beautiful like the angels. I will miss you when I'm in vacation with my family. I wich you have a good vacation. I like been with you because you teach us fun stuff.

By _______

Your Friends

The kids are so sweet sometimes. Makes the bureaucracy, unreasonable hours and other tortures almost worth it. New teachers: I learned something really important today. It is a lot easier to teach in a neat, clean, organized room. A student and his sister stayed after last Tuesday [that was the last time we had school - we were closed half of last week] and helped me clean and organize our classroom. It was so much easier to keep the kids calm and keep my sanity since the room was so nice. Even in the midst of an unexpected fire drill in the rain, and a fistfight at lunch between one of my little kids and a fourth grader, the kids were pretty calm today. Amazing. It also helps to remember that they're just little kids, and these kids in particular have dealt with so many awful things during their short lives.

I only have to work three more days this week, and then I have three days off. And next month, I get almost a week off for Thanksgiving. Then...a mere three weeks after that...Winter Break! Two glorious weeks away from children and teachers and schedules and the free time to be able to do something or go somewhere or at least sleep in and go shopping on Wednesday afternoons. Also, I heard about this BYOB bowling alley not too far from here that I want to check out.

Books

This week has been really irritating. Not so much the events, but the state of my health. I have no voice. It's gone, scratchy, raspy, and painful. And my own fault, because I don't give myself time to rest and heal from whatever this Third Grade Plague is. Speaking of third grade, I am very proud of my class, because we were the only third grade class [out of six] to avoid being stricken with lice. I never had lice as a child, and don't plan to get it as a teacher. Children are so nasty. I swear. This job has made me really think hard about ever having any.

Lots of socializing this week. I've gone out nearly every night. This is a stark contrast to Normal Me, who likes to stay home and be a hermit. I even have a guest here this weekend at my house, which is nice. Also nice is that my mom just came by on her way through town and brought me winter clothes. It has, magically, become cold overnight. I had one sweater and one denim jacket [which I left at someone else's house] to keep me warm, since I moved up here in the summer and only brought summer clothes. She even brought me my nice tall boots and a box of this vegetarian soup that I can't find in the grocery store here. Also, she gave me her copy of The Lovely Bones, which I've wanted to read for a while.

Books. I am totally absorbed right now. I think it has to do with the desperate need I have to escape from the sad reality which is my life. On Friday, I finally finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I can now officially say is the best book I have ever read. I loved it so much that I cried when it was over. As soon as I was done I read the supplementary novella from McSweeney's #7, and I cried when I finished that too. I don't know what it was about this book and its characters, but it breaks my heart that these guys weren't real, and that there is no more of their story to tell. It should be interesting to see how the movie turns out - according to Chabon's website he's still adapting the novel for the screen, so it will probably be a while before we find out.

I started both Fast Food Nation, which I've been putting off for quite some time, and The Corrections, which a friend is insisting I read, on Saturday. Fast Food Nation will be a quick read, but The Corrections will probably take a while.

Can someone do something to make it snow so that school will be closed tomorrow? I really don't want to go.

$1 Bellinis

More district training today. Most of it was boring, but the afternoon session was great, and not just because the guy let us leave really early. The program we learned about might actually make my life easier. Many of the things provided by this fine [hah.] district that are supposed to help us, more often than not, just mean more work for the teacher or less real instruction for the students. All this nonsense about standardized tests is making me very ill.

A few years ago, well, maybe it was just last year? Yeah, last year, I was still at the paper in Austin and wrote a very long, very boring article about the new state-mandated test for schoolchildren in Texas. I did the best I could with the material I was able to gather, but, nonetheless, even I found the article so boring I didn't want to edit it. Standardized tests are just naturally repulsive, dry, awful material. [Pay special attention to this paragraph and how boring it is. This is my point.] It makes no sense to me at all. Children must pass the test to be promoted to the next grade level. This is to ensure that the student has learned the required TEKS [Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills] and is educated enough move on.

The nonsensical part comes in here: in teaching to this test, the children actually learn very little. Many, many hours of class time are wasted on "test-taking strategies," pre-tests, sample tests, and so on. All lesson plans must fit into the guidelines set up by the TEKS. This leaves little room for creativity or flexibility on the teacher's part. Important things like Spelling and Cursive are deemed unnecessary [at my school, anyway, I will note that these two items are covered briefly in the TEKS] and using class time for these instruction areas is frowned upon. People need to know how to spell! They need to know how to write in cursive! I want my students to be able to write a nice letter to their grandma in which they have lovely penmanship and spell their words correctly.

I guess I should shut up now, not only because I'm probably boring most of you, but because someone reading this might have kids in schools in Texas, and I don't want them to think our perfect education system is flawed. [Again, hah.]

I found a place in Dallas that has $1 Bellinis on Wednesdays. This is the highlight of my day. The low point of the day was actually giving the people at Kwik Kar Kare $40 to inspect the ghettomobile. I've been putting it off for a while. The fact that it passed amazes me. Even the emissions part! And when I got the oil changed, the guy didn't even bother trying to sell me a new air filter.
No pushy mechanics, $1 Bellinis, and rain. I suppose today wasn't so bad after all.

Evil World

It's five minutes into the 9 o'clock news, and the newscasters are still talking about people getting shot. The situation near Washington D.C. is just staggeringly awful - I think if I lived up there I would not leave my house. I'd get groceries delivered and hide.

Now they're talking about a shooting that happened here in Dallas. A father of a new baby. Thirty rounds from a "military-style" weapon. Another town around here - a police officer and a customer were shot to death in a gas station parking lot. Does that really seem necessary? Why are people filled with so much hatred and rage that they randomly shoot and kill people?

If I think about this too much it gets to me. I get scared living alone. What if something happened to me and I died? How long would it take for people to figure it out? What would happen to my cat? All of my stuff? I've been thinking lately that I should write a will. I wrote one, once, as fun afternoon activity with a childhood friend.

We were about eight or nine, I think, and now that I am recalling these things we used to do, we were pretty dark, depressive, odd. Both of us had the foundation to end up in trouble - she did, I didn't. One afternoon we were talking about dying, and decided to write wills. Silly things like, "All my books go to Katie, all my dolls go to Amber," and so forth. Just the fact that we discussed and wrote out last wishes seems crazy to me now that I work with children who are eight and nine years old. I can't imagine any of them doing something like that, yet death is something so much more familiar to these kids than it was for me and Katie.

They've dealt with so much. One kid, near the beginning of the school year, missed a couple of days because he had to go to a funeral for the cousin he saw get shot in the head. Another girl, a tiny, sweet little eight-year-old, each day at school, at least once, mentions the baby her older sister had last year that died. She draws pictures of babies with angel wings and has a picture of the dead baby in her school notebook. Every time I have the classes do something with drawing, at least one of them draws something to do with the World Trade Center. Today, for example, I instructed them to make a poster encouraging people to respect the Earth. Ecology. Anti-pollution. I didn't expect one kid to draw a picture of two tall buildings with little cross grave markers on them, with a plane going toward the building, and a note above the plane reading, "Please respect the earth by not crashing into buildings." I don't even know where to begin to discuss this kind of thing with the children. It's really more their parents' place, but sometimes they ask me questions, and I wish I had the answers.

I worry about these kids. I feel so responsible for them. It's a scary world. I wish there was something I could tell them to make them feel safe. I wish there was something I could tell myself so I might feel safe. Living in fear is a horrible thing, but when, every time I turn on the news, I see yet another thing that makes me scared, I can't help it.

Hmm. I'm probably just being dramatic because I'm doped up on both Benadryl and Contac, trying to kill the flu before it kills me. I never go to bed before midnight, and here it is 9:30, with me in my pyjamas ready to go to sleep. I don't like being sick. Especially when I absolutely have to go to work. At least the kids are off Wednesday through Friday. I can deal with sitting through boring lectures because then at least I can sit down. Monitoring 19 people's actions all day makes being sick a little more difficult.

Linguistic Theory

There are few things in the world more annoying and pointless than standardized tests. Today, I had to take one of the lamest of them all: The ExCet [examination for the certification of educators in Texas - specifically the English as a Second Language certification test for me]. To relate how useless this test is - I have been teaching for two months now without having taken it. It means nothing. It's a state-mandated technicality. The time allotted for the exam is five hours; it took me less than one hour to complete. I'm either a linguistics genius, or I completely failed it and will have to pay another $72.00 in April to take the exam again. (Side note - as it turned out, I guess I was a genius after all - I aced that test.)

Everyone Loves a Parade

Today I was walking home from the liquor store near my apartment, and there were all these cops everywhere. I started talking to this guy [he was, in all seriousness, the human embodiment of Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel] who had, of course, a police scanner, but couldn't figure out what sort of crime was going on to warrant all the police.

Then I heard the familiar sound of a high school drum line and realized that there was a parade coming through the neighborhood! It was so exciting. Some high school was having their homecoming parade, through my neighborhood, early on an Wednesday evening. So odd, but also very entertaining. Cletus and I were the only English speakers around, so I couldn't really talk to anyone. There were kids everywhere...they were so excited about the parade.

Man. My life is so G-Rated these days. Anybody want to come over and have a torrid affair or do drugs or smash computers or something else deviant?

Tomorrow is Thursday which means the next day is Friday...quite a good thing. I'm exhausted and need a weekend for lots of sleeping.