1st period I had an unexpected miracle. Most of the guys in the class were dragging their feet on the assignment, while another had finished his outline, script, and background on the first day. He was doing a story on someone who had a hard life, with a reporter at the beginning and end. The student who has been ditching or in SMARTS for weeks came back today. I'm not sure how it all happened, but first I asked if he'd read the part of the guy with the hard life so he could get some credit for the assignment, but he struggled to read the other student's handwriting. So I asked if he'd just talk to me about his life and what has been hard about it. Now this is a kid who has been ditching my class because he was mad at me for catching him ditching another class amongst other things. All of the sudden, he was talking about his parents and his home life and why he started smoking. I think it took me a few minutes to pick my jaw up off the floor.
2nd period I felt like I was a failure. I received an email that morning about a student that had been under review to go up to the next grade level. There had been some concern about her behavior and was the last thing holding her back. She had been doing really well in my class until this week. I wanted to help her out and give her a heads up on what was going on. I asked her if I could talk to her for a moment in the hallway. She totally blew up. She wouldn't talk to me, she kept yelling at me, she walked out to get a drink of water, and I saw another teacher in the hallway so I asked him to watch my class for a second (he also has her in one of his classes). I tried to explain what was going on, but she just threw it back at me, saying she didn't care and she'd just leave the school. Not really sure what I'm going to do on Monday for her, or if I'm going to leave her alone until she's ready to talk to me again.
3rd period I stopped trying to film. I had covered the bay door to the shop with paper, but it was really windy outside, which caused the door to bang loudly and drowned out the students beyond recognition. After two class periods of leaning against the door to try to keep it quieter, I gave up. I had a girl ask me if she could use my printer to print out something for her English class. I told her no, since she had not been doing anything in class all week. Since she's 18, she can leave if she wants, so she called her mom, then the office, and left.
By 4th period, "Friday" takes over with these kids. I wasn't going to film, and the kids fight like crazy and start bouncing off walls on Friday afternoon. So I took a different approach. After waiting a LONG TIME for everyone to settle down (i.e., one students kept jumping out of his chair to do pushups), I took some suggestions on games we could play and wrote them on the board. Most of the students then participated as I taught them a new warmup, then played Ninja and Charades.
Sixth period we started by taking suggestions and voting on games to play. After the first few, one of the students left to go to the restroom. Before I realized it, I said, "Hey let's play a trick on him and hide in the storage closet!" Everyone totally played along. One student sat at the front of the class alone in a chair, two hid under a table, and the rest of us hid in the storage room. When he came back, we didn't do a ver good job of scaring him, but we went back to our seats. Then I realized I was missing a student. Uh oh. A moment later, one of the drawers in the back of the room started to open and close on its own. Then the one next to it. We all burst out laughing. One of my students had crawled into the cupboard underneath and was opening and closing the drawer above. Before I knew it, my kids decided they wanted to make a haunted house. So we're plotting together a super secret haunted house in our room during the school's Halloween Party. Then one of them said, "We should charge like a dollar for admission and use it as a fundraiser so we can go on a field trip." How awesome is that?! So we'll be spending the month designing and building what we can. So cool. Shhhhhh.
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