I know I just blogged about myself recently, but I really have to express how much of a ridiculous day today was. I will break up the ridiculousness by grade, so you can see the order of the chaos today. Oh, the life of being a teacher.
7th Grade: the class where someone threw up
What a way to kick off my morning! We had just finished up talking about conflict in the book when suddenly one of the boys (in the front row!) yaked all over his copy of 'My Brother Sam is Dead'. Now, I used to have a terrible gag reflex. It's gotten a little better over time, but mostly I base my gag reflex on a case-by-case basis. Like one time a student threw up in the office and I had to print something in there and I completely forgot about that because the office smelled so awful. Luckily, when Tristan puked, my reflex was behaving, so i promptly escorted him to the bathroom.
Now, the bathrooms at my school are a little weird. On the first floor, where I teach, there is just the girls' bathroom and the teachers' bathroom. In the basement is the boys' bathroom. Now, I was not about to take Tristan down two flights of stairs to the boys bathroom so I lead him into the girls, which was, unfortunately, occupied by two third grade girls who screamed bloody murder when I went in there with Tristan. I ignored them and made them leave, and they were beyond upset about this and kept carrying on.
Luckily the secretary, Margaret, heard the commotion and she called our handyman/janitor Vince and he came to clean up the mess. Of course, because it is the 7th grade and they are notorious for being a class that is hard to control, all hell broke loose and they all made such a fuss about being in the same room as the puke that I eventually gave up and we went upstairs to the gym and finished reading up there.
6th grade: the class where we learned about chastity
This week the people from the Pregnancy Center in Price Hill, who actually do a lot of good work in a sort of rough part of town, are coming in to teach the 'In Control Chastity Program' at school. Just one of the many joys of teaching in a Catholic school. The nice but slightly awkward man and woman go from class to class. Each year they focus on different things, like in the 5th grade they learn about reproduction and abortion, as well as the differences between boys and girls. This year I sit on the program with the 6th graders. I do not elect to be there, mind you, I have to be because kids must be around a licensed adult and in this case that would be me.
So today I got to watch the 6th graders participate in activities about chasity and respecting yourself and others. Now, my 6th graders are a very well-behaved class. They don't really get in trouble and they are pretty respectful of others, so overall their behavior was good. There are a couple of students though who are either slow on the uptake, extremely curious, or clearly learned things from an older sibling that they feel like sharing. Here are some of the highlights (names omitted for privacy reasons)
6th grader: what's oral sex?
another sixth grader: it's when you put other peoples' private parts in your mouth
Chastity people: ......
Me: (trying not to laugh)
Chastity People: How can your job be affected by having a baby
6th grader: Well I don't have a job...so it won't be affected at all
Chastity People: That's right, we will not get to spend much time with our friends if we have a baby if we are not married
6th grader: Or with our parrots
The worst thing though is when the chastity people ask the teacher for her opinion. I know they do this because they want to establish with the kids that me, an adult they are around every day and who they like, believes the same things you do. The questions today were not too awkward, but I was really trying to read something else and grade some quizzes but I had to keep looking up.
8th grade: 'Miss Hoferer, what's a hobknocker?'
Okay, so a very popular show amongst my students is iCarly on Nickelodeon and this term was thrown around by some of my sixth graders early this year. This is the part where I reveal how out of touch I am because I had no idea what a hobknocker was so I looked it up online. Among it's various definitions include things like masturbation and bestiality. Lovely. I think, though, that the iCarly version goes with the definition I found the most, which is 'something illegal and/or gross'.
But because it has so many various and colorful definitions, I told the sixth grader in question that they should not use that word at school. Well, someone must have said it on iCarly over the weekend, because once the 8th graders arrived and were settled this question immediately came up.
With the 8th graders I try to answer all their questions (as opposed to the 5th graders. If they ever ask me anything inappropriate I give them a vague definition or tell them to ask their parents), so I simply said: 'it has a lot of definitions, but let's go with the saying it's someone who is gross or does stuff that's illegal'. Let's be real here. I'm not going to tell them what it's real definition is, which is British slang for a guy smacking his girlfriend in the face with his...well...you know (I even asked my token British friend Simon about it). But boy, was that the wrong thing to say. About ten minutes later I catch two of the girls passing a note and of course I open it up to see that the girl who asked me earlier wanted to know the other definitions and another classmate, who apparently went on urbandictionary.com to look all of this up listed it's various definitions, was answering her query.
I didn't really know how to approach this, so I just kept the girls after class and explained to them not to pass notes and to ask people later and not to write words like 'masturbating in a public restroom' on paper because a teacher might see it. I didn't necessarily want to discipline them for what they wrote. Instead I moved their seats so they no longer sit together, but still, it was one of those grey areas of discipline.
Planning period: Desserts!
There was a giant plate of mini-desserts in the office today. Let's just say I indulged. I also went online and figured out how to get on Twitter and Facebook, which is all usually blocked. I was excited.
Lunch: More discussion of 'hobknocker' and weddings
I inform three fellow teachers of what a hobknocker is and we discuss all the people who know who are getting married.
5th grade: the class that was all over the place.
The fifth grade at St. Al's is very small, only six students, and their pretty much cover the entirety of the learning spectrum. Last week we had a lot of cancelled or delayed school which means classes get shuffled around and a lot of fifth graders were sick so we are incredibly behind on our classroom novel so today I planned on having the late ones catch up and the ones who were caught up had to read with me out of their little readers.
Well, as soon as we are about to start, in come the Chastity People who need to use my classroom so now me and six students have nowhere to go, so we go to the library. When I get there someone is talking to the librarian and when I'm introduced to him he says 'oh! I know you're dad!' and he proceeds to ask me all these questions about my father while the six ruffians run amok in the library.
Once I calmed them down and sent them to their respective corners, the four who were caught up brought their little readers and we sat down to read only to realize that we have read almost all of the stories in our readers, which meant we had to do the boring ones, which is very painful for 11-year-olds. I stopped them from reading early and we played the vocab game instead.
After all of this I went back up to school, packed up my things, got into my car and laughed hysterically. One of the great things about teaching is I literally do not know what the day will bring me.
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