Thursday, March 6, 2008

Sound of Silence

I was checking up on some facebook stuff during second block today. My kids are taking a test today. Our high school's hockey team made it to state and are playing at the X at 11 a.m. today. The district gave students permission to miss school to go to the game. Don't get me started on that one.

For any student missing the test today for the game, I made them come in either during lunch or after school yesterday to take the test. Ten kids showed up after school. Five of them from my second block. And two more from second block left for the game today, too. One came in early to class to take the test and the other is losing points for missing the test. His fault. He chose not to come in beforehand when he had the opportunity.

Anyway...

So I was poking around online, trying to get out of a mind block while trying to finish up my papers for grad school that are due on Saturday (I need to finish them by Friday). It was so quiet in the room that when I looked up from the screen after a couple minutes, I was almost shocked to see that there were kids in the room taking a test! I never knew that thirteen kids could be so quiet.

I know, thirteen plus the seven that are at the game only makes nineteen. I promise that I have more than nineteen students in that class! I have a huge group of special ed kids in my second block. They're all out of the room taking the test at present. So, yeah. Thirteen kids, and they are hardly making a sound. It's amazingly beautiful.

Oh, right. About the game. Over 200 students had brought in permission slips to go to the game as of this morning. That's 200 students from our school. We've got somewhere between 1000 and 1200 students in this building. That's an insane amount of kids gone from the building. Again, don't get me started.