Interviews

Gosh, so much has happened in the past month. I share some of these entries with my students once in a while, so I won't share all the details yet (it's all school stuff). I'm not quite ready for them to know some of this stuff yet. They'll all find out eventually. Besides that, some of my colleagues are still finding out.

First of all, I am officially getting tenure next year. That is HUGE weight off my shoulders just knowing that.

At the same meeting that my principal told me that she was recommending me for tenure, she asked me to be on the interview committee for a math position looping between 7th and 8th grades. Those interviews happened two days ago for the full day and the first half of today. I'm so glad my prep is the third block of four in the school day. I've got one class to teach today. :)

Our first day of interviews ended early. Grades were due at 4 p.m. that day as well. I went back to my classroom, where my last hour algebra class was in the middle of their lesson, to grab a couple things I needed to enter into my gradebook and then submit all six classes of grades online. My kids all were so happy to see me and kept asking me to stay. I told them that I wasn't there and they should be paying attention to their sub. One kid (my "wild child" from a previous posting) followed me out of the hall to try to get me to stay, telling me that their sub didn't know what she was doing. I could just tell that he was going to continue to follow me down that hallway as I walked away, so I told him that if he left that classroom, he'd be headed down to the office. He stopped mid-stride and backed up into the room again. Poor kids.

I realized today while the interview committee was eating lunch after the interviews and hiring decisions were done (oh, I hope the candidate we unanimously chose accepts!!) that while everyone else was saying that they wished they could take the rest of the day off, I was actually looking forward to getting back to my classroom and teaching. I miss my kids!!

That was such a warm, exciting thing to realize. I like teaching my kids. It's one of those things that you stop thinking about after a while and it takes a day or two away from them to remember how fun they are, even on difficult days.

I just hope that having a sub two days in a row won't be too behind or confused when I see them next week! Oh, and I had a new kid start today. An 8th grader. With a sub. Yup, I'm sure that was great for him. We'll see how he is on Monday.

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.

Pantsing

Towards the end of last block today, my algebra kids were asking about the total lunar eclipse happening later tonight. I pulled up an artice on msn.com about it and was going through that information with my students who wanted to know more about it. It was a great teachable moment about eclipses and the kids were pumped about it!

They wanted to know more about solar eclipses and when the next one would happen, so I googled solar eclipse schedule and found NASA's site that had info. on that. We found out that the next total solar eclipse will be on August 1 of this year. I told my kids they'd have to go to Greenland to see it, though. They agreed that they should do that.

Suddenly one of my kids, who was abnormally quiet and subdued for most of the hour, yelled my name from the back of the room. He tried to convince me that one of his classmates had just pantsed him. Just by looking at their two faces I highly doubted that scenario. I told him such and he continued trying to convince me that he really had been pantsed. I explained to him that had he called my name right away and I had at least seen him pulling up his pants, then I would know that he had been telling the truth. He conceded the point.

Not two minutes later the same kid called my name again. I looked up, he pantsed himself, and stood there saying that his classmate had pantsed him. Uh huh.

After telling him to put his pants back on, and him complying, I had him come over to where I was standing. He walked over and I just couldn't hold a straight face!! There are just some things that kids do that are just so out there and unexpected that you can't help but laugh.

Through my laughter I finally was able to catch enough of a breath to tell him that the pantsing was one, thoroughly inappropriate; two, thoroughly hilarious and a much needed laugh after a long day; but three, thoroughly inappropriate all the same. He agreed and appologized, but you could totally see that twinkle left in his eye. My wild child was back.

Of course, the story doesn't end there! Oh, no. The final bell hadn't rung yet!

I immediately turned back to my computer, which was projecting the NASA website and the solar eclipse information onto the screen at the front of the room. I pulled up a new Internet window and opened up blogger.com to post this story. The kids all wanted to see what I wrote, but the bell rang before I started typing it up. I might just have to share this one with them. After all, it really was priceless.

Can I Take the Test Now?

Oh, the stories I've had today!!

I was standing in the hall outside my classroom after school today, making sure no one killed anyone else again, when Alicia (pronounced "a-lee-see-uh", not "a-lee-shuh") stopped in front of me and aksed me, "Can I take the test right now?"

For the second time in as many days this child struck me into silence. Take the test now? Practically a whole day early? I have never heard such an odd request come from a student. Not when I was a student, not in all my time student teaching, not in the past two and a half years of teaching. Take the test now?

It technically puts her at a disadvantage - she has one less night to study compared to the rest of her classmates. She did a small bit of review with me before starting the test, but nothing nearly as extensive as the class will do tomorrow. But she was insistent that she wanted to do the test today and not wait.

I asked her what she would do tomorrow when the rest of her classmates were taking the test. She said she was going to catch up on her reading. I wish I could do that!!

Obviously, I couldn't find anything that would give her an advantage over her classmates taking it a day early, so she's now sitting in my classroom taking the test while I catch up on grading!

Um, Ms. Grivna?

I definitely meant to write about this one yesterday, but didn't have time.

Yesterday was the first day of second semester. We started on a B Day (the second day in our two-day cycle of classes). My second class of the day is my favorite Trans (pre-algebra) class I have. It was a good day to start the semester on.

I dismissed my Trans kids once I had passed back the quizzes they had taken that day. I followed them out, getting ready to stand in the halls and make sure that no one killed each other during passing time. One of the last students to leave started giggling and pushed her classmate back into my room. This confused me until the student who was pushed into the room started with, "Um, Ms. Grivna??"

Now, I hate putting names in these things, because really, how do I know who in the world is reading these things? But to get the full effect of this story, her name (first only!) is going to be used.

After asking her what was up, she said that her name is "Alicia" (a-lee-see-uh), not "Alicia" (a-lee-shuh).

Now, I have had this kid since the second day of school. She is one of the sweetest, kindest, cutest kids ever. And I have been pronouncing her name incorrectly since I met her. I felt like an absolute fool!!

I asked her why she hadn't told me before now that I've been saying her name wrong this whole entire time (over half the year at that point). She said that she didn't want me to think she was disrespectful of me by telling me I was wrong! What a stinkin' cutie.

I told her that I felt absolutely awful (and I still do!!!) and that she should never feel disrespectful for correcting anyone on the pronounciation of her own name!

Tomorrow will be the first time I see her knowing how to say her name correctly. I know I won't forget, but it will definitely sound funny the first few times I say it correctly in class!

Can I Work Out in the Hallway?

A question posed to me by one of my students who had finished his test. Most of his classmates were still working through their tests.

I told him, "You can work in here."

"But I like to work in the hallway when it's nice and quiet out there."

"It's quiet in here."

Silence.

Then, "Oh. Yeah."

Heh. What a concept! Granted, I have no doubt that this student would get his work done out in the hallway, but I don't feel like having anyone out in the hallways today. It's a new semester. I think I'm going to try changing some of the boundaries for this class now.

To function well, these kids actually needed a good deal of freedom of choice on where to do their homework during work time, where to sit during the lesson, etc. Of course, this would not be tolerated in most classes and I need to start getting them ready to be successful students in eighth grade, where the math teachers are quite a bit more strict than I am.

Travel Tales

I went to Arizona for a week over winter break (which I still have a few days of now that I'm home, thank goodness!). We got back around 9:30 p.m. last night. Dad went to get the car, which we had left in his company's parking lot for the week. The company's only a few blocks away from Mall of America and the parking's free that way. All Dad had to pay for was the light rail ticket to the airport, then one to MOA.

Mom, my sisters, and I got down to the carousel in baggage claim where our luggage would be coming. I staked out a spot to get our bags and my sister joined me a few minutes later. I was people watching while waiting for the carousel to start moving. There was this guy standing a couple people away who looked extremely familiar. I leaned over to my sister and told her that he looked a lot like our school's head night custodian. Not two minutes later did the guy walk over and ask me, "You work at Valley View, don't you?"

Here, he was visiting his parents in Mesa for ten days. Whoa. We were in Mesa, too! Visiting my uncle, aunt, and cousins for eight days.

We visited while looking for our bags to come. All his bags came before any of ours. He said he'd see me Monday and went on his way.


Fast forward to waiting for Dad to come pick us up.


Mom called Dad to find out where he was and he had just gotten off the train at MOA, so he had a good fifteen minute walk (in the freezing cold!), then had to drive to the airport to get us. I found some empty chairs and sat down. I pulled out my puzzle book and started flipping through it to choose a puzzle to do.

A guy walks past us, then stops in front of me. "Do I know you from somewhere? Because you look really familiar for some reason." Okay. That's never happened to me before. I said that I wasn't sure, I've been to a lot of places and done many things.

He started listing off places where he might have known me from. He started out with colleges. The first word out of his mouth was the college I went to. Weird. I said that I had gone there and he told me what dorm he lived in freshman year. Same one as me. Even odder. I asked him what years he had gone to school there. '01 to '02. I was '01 to '05. He lived on second floor, me on first freshman year.

As we visited a little, I started to remember him. Not much, but vaguely. He works in the film industry now. Crazy. We caught up a bit. Turns out one of his freshman year roommates (whom I actually do remember) got married this past summer.

I think we talked for a good five, ten minutes. After he left, Mom and my sisters just laughed. Mom asked me if I really did remember him. Yes, but quite vaguely. Mara told me that I wasn't allowed to see any other people I knew. Right. Dad came a few minutes later, so that wasn't a difficult task for me to accomplish.