Math Class

I woke up just before 4 this morning dreaming that I was telling someone to get the alligators off the floor because they were trying to eat my feet. I think it's because Dickens (chicken in catsuit) likes to sleep between my feet and I couldn't move them. Or it could be because it felt like my feet were being swept out from under me during 4th period yesterday...a time which is my "prep period". Here's what happened....

I walked out into the hallway to rinse out 2 beakers (my entire stock of beakers!) in the drinking fountain (my "sink") and there were 3 girls standing there talking and one of them was eating a bag of chips. No students are supposed to be in the hallways at all without hall passes, which are bright red Student Agenda books belonging to each student in which they are to record assignments, events, etc. I didn't see any of these. So, I asked them what they were doing and why they didn't have the required hall passes, and one of them, a student in one of my earlier periods of Biology said that she had to leave class all of a sudden because she felt like she was going to throw up. When I asked her how the chips came into the equation she said that they helped her feel better. After she told me that she should be in the classroom next door, I told her I would take her in. The other two girls disappeared, presumably back to their classrooms. No sign of our 3 Security personnel or of the other 11 teachers with 4th period prep.

As I entered the classroom, I saw students had rearranged their desks into conversational areas, with not a single sign of students working. The noise level was pretty high and there was Substitute teacher sitting in the back at the Teacher's desk. I went back to talk to her and tell her about the students' story, and she told me that a lot of the students left class without permission and would not do any work or listen to her. The regular math teacher had not left any seating charts, directions, assignments nor anything that would help the Sub manage the classroom. And this particular class had a combination of students who are well known for disruption, defiance and disrespect. (This is an Algebra 1 class which contains mostly upper-class students who have already failed the class at least once; the only class we allow them to re-take during the regular school year rather than in summer school. But it also has a lot of students' whose names I recognized as causing a lot of trouble for other students and their teachers.) I went to the front of the class and told them to move the desks back to where they should be, which they did, albeit some more deliberately slowly than others. When I went around to each of them to find out where they were with their work (the Sub gave an assignment of "write 2 essays" - I didn't look to see what they were supposed to be about), only 2 students had turned anything in. One girl had her cellphone out on the desk, which they know we will confiscate until after school and she said "Oh, HELL no!" when I asked her to give it to me. She also refused to do any work. Another student said he couldn't do anything because he didn't have any paper, so I suggested he borrow some. He just smirked, having had his success at having made the other kids laugh and the teacher look powerless. One of my own Advisory students (who just barely earned enough credits to be classified as a 10th grader, but is in a Junior class Advisory), also refused to work and ran out of the class early.

Our Lead Teacher then came into the classroom to collect the students who had to serve detention that day because they were tardy to an earlier class, and I asked him if he had ever heard of eating Spicy Doritos to soothe an upset stomach and he said he hadn't. He took 2 of the 5 students he came for; the other 3 had apparently already left in order to miss the detention sweep and it was time for the bell to ring.

I wound up writing 3 referrals for defiance to the 3 students who behaved so egregiously and wrote an email to the regular math teacher describing what I had found and experienced. Our Administrator is not on campus 3 out of 5 days, on average, so I'm not even sure when these referrals will be handled. It occurs to me as I write this that I haven't received my copies of previous referrals from the end of last year (I rarely write any until late in the year, when students who are have done little to no work discover that they will not be passing my class, and react by rebelling in the classroom.) I'll have to ask to see what was done with them. In any case, writing a referral is really all I could see to do in this classroom that wasn't mine, where I didn't know most of the students who were misbehaving and where the students were performing to get laughs from the other students.

I sent an email to the absent Math teacher describing the situation and emails to all of the teachers and staff telling them that I would not be allowing my Advisory student to go to the park on Friday for intra-Advisory games competition during Homeroom because of his behavior, and asking to discuss the situation at our next meeting. It was only after I sent that that I discovered that today is another surprise early dismissal day. (Last Tuesday we found out that that day and last Friday were early dismissal days...not on any schedule we had seen!) So, the good news is that all of this can be discussed between us today, which is always helpful. We're pretty good at coming up with systems to manage students and events in a fair way.

I'm looking forward to today; we're building molecules out of candy and toothpicks with an eye toward studying how molecules store and release energy and what roles each molecule plays in sustaining life and the greenhouse effect.

Time to make coffee, decaf of course, I certainly don't need the caffeine to wake me up!