The Lion's Club in our area is sponsoring a book drive, so all the teachers received permission to go through their classroom books and get rid of some of the old ones/ones we don't want anymore. Yay! I had a ton of books on the shelves (and in a box in the closet) that were old and worn out or we had multiple copies of. So I filled up three bags of our extra books. They're on the bench in the hallway waiting to be picked up on Monday. We now have loads of room on the bookshelves for more books... which means I can get even more at the $ bag sale coming up in a few weeks and at the New Ulm Public Library book sale in November. Books, books, everywhere!!!
The books I ordered from BetterWorldBooks.com have still not arrived yet. One of the 5th grade girls keeps perking up every time a large vehicle pulls into school. "Miss H., are those the books? Do you think they're here? Are they coming by FedEx? UPS? I think they're here!" Sigh. I'm glad she's so excited about books, though I do wish she wouldn't get so distracted.
Our school's "grandparent's day" (known around here as VIP day) is on Monday, so we had to get tables set up in the gym this afternoon. The volleyball team was supposed to have practice, but the tables in the gym kind of make that impossible. The head coach said we'd just have practice outside, weather permitting. Everyone kind of made a stink about that (although I do remember having volleyball practice outside once when I was in grade school). Practice ended up being cancelled due to the misty, drippy weather. I was very happy about that, even though I'm still not getting out of school very early.
We have our first tournament tomorrow in Northrup. Miss H. and I are going to be the sole coaches; the head coach is going to a wedding that day. So she's going to drive over to my house tomorrow morning, bright and early, and we'll carpool down there together. It should be a good day. Hopefully our players' attitudes will be a lot better with a night of sleep under their belts.
Today in class the 7th and 8th graders were off the wall! On Fridays, the plan is for me to teach their class for an hour. I figured I had plenty of material for them to work on. Guess again. I handed back their science tests and told them they could fix the ones they got wrong for an improved test score. Most of them handed their "corrected" tests back to me after about ten minutes. So much for looking up the correct answers in the book. There were about five of them waving their tests in my face and I just didn't want to take them back! Eventually, I gave up and handed them their other assignment: do research on African tribes in today's world that were around in ancient Africa. Yeah, they finished that assignment in 15 minutes. So it was 12:55 and I had nothing for them to do.
The whole time they were whining and complaining about how they had to do homework on Friday when I told them they'd never have homework. and we'd only do fun stuff on Fridays. I did say that, but their behavior on previous Fridays has shown me that they can't handle doing fun stuff, so now we do boring stuff. They can't seem to wrap their heads around that concept. I think I may need to write the class a letter telling them why we aren't doing experiments anymore. UGH! It's driving me nuts!
Without having anything for them to work on, they pretty much did nothing the rest of the time. Sure I tried to get them to work on other homework, but their answer was, "Oh, I already have all my stuff done." A few minutes later they'd be working on a speech PowerPoint or working ahead in spelling. There were a few kids who were playing games on the computer and listening to music when they weren't supposed to. We were in Mr. E's room, which makes class tricky. I don't know what his rules are about the computers, so I don't know if they're breaking the rules or not and if I should get them to stop what they're doing. Sigh. I was ready to pull out my hair at the end of the hour. But the other teachers said that they had a hard time with the 7th and 8th graders too, so that makes me feel a little better. I'm at the end of my rope! What can I do with these students so that they care about what we're learning and act respectful in class? Maybe a good night's sleep will give me inspiration.
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