Frustrations

Yesterday morning the watch my youngest brother gave me when I started teaching quit working.  Thankfully I have a spare... but it's not as comfortable as the other one. 


This weekend I spent a lot of time putting together a powerpoint for today's Minnesota history lesson on the Dakota.  I got to school this morning, plugged the drive in... and nothing.  Couldn't find the powerpoint anywhere on my external hard drive.  I'm hoping I saved it on my laptop.  I don't know where else it could be!!!


So today I gave my students the choice; instead of doing history, we could do art or science.  We're going to do both art and science this week, so I didn't care which they picked, we'll just shuffle the schedule around a bit.  They picked art.  We made some good progress.  We also made a lot of noise.  For some reason, my students have been picking on each other a ton.  I'm talking more than the normal run-ins they have with each other.  The worst part is, the rest of the class kept gossiping about what people were saying to each other and added fuel to the fire, "Hey, did you hear that guy say this?"  Ugh.  One student talked about wishing a branch would hit his neighbor on the head or something about a stick hitting that person... as a class, they decided the consequence should be that a marble be taken out of the jar (marbles we're collecting to earn a class prize).  Seemed fair to me.  Now we're down to 11 marbles (we need 65).


At recess, (after a lecture on being nice to our neighbors...treat them well...you're family...etc.) we went out for kickball.  One student crouched to examine a bee resting on the pavement.  Another 5th grader zoomed up next to him and pretended to stomp on the bee.  The first 5th grader lost it and nearly lit into the kid!  I had to pry them apart, telling the first 5th grader to take a break inside and then chewed the second 5th grader out.  The second guy knew it would bug the first one if he pretended to hurt the insect which was why he did it in the first place.  Sigh.  So I made them both write apology letters to each other.  They eventually made it out to kickball and had a good time out there. 


It was kind of funny, during kickball my students were being overly nice to each other, encouraging each other and saying "good try" to the other team.  Of course there were still some, "Oh come on! Why'd you throw the ball?" but overall they were better about being teammates. 


Hopefully they'll burn themselves out playing soccer/volleyball tonight and won't be at each other's throats as much tomorrow.