4:00

Yesterday I actually made it out the door of school before 4:00!  I headed down to Fulda for the weekend to celebrate Mom's birthday.  I made it home just in time to leave for supper out in Currie.

Friday was a doozy of a day.  By the time the bell rang, there were still five students who hadn't said memory work.  Plus one kid was sick and one was still on vacation.  Neither of them had said their memory work either.  That's seven out of 13 students, not very good odds.  Mrs. B worked with a couple of them to help them memorize it, but one boy wouldn't say the words with her, he'd just sit there and distract the other kid, so she had him come back to the classroom.  I'm pretty much the only person he'll work with, but I don't have time to be solely focused on helping him memorize stuff that should've been memorized earlier in the week!  One kid is in a state robotics contest this weekend... and you can tell he's distracted.  He still didn't get it memorized by the end of the day, so I told him if he would walk through the door Monday morning able to say this memory, then I'd still give him regular credit for saying his memory.

My chameleon (who hates writing most days) had two letters written on her handwriting due Friday.  Yep, two letters.  Even though she promised she'd take it home and do it Thursday night.  Her excuse, "I forgot and didn't bring it to the basketball games!"  She started working on it for Work on Writing, and I was going to be lenient, but after twenty minutes she only had one row finished.  She asked to go to the bathroom (clearly a tactic to avoid doing her work).  "When you're handwriting is handed in."  She pouted and turned back to her work.  Because she couldn't focus in her desk, I moved her to the lab table and put a tri-fold board (used for science fair projects) around her to block out the distractions.  She asked me to close the window shade too.  And that still wasn't enough!  Now her classmates were too loud (they weren't) and too distracting (they weren't).  She kept telling them to shut up and wouldn't stop no matter how many times I asked her to.  So she earned 15 sentences to write.  I know you're not supposed to use writing as a punishment, but sometimes that's all that will work.  She stopped doing that, but didn't make much progress on her handwriting.  So I gave her an ultimatum. "Your handwriting must be finished before lunch.  You can choose to sit here and stare off into space or you can choose to finish your handwriting, but you won't get lunch until it's finished." (There was still an hour before lunch... plenty of time).  11:30 came.  Time to set up for lunch.  She still had to write the Bible verse on her border sheet.

And that's when the sobbing commenced.  She'd been crying pity tears before that, but now her lunch situation was finally sinking in.  "I'm never going to eat lunch! I'm going to starve!"  I reassured her I'd make sure our cook would set aside some food for her so she could still eat lunch.  "But then it's going to be COLD!" she wailed.  I shrugged, "Well, you've had plenty of time to finish your handwriting this morning.  Once it's finished, you can eat."  More tears.  Her classmates prayed and went to wash their hands.  She still had four lines left.  And she was still bawling about the cold food.  I asked her if she'd rather go through the lunch line herself once she was finished instead of me getting a try for her.  A nod.  In reality, she'd probably be finished with her work shortly after the 8th graders went through the line.  So I went to wash my hands.  In the meantime, her classmates with cold lunch came back in talking quietly.  "THEY'RE BEING TOO LOUD, I CAN'T CONCENTRATE!"  Trying to blame her situation on everyone but herself.  By the time I made it back in the room with my lunch, she was handing in her handwriting.  Of course, she took forever to eat and didn't get any recess.  Or any time to study her memory work (which she still hadn't said).

The afternoon went a little smoother.  The 8th graders moaned and groaned about doing Mystery Class.  "Why do we have to do it?  It's so hard!  I don't get it."  No matter what I said, they were bound and determined to hate Mystery Class... totally opposite from the 5th and 6th graders who keep asking "When can we do Mystery Class again?" and cheer when they find out it's on the agenda for the day.  With the second set of data we can figure out if the classes are above the equator or below it, based on whether the amount of daylight they get is increasing or decreasing.  We're using Courtland, our home location, as a control (something to compare the other data to).  There are only a few locations below the equator, so we made predictions on which continents they'll be located. There's too much land above the equator for us to guess which countries those classes are located in.

But back to the 8th graders.  After they recorded their data, we watch part of the video Icons of Evolution.  I had previewed it so we could only watch the most interesting parts.  And they still complained that it was boring!  One kid even fell asleep.  It was his snores that gave him away.  You could hear them all the way in the back of the room.  But by that time, class was over and they scurried back to their classroom.  I guess we won't be watching videos in science for a while.

So.  That was my day yesterday.