Thursday, December 01, 2005

Lost it!

Today, I lost it.
I was playing a game, and it was going pretty well with my first grade three class of the day.
This one kid, a friend of the one who regularly drives me crazy, who also regularly drives me crazy, was talking the whole time.
I let it go for a while, but then I started staring him down, and stopping the class until he shut up, which actually works pretty well.
The game ended, and I started describing what we would be doing next week, which is describing "things". He started repeating everything I said under his breath in a mocking tone, and started to shake his head and mumble to his friend. I told him to be quiet. I asked him to be quiet. I stared him down. He would stop, and the instant I started talking again, he would start too. Finally I asked him to leave. I just said "Listen, you should just go. Just leave now", and I pointed at the door.
Then he said sorry. Then he pretended to cry. I didn't see any tears, but he said "teacher sorry" and then said "tears".

Then he started talking again.

I just closed my book and left. I said "I am done for today" and I walked out.
I was told after that the student was honestly sorry, and that he had just been asking his friend what "describing" meant. I refuse to believe that, because he had been talking through the whole class, and repeating most of what I said in the class in a sing-song voice.
I left, but there was only about 45 seconds left of class anyways. In truth, I had expected the game to last all class, and killed about three minutes with a preview of next week.

Luckily, my second grade three class was awesome, and totally rescued my day! I laughed a lot in class. The reason? One group's english team name was "Team Negro". Seriously, how does that happen?!

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