Glennalicious: Child Larvae

September 16, 2003

Child Larvae

Week two of school: alive, exhausted, still not enough chairs. The chairs I have are an ugly mix of splintered ass-rippers and molded plastic chairs with broken rivets. Although it is funny to watch a teenager flip backwards out of a rickety chair, I don't recommend the lawsuit that follows.

In quite a few ways, I have dream students. I am in charge of two classes at the school. One group has the highest level students at my new junior high, and I just keep pinching myself over their behavior and work. Even with no chairs, they behave like angels, comparatively speaking. These are young teenagers, so we don't judge them according to normal human behavior. As far as human larvae go, they're wonderful. They do their work, they take notes, and they clean up after themselves. With this group, I want to take trips. With this group, I want to teach math.

My homeroom class is a mid-level seventh grade class. I have some really sweet kids, and I have some really evil children. I could swear I recognized one of them from Rosemary's Baby. Maybe it was the behavior, maybe it was the chanting and blood, maybe it was the hooves. Fortunately, they are a small class of only 16 kids. The bad side is that problem kids from other classes will be sent over to my class. The good side is that I am trying to create a group behavior that forces newcomers to observe the rules. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and also stocking up on horse tranquilizers. I'm not sure if I'll use the tranquilizers on them or me.

Posted by G at September 16, 2003 09:37 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.glennalicious.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/58

Comments

Horse tranquilizers, mmmm. It's the end of my third week as a new teacher.

I've been having fantasies of being Marlon Perkins, or his trusty sidekick, with the tranquilizer dart gun. I've got 9th graders in the last (I think) dinosaur of a huge factory-style comprehensive high school in Manhattan. Exhaustion, stress, head cold . . . plus vague guilt that I'm not giving the kids what they need. They're not bad, they're just drawn that way, or portrayed that way in the West Side Spirit.

Ah, but I think I'll be ok in the long run, and keep humming to myself that The Kids Are Alright, and, uh, I am too tired to go on.

punctilio1 at yahoo dot com

Posted by: Valerie, cohort 6 at September 26, 2003 02:36 AM