Friday, March 16, 2012

umph- draft from Friday

Friday was rough. I'm publishing the draft of the adventures-

Today has been horrible. A perfect storm of disasters.

To start with I'd stayed up way too late baking cupcakes for my birthday buddy. I share a birthday with one of my former students. For the past 5 years we have celebrated our birthdays together by decorating cupcakes and since he is now in fifth grade this was our last chance.
It has also been an awful week and so I arrived at school this morning tired and stressed. I walked into my friend's room and announced, "We should all go home. I just have a feeling something awful is going to happen today."
Moments later I checked my email and learned very sad news about a friend.
Now I was tired, stress, sad, worried and distracted.
A fabulous combination for a Friday.

The day started out OK. We wrote our anger management book for Papa Bear and despite one of my friends recommending that Papa Bear stomp his feet on the toilet seat (????) it went OK. Brown Bear was in anything but a good mood but we were working around it and being flexible.

Come time for writing workshop and I pulled out my favorite leprechaun lesson I do every year. It involves reading a story about leprechauns and then planning how to catch a leprechaun. In my mind we would have a very clever class discussion about how to catch a leprechaun, then would draw pictures and write about our plans, and I'd promise to put the plans in place when the children left school. Then over the weekend the leprechaun would visit, destroy the room, and we'd all be in shock and horror that our plan to catch him didn't work.
I have done this before. I thought I was prepared for their responses.
Except-
there was no response.
Crickets.
Shock and horror that I'd want to catch the leprechaun.
Those willing to catch him were not able to grasp the concept that we wouldn't be here when we went to catch him. The idea of setting a trap that would work when we were gone was a bit above them. I of course realize this in the middle of the lesson. As I stare out at the blank faces I realize that my very fun and exciting lesson of the day was going south in a hurry and I quickly told them to forget about it and sent them to do normal writing workshop.

Perhaps confused from my awesome lesson tanking I managed to forget about a meeting I had over my lunch break. When I finally remembered I ran out of the room in a hurry, leaving the kids and my awesome aid staring at me in confusion, and forgetting to take my lunch with me. I sat through the meeting trying my best to ignore my hungry stomach and my sad, aching for my friend so that I could focus on the important message being conveyed. I also tried to block all thoughts of my aid and what she was going to do to me when I came in crazy late to the class because the meeting was running over.

When I returned to the room one of my friends was laying on his back kicking my aid as the other students in my room repeated "no kicking" to themselves over and over again, as though to remind themselves that rules do exist and that maybe if they say it enough it would make the kicking stop. Magical squinched up his eyes and announced that they were tired from seeing all the kicking. The friend having a rough day started flickering the lights on and off. We all sighed. Even our magical-ignoring glasses couldn't block out the screams.

Finally the friend having a rough day ended up in the hallway to decompress. He was quiet and reserved out there when one of my coworkers came in, "Um, did you know your friend out there is wet?"
And yes, sure enough, he was soaked.

So into the bathroom we went.
Yet once we were in he decided he didn't want to put on new clothes (they weren't his clothes and nobody wants to wear clothes that are not your own). So he took them off and threw them into the toilet. He was now standing in our classroom bathroom pants-less.
The classroom bathroom is a boring place to be and my friend didn't see any reason why he should stay in there now that the pants he was so opposed to were off his body. He attempted to walk straight out of the bathroom into the classroom over and over again.

For the most part the other kids were reserved and quiet and respectful of what was going on. Of course they heard me loudly explain, "No underwear in the classroom! We don't show people our underwear"


That's as far as I got before I gave up. It barely hits on all of the exhaustion from the day, but I'm hitting publish and walking away...


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