34 posts tagged “school”

Recycled Art Guru: "Top five all time acronyms educators will never use. Go."
Me:  "Five - TKR ("This Kid's Retarded"), Four - PIP ("Poops in Pants") Three - PSC ("Probably'll shoot Classmates") Two - LEG ("Likes Eating Garbage") and number one... SILF. (I'll let you figure that one out for yourself)."
RAGuru:"Oh, I had a PIP and LEG kid today. Damn babies."
Me: "I'm just glad you didn't have a BILF."

I got the best postcard ever from the Starlet, who is on the British Isles right now, wandering about.  He got it from a gay bar in Edinburgh, and told me a story about using a ladies restroom.  How I miss him.

My last days of classes are this week, and my final papers are due Monday, so I imagine I will be a little sparse this week.  I keep procrastinating, naturally, but soon it'll be all papers, all the time, instead of "work on a paper, stop, peruse the internet, work on a paper, stop, eat lunch, read for a while, then realize I have to go to work." 

Ooh, that reminds me.  Yesterday I worked a long shift, and on my break I wandered over to Borders.  I saw a book there called "The Obama Nation - Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality."  But... I'm more than a little sure that Jon Stewart coined the phrase "ObamaNation" a year or two ago.  So, way to crib from The Daily Show, right-wing dude who wrote a book.  What's next, a book titled "Truthiness?"  Heh.  The very best part of this was that it shared a table with the promotional material for Breaking Dawn.  So, you know, at least it was with the rest of the fiction.

Cult of personality, my ass.  It's like they forgot the years of "DON'T CRITICIZE BUSH BECAUSE WE ARE AT WAR!"  Remember?  When it was unpatriotic to criticize the president?  I sure do.  I got told to "leave America" by a roommate when I said that I understood why Europeans didn't like our president.  Ironically, we were not IN America at the time she said this, and it didn't make her any less angry with me when I pointed this out.  It does make a great story years later.  I ran into another roommate from Athens at a wedding, and she was like, "I tell everyone about the time when she said, 'If that's how you feel, get the fuck out of America!' and you said, 'But... um, we're in Greece?'" 

I'm something of a jerk.

OK, I said I wouldn't talk about my niece again, but I have to say it.  I saw the people magazine with Brangelina's twins on the cover and, you know what?  Not impressed.  Compared to Little Miss Sunshine, those babies are total uggos.  Nice try, Mr. and Mrs. Smith. 

(context: talking about my paper about sex, sexuality education in US public schools.

Tigi: This seems to be the loudest rallying cry - that Christian students are left feeling uncomfortable in a school system that adopts what is deemed a more politically-correct approach. There is, of course, a common sense problem with this.  Public schools cannot discriminate against students of any religions - this is why they cannot force a Muslim student to eat carnitas burritos at school lunch.  But is hearing separate ideology from what they may hear at home always discrimination?

Pineapple: EXCELLENT. I feel like this is a new development in the history of discrimination rhetoric.  because never before was it available to people to claim this was anti-discrimination for its own sake.  You know, it's always been more like about the dignity of all people and hippie dippie crap like that. But now, they can say, "YOU'RE BEING DISCRIMINATED AGAINST?!  TELL ME ABOUT IT!"  It's like men who are uncomfortable with feminism.
 

Tigi: Yeah. They can suck my dick.

Professor:  "2014, that's the year NCLB says we will all become proficient.  *pumps fists in air*  I can't wait!

Fellow MA Student: But how do you take money out of the equation in cases of extremely diverse socioeconomic situations?
Professor: You call Robin Hood!

Teacher of classroom we're observing: Let's ask some of our guests if they can solve our riddle!  What has four wheels and flies?
Fellow MA student: Pegasus!  Wait a second, that's not right.

Fellow MA Student: I'm just afraid the ball is going to bean one of these kids in the head.
Me: They're young.  They're malleable.

Interested in being interviewed for a research paper on Sex  Ed in the U.S.?  What was your experience in high school?  Leave a comment or email me at bukokat@gmail.com. 

I’d been tutoring Dee and Bri all year, watching these girls gain more confidence in math and celebrating when Bri got an A+ on a test. One day, one of them said something about the lattice method of multiple digit multiplication, and got a chance to ask them how it was done. I’d seen students doing it all year, and was baffled by it.

Dee got out a sheet of paper and wrote two large numbers on it, then set up the “lattice.” “You multiply each number like this, and then you add up those answers like this.” She set up another lattice for me, and I tried it. After I got my answer, we double checked with a calculator. It was right.

“Good job, Ms. T,” Dee said, patting my shoulder. “You’re a good student.”

“I have a smart teacher,” I told her, and she grinned.

Whatever happens to the rest of the kids I've worked with, these two will kickass in high school. 

We had a field trip today to the UofM Arboretum, and I actually had a blast.  I had ten kids in my group and they were all pretty fun and funny, and most of them had a great time.  Some of them whined a bit, but in general it was great to see a group of teenagers turn into a group of KIDS.  They ran about, they played, they goofed off.  One of the other chaperones thought I was being too lax on my group (because I let them run through sprinklers -- but so did other chaperones), but I was like, "Dude, they live in the middle of Northeast and don't get to run around like this.  As long as they don't hurt others or themselves, I'm fine."  I think it worked, because my group claimed they had fun -- and these are middleschoolers, who are bored by EVERYTHING.  All the time.

The highlight was having lunch with some of my favorite students, including A+ girl and one girl who is moving to Georgia over Memorial Day weekend (much to my utter dismay - this girl is so rad I can't bear to think that she won't be around after tomorrow).  And they asked me to join them!  I think probably because they knew I wouldn't be drilling them about what they learned today, and they probably (rightfully) suspected that I would share bits of the box lunch that the chaperones got with them.  And they chatted with me and with each other and talked freely about boys they liked and American Idol and what they wanted to do this summer.  Teenage girls are so refreshingly the same, no matter where you live, no matter what era it is.  They just have different technology now.

The bad part of the day was that I had to break up a fight between two girls who weren't even in my group.  It was as we all were heading back to the busses -- I heard yelling, but then kids are always yelling.  Then I heard thumping.  I was the only adult nearby so I bolted towards them, screaming, "BREAK IT UP RIGHT NOW!"  A boy thought I was yelling to him, so he jumped in and pulled one of the girls out.  A few other girls pulled the other pugilist out of the fray, and she bolted from the scene.  I grabbed the one remaining, who was screaming her head off at her retreating foe, and told the boy who was holding her back to get her to the bus.  He did so, saying to her the whole time, "It's not worth it, it's not worth it!"  (And apparently spent the whole busride home talking about it, the 7th grade math teacher told me later)  After we got back to the school, the girls ran at each other again -- but someone had radioed ahead to the principals and behavior staff, so those fights were stopped instantly.

Fights don't happen as often at the school as one would think -- most of the kids are the yelling type.  I prevented two fights earlier in the year by recognizing the signs and jumping in like a good ref, but this one happened without warning.  When it does happen, the fighting upsets me deeply. Because, well, these are kids, and what is it that drives kids to fight like that?   

They've turned on the AC in the school, even though it's been a fairly cool spring. But the calendar says it's late May, so on goes the air.

One of the eighth graders I work with shivered and asked me why they turned the air on.
"Well," I told her, "Every other bureaucracy I've experienced doesn't think like a reasonable person.  MPS looked at the calendar, saw it was May 20th and said, 'All right, this is as good a time as any to turn on the AC.'  They didn't even consider that it's not even 70 degrees outside."

My eighth grader looked at me with the sort of outraged incredulity that everyone experiences when they realize things in the world are intentionally fucked up.

"They need to be punched in the face!" she exclaimed vehemently.

Teacher: No calculators for this one.  You have something far more powerful than a calculator with you.
Student: What?
Teacher: Me!

7th grade boy: OOOOOOOOoooooOOOOH!  You got MATHED!

It's like my kids know JUST how much bullshit I can handle before they decide to throw me a bone and be fucking awesome.  I've been working with this one eighth grade girl for the whole time I've been at the school -- she was a lot quieter than other students and I started pulling her and two other girls aside to work with me, since they were getting lost in what's a pretty wild classroom.  When I started working with her second quarter, her average in the class was a D.  This was because she couldn't understand the homework, no matter how hard she tried... so I got in the habit of checking her homework with her once a day before she turned it in.  Her grade started to rise a bit and though I still help her out everyday, she definitely has more confidence in math.

This isn't just any eighth grade math, this is like, stuff with exponents and shit that baffled me a bit when we started on it.  I actually had to reteach myself how to do it so I could help her out.  Last week, the day before the "check-up" (what they call tests), she and I sat down for a few minutes so I could explain with her one-on-one the difference between using x as an exponent and just multiplying a number by x, and when to write the exponent as x-1, and how to enter this in a calculator so she can read a table.  And, you know what?  Apparently I taught it WELL.  Because she ate that test for lunch.  She pwned it.  She got an A+.

"I'm so stinkin' proud of you," I told her.

She grinned at me, which was great to see because she's normally a very stoic teen.  "Thanks!"

And then I had to reteach myself scientific notation so I could explain it to her.