Salmon and Souvlaki

Today was a crazy day.  One of my students stole a very large sum of money from another ESOL student.  I have both students in the same class. Needless to say, we didn’t get a ton of thing done this afternoon. During the midst of it, there was a class change and I had another set of kids for two more periods.  In that set of kids, I had three kids who were really with me, one boy who was refusing to work (long story), and another boy crying and really upset because he had been falsely accused by the thief of being involved.  Ideal learning situation, right?  Anyway, at some point I had to leave the room to deal with the defiant boy and so put another student, A, in charge of teaching the class.  They were just reviewing the answers and so I figured he could handle that.  He LOVED it!!  He called on different students to give their answers and then said, “Class, do we agree with B?” Those are exactly the words that I use, clearly all too often!  He was being me!  Afterward, he kept saying, “Miss, being a teacher is fun, right?  I like being a teacher!”  He was very cute about the whole thing and gave me a little levity in a tough and sobering day.  He also gave me a little perspective on the whole thing.  Yes, being a teacher is fun.  Just not always.

P.S. Stay tuned for a special Friday edition of “Poetry Thursday”.

That’s a lesson I learned early on.  As in, never promise, “I’ll have your tests graded by tomorrow” unless you’re sure you can do it.  As in, don’t promise, “I’ll post the answers tomorrow” when you’re making dinner for someone that next day and taking it to their house to eat it with them.  It’s a lesson I clearly haven’t completely learned!

So everyone gets a big “check plus” for participation but no one got them completely right so no A+ for anybody.  Sorry!  I’m trying to avoid grade inflation here.  I must say, Nik and I enjoyed all the guesses and particularly had a good laugh at Rachel’s guesses.  How in the world did you come up with “yawl”?

And, as maybe Meggan figured out, if you hold your mouse over the pictures, the title that I saved them as comes up and you’ll see that the three words were hand, dig, and stand.  In the picture that I showed to my students, I drew an arrow pointing at Nik and an X over me.  So they got the idea.

It was really fun to see their reactions to seeing me and Nik in the pictures.  They loved it!  But I was surprised by how they zeroed in on the periphery of the pictures.  They wanted to know all about the room we were in, about the computer in the background, and about what we were doing.  Both classes also asked if I knew that Nik was taking a picture of me in the dig picture.  I guess I was convincingly enthralled in my digging!

And Rachel, thanks for the compliment on my sweater.  I bought it in 2003.