16.12.06

you know that phrase"a doozy"?

I had one of those weeks this week.

My kids had one of their few bad days on Tuesday. We've had a series of, well, atrocious, subs for my IA, and the most recent one was completely over the top. Besides constantly interrupting lessons to add information, he leaned in so close to the kids that he was breathing into their ears. After two days of this (Tuesday), my students were running low on tolerance and high on annoyance. He finally breathed in the wrong student's ear and set-off an entire "Why you in my face man?" rant. After settling the student down, the rest of the class was so riled that we couldn't refocus on the work we were doing, and then my principal came in for an informal observation. I actually had to have them read silently and answer the questions at the back--something I have never done. Luckily, they settled down and my second block (when my principal came back to finish the observation) was so wonderful they were practically teaching themselves. This was lucky as I got pulled out of class twice to discuss some of my first block's students' shenanigans. Apparently a few of them had brought eggs to school with the intention of egging a student "because it was his birthday." The plan was to wait until after school, but best laid plans go awry, and this particular plan ended up getting them suspended when they put it into early action.
Of course, the day after an horrible lesson I had to go to a full day in-service. Luckily, I got a fantastic sub, and while she admitted they got little of the work done, they at least didn't get out of hand. Thursday and Friday were better (mostly because they were very, very sorry about Tuesday), but I'm glad that it's only one more week until Winter Break.