boring by this week's standards

Just thought I'd throw in that evidently two of my resource kids were suspended... not one. Which makes seven, eight if you count Sidekick's suspension from earlier this week... I haven't even checked on Urkel or one of my other resource girls in days, so I don't know about them.

On the plus side, with five kids out the rest of the class did an AMAZING job today during RELA (reading and english language arts). Small cooperative group work, one doing guided reading, one doing dictionary work, one supposed to be doing cause-and-effect but they decided collectively to review the play we just read and reassigned themselves parts and read it together instead. Most classes I hear my name called, without exaggeration, probably eighty times. Somehow they think if I didn't respond to them the first three times they called my name without raising their hand or being in their seats it'll work SO much better to just say my name repeatedly eighteen more times without taking a breath while walking around the room. Today they actually shooed me away because they wanted to keep focusing on their work and didn't want me to distract them, and they all wanted to spend the full two periods on their projects rather than switching every 25 minutes like I planned. I was in teacher heaven for probably two hours.

I even went over Bloom's Taxonomy with my high group-- if you're not a big educational theory dork/TFA member, Bloom's is a system of organizing thought processes that teachers use to sort of scaffold learning and push kids to more advanced critical thinking (being able to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge rather than just identifying and using it)-- and had them create questions from their reading (they chose the most difficult of the books I gave them the option of choosing between, I was proud) and categorize their questions. And all this with the other teacher who's been the consistent long-term sub for M. out today. It rocked.

If only I'd been observed today... course I probably didn't have some piece of paperwork in the right place, especially with all the teaching materials and student work covered up from the PSSAs...

Three more of my kids told me they think Dae took my wallet and passed it off to somebody. I really, really, really hope that's not true... I've managed to convince myself that it happened downtown, and now I'm trying to psych myself up for being mean/disappointed when my kids come back. They deserve some mean treatment, after basically ganging up and robbing another kid, in their class no less, and they need to know and understand that, but mostly I just miss them, even Dae, who I'm starting to have serious character doubts about. I need to borrow some of his mean streak.