Never A Dull Day

Last week was an interesting one at school. One of my freshmen girls came back from a five day suspension for fighting. She had said some things to a smaller senior girl who proceeded to slam her head into an elevator door. It gave me five days without hearing the word fu__ in my classroom. She came back and started dropping f-bombs right and left. I put a stop to it and it moved out into the hall during passing time. What an exceptional young ‘lady’. I consider her a “work in progress”.

I have another young man who wasn’t doing his work this past week. When I talked to him about his problems, he told me he doesn’t like to do any writing and would as soon take a zero in the assignment. If we did projects in science that involved building things, he would be fine. When I reminded him that he would not build a bridge project earlier in the year, he pointed out that that was with craft sticks. He’d rather work with power tools. Some kids are very difficult to reach but I just look on it as a challenge.

A third boy was loafing along, missing class on a regular basis and avoiding work whenever he did show up. Yesterday, he came into class and spent the whole period on task. Then an email came from the counselor telling me that he had just realized he needed to pass classes to earn credits. I guess he thought he was still at the middle school. He isn’t a discipline problem but he is definitely hurting himself.

Yesterday saw two fights on campus. One was between two guys that was stirred up by a girlfriend of the one. The other was between two girls who had said some nasty things about each other. Different teachers had to intervene to break them up. Fights between two boys usually involve a lot of posturing and hoping that someone will come along to break it up. I made a bit of a reputation for myself when I broke up a fight last year and didn’t even put my clipboard down to do it. But when girls fight, it is usually no holds barred and step between them at your own risk.

My physics students had a test today. Hopefully they did well since even the calculus students have trouble handling the math (algebra based) in the text. I don’t think high school students have developed enough mental maturity to interpret the questions and determine the proper method to arrive at an answer. The questions are often too complex for a junior or senior in high school but appear to be simple when they are just a year or two older. They know the mechanics but the setup is often beyond them. Part of the problem might be the way math is taught with repetitive sets of problems that involve little actual thought and limited problem interpretation.

Wednesday morning was a lot of fun. We had a faculty training session on computers. We were taught how to plug in a keyboard and mouse among other basics. It was unbelievable that the district paid money to bring in outside consultants to go over such basic information. I suspect the training was part of a requirement from the state to maintain our special rates for internet access. Computers have been a bit of a recent sore point among the faculty. We are following a business network model with a central server and all computers set up so we can only use them and not add any programs or peripherals. Unfortunately we do not have a full time computer tech on staff to do installations so our computers provide less flexibility than they did in the network system. The trainer didn’t know we had such restrictions and many of her points didn’t apply to us.

Never a dull day.