The end is in sight...

I graduate in sixteen days. Crazy!

Yesterday was a really rough day. My kids have been WILD, and yes, on some days I would classify them as HELLIANS. Yesterday was one of those days.

One student in particular has been very hard to love on some days. She's really young and pretty immature for a second grader. She started kindergarten a year early, at a Montessori school. She then switched to Whittier for first grade, and she came in not knowing her letters and their sounds. Basically, she's still a year behind and should probably repeat second grade, even though her parents don't want her to. Anyhow, her only way of coping with anything is to cry and throw a fit. And it gets pretty old real quick. Yesterday afternoon I was teaching science (and was being observed!) when this little girl started to cry for some reason I could not figure out. She went over to the wall and started to pound her head on the wall while crying. In the mean time, I had 21 students sitting in their seats in stunned silence, wondering what was going to happen. All eyes were on me, and I didn't have the faintest idea of what to do. So I got the kids started on gathering their materials and I tried to talk to the upset student. Aye aye aye, my class is nothing but drama-rama!

There is one little boy who cracks me up. He's a student I would love to take with me and teach every year. Today he had all his literature cirle work done, all of his other work done, and had read all of his library books. I asked him to please find something productive to do, but he couldn't think of anything. So I had him clean transparencies. It was awesome. I had a stack of about 30 transparencies that desperately needed cleaning, and he actually loved doing it. I despise cleaning transparencies! And he was really cute while doing it, too. First of all, he got absolutely soaked. Second, I kept hearing cute little outbursts like, "How does she do this?! This is hard!" and "Purple ink is the worst!!!" Oh, they crack me up :)

We ended our day this afternoon by practicing our square dances for our potluck that is next week. I had a blast just dancing with my kids. It was great to be able to have fun with them and just dance around. One thing is for sure, though - our kids sound like definate city kids when they say "Yee haw!" We're gonna have to work on that...