Unev-what-ful?

If tomorrow passes without a crisis it will be the first week since late July that has been uneventful.

Hooray.

Last Friday a child (who was 11 years old) started crying at me and screamed "you're a JERK!" because I took the ice pack intended for his knee after he started eating the ice in it. A little bit later after talking about how Solomon Linda's Mbube was lifted by Pete Seeger after a trip to South Africa, he shouted "YOU STOLE FROM ME!"

The hardest part in managing this situation is to encourage other kids in the class to have compassion about the hard day he must have been having rather than looking at me and meekly saying "you're a jerk" when he's not around because it cracks them up. Especially since when I walked into the teachers lounge the school nurse that I eat lunch with yelled "you're a JERK!" when I walked in and I laughed my ass off.

School story the second. There are 17 kids in my elementary band class. Today we got through "go tell aunt Rhody" while still hanging on to all of them. Also they changed the words to the song and it now involves macaroni. When we finished I gave a short speech letting them know that if they didn't practice between now and the next band class, they would lose it and we'd have to do the whole thing again.

There is one girl that is about six inches shorter and as skinny as the trombone she plays. She raised her hand and asked, "Mrs. Terry, can I make an announcement?" I said, "of course." She shouted "LET'S MAKE MRS. TERRY PROUD!!!"

Moral of these stories-

There is nothing worse than a fifth grader who hates you and there is nothing better than a fifth grader who adores you.