Lesson of the day: Spend a day in the rain with people you love.

I started the week off at the doctor’s office with the words “You have bronchitis, strep throat and an ear infection. Didn’t you know that young people are not supposed to get this sick?” All I could think was, “I’m just glad I didn’t get the stomach thing going around…”. It is one of the deep dark secrets of teachers; we catch everything our kids get. If they touch it and turn it in, those germs are now ours. Whoever said teenagers don’t like to share? Because, my kids share way more than I would like them to. But aside from being sick this week, something really special happened. For the first time ever, I got to chaperone a field trip! It was pouring rain and the trip was to Knott’s Berry Farm…but I got to go! More than anything, I had 5 kids with me that were my kids, and it was special because they were my kids. It made up for all of the really hard stuff this year has thrown at me. As I was sitting watching them eat nachos and drink hot chocolate, for the first time this year I felt like I made a difference. I felt like I had done my job. I was sitting there with these 5 kids who really aren’t kids anymore and realized that sometimes life rains on us. Sometimes it feels like the rain is so strong that it is going to wash us away. But if you spend a day in the rain with people you love, the rain isn’t such a big deal. It is just there in the background of what you are doing, while you are with the people you love. 

Teachers are bigger versions of their students...

So I had yet another training to go to... And, if you have ever read my blog before, you know how much I hate going to these things. It is a slow painful death. The teach sitting next to me kept saying "I can't believe it's only...(insert time)" and repeated this every 20 minutes for 7 hours. It was like the never ending road trip, "are we there yet?" At one point it got so bad that my assistant principle wrote a haiku about me...

Cupcake love can kill
Caring for the underdog
Adams took the hit

Now I am sure that you are wondering with great anticipation what I was doing... Well wait no more... here is what I was doing with my time....


1. taking random photos of stuff on the table

Post-it notes are on sale at Staples... Look at all the pretty colors...

2. Asking myself meaningful questions like...

Just so you know, there is a lot wrong with this scenario. For example, the hundreds of dollars that my district paid for us to go to a training in which they taught us NOTHING!!!!

3. Trying to pretend that i was paying attention and following along...

Hmmmm...interesting (nod head and do the thinker pose)

4. My favorite part of the day, evaluation time. I put a lot of effort into this...

Stuff Korean Moms Like: #58 Korean School

I have to say that this is quite possibly my favorite blog of all time....

Stuff Korean Moms Like: #58 Korean School

So we thought the tiara was a the biggest problem…I wish

You remember that kid in elementary school, the one that would wear strange outfits and thought that they could fly, would eat glue and always seemed a little off? If you were that kid, stop reading now…I don’t want to upset you with this story.

So the super hero girl has achieved a new nickname at school… Demon Bat Girl…hmmm… “why?” you ask, well let me recount the events of last Friday at approximately 2:10 PM in Perris CA. There I was, standing like I always stand during the passing period, greeting my kids so that they feel welcome and loved. I had noticed that though the brutal heat of Perris in the summer had remained, the sun had disappeared and yet another thunder storm was about to hit.

Seems like a pretty normal thing right? Well that is how all American gothic stories start, with something normal, but there is always a glint of foreshadowing in the weather or something…and that is when things go horribly, horribly wrong. I’ve read enough Poe, I should have seen it coming… Screams of terror begin to rise into the oppressively moist filled air. I turn, in expectation of a “physical altercation”, when I realize that the “super hero girl” has thrown herself on the ground just to the left of my class room and is sobbing out the words, “You are a MURDERER”. By this point a crowd had begun to gather, like flies to honey… stupid teenagers, they didn’t even see it coming.

“Apologize! A-pol-O-gizzzzeee!!!”, she yelled at the top of her voice, and began to run after one of the senior boys. “You killed it! It was a defenseless animal and you killed it… APOLOGIZE!!!”, and as any though guy would say, “No! It flew at me. It attacked me! I didn’t mean to kill it, but I won’t apologize that I killed it”. (Apparently a fruit bat had flown at and attacked the senior boy, who smacked it to get it away from him…and he killed it. Really, she had the bat in her bag and took it out and it went crazy. Because despite the fact that bats are cool, they can’t be out in the 112 degree weather during the day. They are NOCTURNAL!!!)

So reader, guess how well that went over. Your literary skills are impressive, but I doubt that even Faulkner could have guessed what would happen next in this tale. “If you don’t apologize, I’m going to put a curse on you!” to which he replied, “Go ahead, I don’t believe in that crap anyway”. So what do you think she did? She started going off in some strange gibberish and then said she cursed us all and the school. And of course, because I always get the weird ones and she has my class right after this incident… she comes storming over to my room. But after she just cursed us all and wished evil down upon us, there was no way I was letting this one into class. I moved from my greeter position to block the door with all you’ve got position and told her no way was she coming into class. I yelled for security and told them to take her to counseling. So they come over and take her away as she looks back at me with hate in her eyes. But what was I supposed to do? The entire class saw her acting crazy and cursing us. Try calming down a room full of teenagers, mostly who are Catholic and have all pulled out their rosaries and are praying for their lives. I even had a kid ask if I would pray with them, that is when the wind and thunder storm hit…

It’s going to be a loooong school year…

“Cho hommie where you from” and “I can make you have a bad day”

So there were some really funny things that happened this week aside from the caped crusader, that I just have to share… and proof that it may be time to stop working in the ghetto.

1. Walking into campus I hear a boys voice yell, “Cho hommie where you from?”. Now, in the ghetto this is calling someone out. This means hommie you’re about to get cut, so run or fight. Fight or flight reflexes kicked in and apparently I was ready to fight because I turned around and yelled, “What did YOU just say to me?”. Of course as I said it I thought, you have worked in Perris for too long if someone yells that and you know they are talking to you… turns out it was two of my cholitos joking around. River-side-ah, so back up hommie!

2. After being called out in the parking lot… First period I am privately reprimanding a student for cursing in class, when one of his friend stands up and yells “don’t tell him what to do”. And before I could control myself I had in a calm voice told him, “If you think you intimidate me just because you’re 6’2”, you’re wrong. So get your butt back in your chair and mind your business”. THEN his other friend says, “You know I can make you have a bad day!” And again before I could control myself I said, “Really, because if you think you can make my day bad you can’t imagine how bad I can make yours. Shall I start the process of making your day really bad? One more word out of your mouth and we’ll see just how bad I can make it…” Apparently I put them in check because I got an apology from all three and a twix the next day. 

Ummm…. Ivan, is she wearing a cape?

The first week back was nothing short of really insane. Just to show you how insane it was, let me tell you about today.  So I'm standing at my door and greeting my kids when this girl walks into my class. And I think to myself, “hmmm… somethings not right”, but for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on it. So the bell rings and I come inside to take attendance, and that is when I realize what it is. My student is dressed in a full on superhero outfit. Cape, tiara and for whatever reason black electrical tape on her face… and all I can do is look at my T.A. and say, “why me?”, to which he said, "seriously" and we both sighed in the knowledge that this was going to be the strangest of all my classes. You can’t imagine how hard it was, since today of all days was my teacher student confrence day. There I was thinking as she walked up to my desk, do I tell her to take the tiara off, since I don’t allow hats in my room? Or do play that ignorance is bliss and pretent that the child infront of me does not have electrical tape on her face? I chose avoidance, but could not help but laugh when she told another one of my students to get out of her force field. 

Back in the saddle again

It has been a while since I wrote… and maybe I need to explain by just saying that this was the hardest year of teaching yet. And I am firm believer that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all… so I have not said anything for a while…
But now it is summer vacation and I am ready to start writing again, because graduation and a few weeks of vacation reminded me why I am a teacher. I thought that I would write my first entry back in the blogging world about a student I wrote about earlier in the year. He was expelled for which I won’t go into detail, but it broke my heart. That was only the second time that I have ever let my kids see me cry (the other being when a close friend died). I was devastated, because I felt like I had failed as a teacher and mentor.
And then the next day came and I had to take what I had learned from the loss of that student and apply it to the kids that I was left with. But for the rest of the year I hoped that he would not give up, and I hoped that I would see him again. But in my line of work, we don’t often see the kids that we lose again. And for that reason you cannot imagine what it meant when I saw him walk into the graduation stadium in his gown. (Our school is so small that we combine with adult ed for graduation, which is where he went after his expulsion.) My heart stopped for a second, I was so proud of him.
There are no words really for that feeling. It was like someone gave me back something priceless that I thought had been lost. And for all the hardship of this past year, that one kid reminded me why I do what I do. There are a lot of kids that walked that day that reminded me, that no matter how hard it is, they deserve to have someone fight for them. Even if it is just fighting to help find them a place to do community service;)

Miss Adams and the End of the Year

 

New Fav Song

The World That We Live In...

The Nightmare of a Teacher

The world is ending and we are all gonna die... get over it already

Why are you people worried about the earth getting knocked off its rotation? There are WAY worse things out there lurking around every corner. Let's stop worrying about the things we can't fix and focus on the things that we as a human race can wipe out with our mistreatment of the environment!

Down with the blob fish...

Check this people! Fear the Blob Fish

Miss Adams is a Sci Fi NERD!!!

Whenever I am having a bad day, there are certain things that will always make me feel better. For example parodies combining Stargate the TV show and the ultimate 80s pop song Jenny 867-5309, bring a small bit of calm and tranquility to my world.

Check this out!

A Reminder to Myself

A Better Outlook than Yesterday

Scars

Thomas Hardy once said, “The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.” Today I met with a bitter disappointment. I have never cried in front of my kids, but today was so devastating that there was nothing I could do to keep them from seeing the reality that when they fail, it is my failure as well. I am not talking about a test or something trivial. I’m talking about when they make a choice that forever changes the course of their life. I have seen kids be taken away in handcuffs; cops have taken kids right from my room. But today it was one of my kids and I can not describe how devastating it was. It was his fault, what he did was wrong. But I can do nothing but question myself about it. How did I not see it? How could I have a child that I considered to be one of my kids for 2 years, and be blind to what he was doing? That was my failure. My heart hurts, because I can’t tell this kid that everything is going to be okay. My heart hurts because, I feel like I failed him in someway. And in my devastation I overreacted to something stupid that another kid did. I tore everything off the back wall in my classroom. Because why should they have anything nice, when they do nothing to deserve it? A kid decided to be a jerk and rip my focal walls. And so I took it all down. Because that group of kids thinks that they are the center of the world. That we should bend for every whim they have. And I refuse. I will not allow them to own anything in my life. I will not allow them to be another disappointment in my life. I will not have another scar because of them.

The Fat Don't Fly

So as I sat tonight watching the Vancouver Olympics, I was a little irritated by the commentators. Not in the “you think your funny but you couldn’t tell a knock-knock joke to a 2 year old and be funny” kind of way. In the wow you’re a huge hypocritical jerk kind of way. Readers (if you’re out there) check this out. So I’m watching the ski jumping (which I’m not sure what it is technically called, but is on wii fit so…), when this French guy gets up there to jump. He is massively tall, but thin as a rail. If he was any thinner he would be anorexic. And what do you think the commentators start saying about him? “He is way over the body mass index for this sport” and my favorite of them all, “the fat don’t fly”. Let’s take a step back NBC. Is your channel not the home of The Biggest Loser? Frenchy is NOT fat, he is a professional athlete with a muscular physic. Commentators, if he was out of the body mass index for that sport, do you really think that they would let him compete? Are you being jerks because he’s French? Really I think that is what it boils down to, he’s French and that is why you have a problem with him. “The fat don’t fly”, well NBC why is it that you didn’t make a fat joke about the American bobsled team? Did you not see them? Let me refresh your memory…

No wonder why the USA lost... apparently the fat can bobsled either. But thanks for giving me a new phrase to yell at people. From here on out whenever someone says they can't do something I'm going to yell, "it's because the fat don't fly". They will thus think they are fat and go cry in a corner and I will have thus successfully crushed their spirit. Thanks NBC!

William Lyon Phelps

William Lyon Phelps once said, “A student never forgets an encouraging private word, when it is given with sincere respect and admiration”, but what about when the students pull us aside and encourage us? It amazes me how closely they watch us. Our kids notice when we change our hair color, or get new shoes. They can sense our mood before we have even spoken, and they know when we need them to tell us that we are doing a good job and that they think we are great. I was having very possibly the worst day of my life yesterday; I won’t go into detail, just trust me that it was BAD. And at the worst moments of that day, kids stepped up to make me feel better, “Miss Adams I’m sorry your sad, but I love you”, “I’m gonna get you a Twix right now, Twix fix everything”. But of them all, there is one student who has never been one to say Adams I love you, or you’re my favorite teacher. But he did everything in his power to make me smile and then he put his and on my shoulder and told me that he thought I was great. And as he left my class he asked, “did I make you feel even a little better?”. What can you say to that? Maybe it is this, William Lyon Phelps wasn’t wrong, but I have to say that it works both ways; because, a teacher never forgets an encouraging private word when it is given with sincere respect and admiration. 

Dieting : Miss Adams :: Sonnet : Shakespeare

Since I am already in a bad mood from the past horrific week at work, I decided to add insult to injury and throw a diet in there. You know, just to see just how much I can take before I lose my mind and crack. I’ll be honest; I am always on a diet. But I have a schedule right now, and come hell or high water, death or dismemberment, I WILL MEET MY GOAL. And so here it is, I am joining the bandwagon of crack heads that hope and pray that the cabbage soup diet will miraculously drop at least 10 pounds off of their bodies. So here is day one… I have not cheated, but I can tell you this right now in all honesty I want to inflict pain on someone. I love soup, more than any normal person should ever love soup, but I’m so hungry I am nearing violence. It’s not like I have 50 pounds to lose, or even 20. I can’t really explain why it is so important that I do this. I guess I can sum it up with a fight I had with a member of my family this week. Let’s just say that they pointed out that I recently gained 5 pounds…I’ve been crying for the past 3 days…

I can do this… but I have to point something out. Did you ever notice the “die” in diet?

Meeting Your Match…

So today was my first day back with the kids after winter break. I was really happy to be back. But I was a little hesitant about what to expect. You see I was given the charge of taking over several of the 11^th grade English classes. The reason for this being that the students were so hellacious, that the previous teacher threatened to retire if she had them for second semester.  And thus I inherited a motley crew of teenage hooligans. But hooligans are my favorite, so I am happy! They make life so much more interesting. And really, I am a tough cookie to crack; I get down with the best of them. But today I met a child that very well may be my match. For whatever reason, he has decided that he is going to be a little punk. And by punk I mean that he acts like he has ADHD and is blind and deaf to anything said or done by an authority figure. Well, all I can say is bring it on honey! I will shove you in a corner of darkness and move on with class. I’m prepared for you. And besides, I have thugs to take of things if I need them;)

Why me????

I'm sitting at a high school in Romoland.... Dying a slow slow death!!!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A Sad End to Winter Break

Winter break is a beautiful thing. Time away from the kids, co-workers, and irritating drivers in Perris, brings refreshment to the inner workings of my being. I swear I have developed severe road rage just from the way four way stops are done in Perris. But this year, my beautiful winter break has been cut short.

ERRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All the English teachers had to come back a week early from winter break to go to a “training”… just imagine it this way… some deaths are slow and painful. But this is much, much worse. It is never a good thing when you sit there thinking that being eaten alive by army ants would ease your pain and would be a relief from the boredom in which you are withering.  I have said this before, but I will say this again, why do teacher trainings always reduce you to the level of a 5 year old? I am an adult. I have an education. I can drive and manage a bank account and do all the things that other adults do. So then please, someone, tell me why it is that the trainers feel that all the teachers in the room are an elementary class?

Okay, so with that out of the way I am getting ready for my new semester! Loads of fun I can already tell. I was looking over my rosters, in a class of 23 students I have 5 girls… and in a class of 26 I have 8 girls. What is the sadist part is that I know most of these girls and the never come to school! This means that next semester I might as well be teaching at an all boy school. hmmmm….vocabulary football anyone?