Filtering Life

Sadly enough, I had to look up the spelling of Pringles. It was the old debate on the ending gals or gles. Anyway, enough about my poor pragmatic skills. I am T minus 21 hours of school left until Thanksgiving break. This is the beauty of being a teacher, you still get to experience the excitement of looking forward to school breaks. My kids are starting to drive me insane as we are wrapping up the next grading period today and they are pathetically behind and even more pathetically apathetic about getting the work in. I have vowed to not let them rain on my parade. In my first period Study Skills class a kid was working on a paper where you are suppose to start off by saying “Here’s why….” He was ticked I was making him work on it when he was so tired so he wrote his paper on “Here’s why I hate school and am going to destroy it.” It was a beautifully uplifting piece talking about how horrible the administrators are, how they try to act like they are 18, but they are really 50 and he wants them to grow up and stop speaking in a country accent. He also lamented on school lunches and how he hates that teachers decorate their rooms with “smelling things”. I realized he was trying to say smiling things, but did not know how to spell it. He had great lines about how he sees “smelling” rainbows and “smelling” flowers and “smelling” stars and how they make him want to throw up. It was hysterical. Ahhhh…the bitter angst of puberty foiled by the inability to spell. I told him that although it made me laugh, he would not be able to use this paper. I suggested that maybe he should write about “Here’s why I will work hard and pass all my classes so I don’t spend another year in 8th grade” but he wasn’t down with that. This kid reminds me of my brother at his age. He is a skater, loner, trying to be bad as he can be, but is really a good kid at heart. I LOVE MIDDLE SCHOOL SPECIAL ED!