"Your mom lets you use that?"

While stapling Indian head bands today one of my girls came up to me in all honesty and asked, "your mom lets you use that?" Referring to me being able to use a stapler!!

Shorter days?

I've been noticing myself being able to leave a bit earlier. My routines have been developed, tweeked, trashed, and re-developed, tweeked again and now seem to be taking shape. I do not have to put in that extra hour or so a night to re-think and re-design things. Which means that I am riding the wave of weekly plans and surviving in a more mentally sound manner!

How about all of you? Just dealing with the daily grind or still beating yourself up over the little things. It is easy to do after all. Are your nights becoming longer- and days at school shorter?

You know how there is that old saying, "There is no such thing as a dumb question."?

Well, I have come to disagree with that statement.

We have a field trip on Friday and today I had a little pow-wow with my class about Do's and Don'ts for the trip.

One of the things that I was asked to stress to the kids was that they are welcome to a bring water bottle on the trip as long as it is filled with ONLY WATER.

20 hands immediately sprang into the air and I knew where these kids' minds were headed.

"Please save all questions for the end. I might just answer your question before you ask." I advise.

I went on to further clarify "That means you shouldn't take a Gatorade, pop (or "Coke" as they call it down here), Red Bull, juice, lemonade..." listing off every non-alcoholic beverage I could think of. I also went off on the tangent that taking an empty bottled water container and filling it with a liquid other than water does NOT make bringing that liquid along for the trip okay. Bottom line is I went on for 5 minutes trying to make my point CRYSTAL FUCKING CLEAR that you should only bring WATER.

"Any questions?" I dare to ask at the end of my tirade.

"Can we bring Vitamin Water? :::LOUD MOAN::: But why!? It is better for you than water!"

"How about those little flavor packets that you can dump in your water and shake up? Can we bring those?"

"Can I bring Gatorade? NO? But what if it is a light color, like yellow or pink?"

"What if we bring a water bottle filled with half water and half sprite?"

I have learned to ignore these ridiculous questions. Not so much as glance in the asker's direction. Some of the kids find it necessary to then just continue to shout their question loud and louder. That doesn't stop me. Increasing your volume will not make me dignify your stupidity with a response.

I just move on as though I heard nothing. As though they are not even in the room.

Is that mean?

Whatever, it is better than poking them in the eye with a sharp object, which is what I am tempted to do on a daily basis.

Can I teach orphans instead?

Now hear me out, my class is great. I love each and every one of them no matter how frustrating they can be at times. But teaching a class of orphans means that I wouldn't have parents telling me that I don't communicate enough despite weekly, in-depth newsletters with attached research articles on education... and that their child doesn't learn because they don't have 8 pages of homework every night, but they have perhaps one page of homework and math games and reading that they can do...

As one of my colleagues says, "Do they go into their doctors office and tell them how to run their practice? No. So don't come into school and tell us how to run our classroom..."

I am only one person... I can only do so much... How can I possibly do MORE??