Day 11 - Pointy toed, leopard print flats

As the title of this post suggests, I wore a new pair of shoes to school, which automatically made today a good day. Plus I got a few compliments on the shoes, making me very happy that I purchased them. However, the shoes don't really have anything to do with teaching today, so I will move on now.

4th and 5th period were set to do the same review activities as 1st period did yesterday. We gave the practice quizzes, went over them, and played vocab bingo. 4th period was pretty productive. We even had time at the end of class to present the political cartoons the students started on Monday. I hope they retained what we did today- strike that- I PRAY that they retained what we did today, because we are spending way more time reviewing in class than we planned and they had all better do well on this test next week.

And then there was 5th period, the most interesting part of the day. A group of 4 students was sitting on the left side of the classroom- 2 girls who are best friends, and two boys sitting behind them who are also friends. Well, many of our students find it close to impossible to not talk. Like, I think they might explode if they were quiet for too long; they just can't keep their mouths shut. One student in particular in that group of 4 just would not stop talking and it was getting on my nerves. I wasn't mad, I didn't overreact or yell, I just finally got tired of saying, "Stop talking." So, to the surprise of that student (and probably the rest of the class) I just finally said, "Can you do me a favor?" When he said yes I pointed at an empty desk on the other side of the room and said, "Come sit over here." He didn't think I was serious at first and tried to convince me that he would stop talking to his friend, but I wasn't born yesterday- close to it, but not quite. The student moved to the new desk, to the dissatisfaction of some of the students on that side of the room. BUT, I dealt with an issue fairly smoothly today and I was very proud of myself, and my supervising teacher approved of how I handled it, which made me feel even better.

The school I am at is a k-12 school and some of these students have been together for many, many years. This makes dealing with behavior problems challenging because students are very loyal to their friends and adamantly and willingly let you know who they do not like. I don't think an ideal seating chart exists, but we need to figure one out.

Two more days left this week! And we are going to be working on the essay questions for the test and I am actually looking forward to i.

I know that you are dying to see my new shoes, so we had a little photo shoot today :) Enjoy!