Three Mondays Until Spring Break

 You know that it has been a very long week when you find yourself entering your home, heading straight for the medicine cabinet, and promptly swallowing three Advil.  I was pretty much convinced that my brain was oozing out of my ears at about noon.  I spent most of the morning working desperately to keep my eighth grade students on task and focused.  They, on the other hand, were much more interested in poking, pinching, pushing, and touching each other.  If I stopped to take a breath, they were talking.  When I finished with instructions and moved them to computers, they spun in circles in the computer chairs.  Who in their right minds places wheels on chairs in a middle school computer lab?  By the time I got them logged in, they were well on their way to Google.  I should take time to note here that the web quest I placed on SmartBoard had nothing, nodda, to do with Google.  

Brandishing referral slips in my left hand and a pen in my right, I managed to get them on the right site.  I taught six classes today and sent four kids to the office for disrespect, held about twenty kids in study hall at the end of the day, and managed to get the remaining students through the web quest.  Holy cow!  This rarely happens to me.  I can’t even imagine how the next three weeks are going to go.  If I had shoved that web quest on to a disc that could be slammed into Xbox, slapped control in their hand and stepped back, it would have been smooth sailing.  If I would have linked them through an IPad, the game would have been on, and wild horses would not have pulled those hormones in sneakers out of my room.  Case in point is that I started the year with my Kindle on my desk.  I showed my second generation to my eight graders and after Christmas the bulk of them were sporting Kindle Fires and IPads.  I have nineteen kids in my homeroom and twelve of them are reading at mock speed on their E-Books.  They were stoked when I showed up from break with my Kindle Fire and a world of conversations about apps, books, and search engines ensued.  

Can they use those search engines in school? Nope.  The Internet and all those apps are shut down to them. So I take them to the computer lab to do a web quest on computers that are in no way close to the technology in their lockers.  Thus, the poking, pinching, pushing, and twirling that led to my consumption of three Advil.

Ugh!  This job is hard, and it is getting harder. I just keep telling myself ……three more Monday’s until break and the end of the quarter.

Lora