Parent Meetings and Basketball

**quick note: i'm not sure what happened with the previous post but somehow the last half got deleted and some weird conversation got saved instead. So here the post is in its entirety.***


So basketball practice has definately gotten better. Around 12 girls show up and we have a pretty good time. There are still a couple that duck when the ball comes their way and scream, but we´re working on it. I now have a whistle so maybe I should start making them call me coach, but I think I´m happy with Ms. Meghan. Although the title teacher also seems to be popular.

Now back to the 7th graders, the little bastards who like to make my life miserable. I guess the question you have to ask is why are these kids such hellions? In most cases you can go straight back to the parants and it all makes sense. So I met some of my students parents last night and I was not impressed.

The first problem is the lack of administrative support. The other day I sent a girl to detention for the rest of the day and when I went downstairs later do you know what I found her doing? Helping to paint a window and having a grand ol´time. When she saw me she just smiled and waived and said, ¨Hi, Ms. Meghan.¨ If there was ever a good argument or good time to beat a child that would have been it.

I have now learned amazing screaming abilities I never knew I had but I have to yell increadibly loud to get the kids to sit down and hear me over the noise. So this week my students are of course wandering out of their desks, throwing paper, talking to one another across the room, and just generally being bad and Im feeling like I want to tear my hair out. So I yell to the kids to open their books and they´re going to have to read this story silently and we´re going to have another test like we had earlier in the week. The test I had given last time had purposely been designed so that most of the students would fail. I´m not actually going to count the test, I can´t because only abuot 3 students out of 31 passed, but they dont know that. But then I thought to myself why should I be punishing the good kids? So I split the room and put about 12 or 13 really bad kids on one side and told them to read the story and answer questions in the book and then I taught the good kids somethign else. I taught poetry to the good ones, we even did a little Alan Ginsberg, and you know what? They liked it!!!

I generally do not care for poetry myself but I do love Alan Ginsberg and there´s a lot more to poetry than crappy love poems, so we talked about the stuff I liked (dont worry parents I did edit out the bad words). The crazy thing was one of my students who is bad often but being good that day really got into it, kids were asking questions after the bell had rung and we were actually enjoying ourselves and my kids wanted to learn more. It was great!

Enter the evil parents. So we have this meeting with some parents last night and this one man gets all up in arms about seperating the class being discrimination (total bullshit) and just blah blah blah. Now these kids can work their way over to the good side. If they sit quietly and do their work they will be allowed to do the same thing as the rest of the children, but some parents I suppose felt this was unfair. Perhaps it would be had we not tried sending them to detention, sending them to the principal, sending them outside the classroom, writing papers about proper classroom behavior is, etc. but we´ve done all that and this so far is the only thing that works. Honestly, I´d rather teach to the 20 good students and say screw it when it comes to the bad students. When we try talking to bad kids parents they act shocked as though they´ve never heard that their kid was bad before. In fact I talked to a mother last week about her sons behavior and invited her to sit in class with him and she said of course she´d come and help, but instead she changed her mind and said her son wasn´t a problem that the teachers were the ones in error and she was going to sue or something.

So we agreed we´d give the kids one more chance and not divide them which really means we wont divide them today or Friday but come Monday I´m splitting the kids up. I´m not going to have parents who cant control their kids telling me how to run the classroom. There was this one pompous ass who came (the guy who called it discrimination) and asked me how his daughter was in class. So I explained that while her behavior was acceptable her work was sub-par and her English wasn´t very good. Now I´d like to add that this man teaches high school in San Pedro and is from England, I´d also like to add that he came to this meeting with his shirt totally unbuttonded (that spoke volumes to me) so for him to have a daughter that can barely write comprehensive English is ridiculous to me. And do you know what he told me? He told me I should make all my students have a folder and make sure that they write down their assignments and go around and check. I have 40 minutes with these kids and I probably spend at least 15 minutes just trying to get them to sit down some days. What a joke. Aside from that last time I checked I was a teacher not a babysitter and Im not there to make sure they write down their assignment, they´re old enough that they should be doing that themselves.

Oh well, what can you do?