Quote of the Week #2

Student walks in, reaches into his pocket and says, in a decent Scarface impression: “Say ‘allo to my little… “ Student pulls out a pen. “…pen.” Student smiles. Note: It has been pointed out to me that this little quote could be seen as threatening–at least considering the Scarface reference and the fact that the…

Tar Beach

For Spirit Day yesterday, I used a project inspired by the book Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold. In this story a girl imagines she is flying above the night skies of New York and claiming it for herself. She reclaims the union building that won’t let her father join due to the color of his…

Bait and Switch

Earlier this year our little program was in the depths of student misbehavior. A couple of strong role models were pretty much running the place with chronic defiance and bullying. We had tried everything we could think of to change the tide and were at a loss. By this point students had lost nearly every…

Is There an Emergency?

As an attention-getting device the yodeling emergency button is barely passable. The yodel is quiet, and the students either giggle or yodel loudly when it is played. As a community-building device, however, it has come in handy. I put it up one day, and no one noticed until I began to run around asking if…

I Heart NPR

Many caped teachers listen to NPR.  On the way to work this morning, this caped teacher heard this news story about a bullying program our district elementary schools have been using.  In the story a middle school is using it, and many of the comments by the principal and the students reminded me of my…

Quandary

Okay, I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to post this on the blog. It crosses the boundary, I know. Here is the quandary… if I don’t share this masterpiece of an issue, the masses will not have the correct image of what cape-wearing truly entails. If I do share it, I will…

A Detention Conversation

Warning–This conversation would be rated PG-13.  It would be, if folks rated this kind of thing. E. is a very bright, very oppositional 7th grader.  He is truly quite funny and entertaining, but he gets the class so riled up, he has to be tempered a bit.  One of his skills is to weasel out…

Nimble-minded

J. showed up in my room today with a note from the teacher next door that said “Please keep him busy as long as you can.”  This means that his constant stream of chatter (most of it inappropriate) had reached its peak and needed a reset.  I reached in to the canyons of my Super…

A Cup of Tea

M. has a cough.  It is an obnoxious cough and quite distracting.  M. comes to school anyway and does not have a ride home if he is sick. On such occasions it might be appropriate to serve hot tea.  This caped teacher found some organic lime tea that comes, amazingly, in the form of a…