Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Stressful Tuesday

Yesterday was quite the hectic day in the Barnes classroom. The first bell rings at 8:05, by about 8:10 I had a note in my hand from a student saying that someone had a knife in their backpack. Of course I have to call the office, by law I am not allowed to look in backpacks. My principal was off campus at a meeting, so someone else from the office came down and found the knife. He was escorted to the office with a pile of "stuff" to work on. We had to wait for the principal to return to campus to hear his "fate". He was suspended for 3 days, yesterday counted as day one. In my 3 years of teaching, this is the second knife and last year I had a toy gun. All have resulted in 2+ day suspensions. Needless to say, starting the day that way throws everything off.

In other interesting news, the 4th grade team at my school has been selected to participate in an international math assessment. We are one of 2 schools in the state. My school is a very low socio-economic school with a mostly Hispanic population and a lot of students who are not proficient in English. The 3 of us upon hearing this news looked at each other and laughed. Our mentor told us that the program is trying to select schools with similar groups of students, which seems impossible considering that it is an international exam. So basically, our students who are behind according United States standards are going to be compared to students from excelling countries. We are not going to stress about it, we will just laugh it off, because we were chosen completely randomly from a lottery of all the schools in the state. We won't see the results until this year's 4th graders have left the school.

It has been an interesting couple of days to say the least.

1 comment:

  1. WOW! How frightening. Did the little boy's parents know he had the knife? Guess he had a good excuse for having it - like I needed it to peal my apple for lunch. LOL And good luck with the math test. That is ridiculous the way they pick the schools for that kind of test. Oh well, like you said, nothing you do about it. But good luck anyway.

    Love you,
    Grandma

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