School:
So I stayed up last night until one in the morning to finish my paper and submit it. Note to self: YOU ARE NO LONGER 18 YEARS OLD!!!!!! When you are my age, you have no business thinking you can get up in the morning and function! I did function, but you know I fell asleep practically the second I got home. It’s all a part of the “just one more thing” mentality. I needed to finish the writing part while I still knew what I was talking about. Then I decided I might as well put the citations in the paper while I still had everything open and fresh in my mind. And what the heck, at this point I might as well put in the references at the end because I still have all my references open. And hey, I might as well submit the paper to the Center For Writing Excellence, a thing the school has that will look at your paper and make suggestions for corrections and improvements. Oh, gee, that was done quickly! I might as well look at what they said. Yeah, I can fix these few things and ignore the suggestions that are stupid. Oh, look! The paper’s done! I’ll just submit it now! And yeah, by then it was 1:00.
In the meantime, I did get my other paper back, with a score of 14.8 out of 15. At the top was a VERY nice note from the teacher!
School:
Today was day three of SFA, the reading program. Day one: J. and E. spent the two hours off-task and no amount of redirection or support helped. So notes were written to give to their parents. Day two: E. was much better, and no problem today either. Then there’s J. Moved him to another group. Moved him away from all groups, so he decided to GET UP and walk over to another group to take a member’s paper! It just got worse from there, and his time ended with a form filled out and sent with him to the office. Day three: It only took about fifteen minutes for me to have this other form filled out and send him to the toughest 4th grade teacher. I should have done that yesterday, because technically that comes before being sent to the office. Gee, I can hardly wait until tomorrow! In the meantime, I’m documenting everything. This is a fifth grader who’s reading at a beginning third grade level. If he doesn’t actually read during reading class, he’ll be a ninth grader someday reading at a third grade level.
In the meantime, I have A. in my regular class who I also began documenting. He was tested last year but didn’t qualify for services because he’s a part-time student, just like my buddy K. from last year. If you’re a teacher, you’ve seen those timed addition tests (100 one-digit problems). He got 43%, not on the timed test but doing one for homework. It’s not just that he couldn’t get them right — some of his answers weren’t even numbers! He already missed two days of school — the two days before the math test (on which he got zero out of 15 right, which was an open note test). But we’re going to try to reopen his case again.
