My sister’s sleeping on the couch right now, so you need to be quiet while you read this so you don’t wake her up!!
I’m thinking I’m going to do my NaNoWriMo novel mostly online in a blog that I don’t use. That way I can access it from any computer, and don’t have to worry about saving it because WordPress does auto-save. I will still take the chunks periodically and put them into a single document, because I’m going to need to do that in order to get a final word count and submit it. I know of two other family members who have signed up this year. Sweet!
The weather is finally rather chilly in the morning and evenings. That is a weird adjustment, after it being hot for so long! Still need the AC in the middle of the day, but really just to cool the house down. Otherwise it goes up to around 82. May just start opening windows when I’m home instead!
Friday morning I finally had 100% attendance. By 10:30, two students went home sick. At least one teacher has a daughter who was officially diagnosed with “piggy-pox” on Friday. There were a lot of teachers out on Friday (lots of subs), but I don’t know how many were sick themselves and how many had a sick child at home. They sent me one of the students from another teacher for SFA (reading) because they didn’t want a sub to have to deal with him. I’d already had him last year for SFA, and knew he could be good if he wanted. So he was a saint.
Earlier in the week, one of my students who’s our Student Council rep came up to me and said that the other kids in her group were playing R[name] Touch. So I asked what R. Touch was. Apparently, it’s like a way of saying you have cooties, and you have them until you touch someone else and say R. Touch. R. is my dear boy on the autism spectrum. So I called some of them into my outside office (the porch) to get more information. It took a little while because a couple lie like a rug, but there are a few who would not only name names, but give you dates, photographs, and other evidence if you asked for it! So then they knew I was REALLY mad because I came back in the room very calmly and went over to the phone. We have a counselor/social worker who’s excellent at this sort of stuff, because she comes and does it during the course of the year anyway. So she came over and got more information, and talked about empathy. It turns out that they’ve been doing this to R. since last year, and they named names of kids in other classes who are bullying him as well. He also talked about other kids who do it. He also got to say how he felt. Then when she was done and went back to the office, they addressed this with the other students involved. There will be no bullying of kids in my classroom, and especially bullying someone who doesn’t have the social skills to deal with it. The next day after school, his mother came by for something and I told her what happened. While I was taking to her, he drew on the board the picture at the top of this entry.
