Fadedwords

Slowly but surely I am beginning to gather a circle of students that know me and come to see me on a fairly regular basis. These kids are ones that have several things going on; many have some problems dealing with and controlling their anger, some have problems with friendships, some are struggling with other things all together. My first few weeks at the school I barely saw anyone, but lately I’ve seen more and more. I have a list of regular visitors, students whose names I know and who smile when they see me in the hall. One of my boys made some fantastic progress with his anger, and today I got to reward him for his good decisions. I had a great conversation with one of my girls today about a situation she’s dealing with right now. Every day I see these kids… whether it’s in the hall or they’re coming up to me asking me, “Ms. M when can I come see you?”

These are the things that make all the bad days worth while.

I taught my first lesson today, in Courtney’s fifth grade classroom. I had been nervous before that they’d be out of control and disrespectful… mainly because that’s why I was going in to talk to them. The lesson was supposed to be about respect and responsibility because they’ve been struggling with those things. And that’s an understatement. The lesson went amazingly well; the kids listenend, participated, and seemed to have a great time. Hopefully the lesson helps Courtney out with some of the problems they’ve been giving her. We set up an idea that every week she can nominate a student from class that has been most respectful and responsible, and that student will be able to come to my office and pick candy from my stash. They seemed very excited about that. We made a giant poster in class today, along with some great pictures that I now have hanging up in my office. I’ll have to take a picture on Monday.

Today I began making Drew his care package. He’s had kind of a rough week or so, and I owed him brownies for sending me a stuffed beaver dressed like a Canadian Mountie. I’ve owed him that since last fall, so I figured I’d just send him a care package to cheer him up. I made chocolate chip cookies tonight, and tomorrow morning I’ll make brownies (the ones I made the other day that turned out so awesome), another batch of cookies (swirl chip ones this time) and maybe some sugar cookies. I’m still trying to decide if I have the gusto to go through that whole production. The sugar cookies are outstanding, but man is that batter hard to work with.

The past two days at work have been very good. I’m still stressed out about a couple things that I’m still… left in the dark about. Hopefully those things get cleared up next week.

Jake will be here tomorrow. There was a battery recall on every laptop that Red Hat has in their office here, so he’s spending five hours tonight after his regular work hours trying to get all of the batteries ready to ship back. It’s tedious and awful, but he’ll get it out of the way tonight and we’ll enjoy the rest of the weekend. Tomorrow we plan to go to the fair, which I’m exceptionally excited about. This is just the local county fair. State fair is in another two and a half weeks.

Tonight I will sleep early so tomorrow will come quicker.