What In Tarnation?!?!?

October 31st holds a lot of significance:

Happy Reformation Day!

Happy Knock-Knock Joke Day!

Oh, and Happy Halloween!

I hope that your trick or treating is a little drier than the kids are having around here tonight.

Of course with holidays like Halloween come stories from the parties. Today did not disappoint. As I have said in the past, Halloween is the biggest visitor day at my school. Parents come out by the droves. At 2:00 we have our Halloween parade where all the students get to show off their costumes for the rest of the school. Since it has been raining outside all day, we were going to have the parade in our new gym. We packed all the students and parents into the gym for the fun. It was tight. Very tight. It felt a little like being a sardine. That tight.

I was standing at the edge of the hoard of students enjoying the preschoolers march across the stage when I saw a first grade teacher on the other side of the gym making a gesture with his hands near his mouth. He wasn’t looking directly at me so I dismissed the gesturing and continued watching the the parade. Out of my peripheral vision I noticed a group of about five teachers converging in the same area, quite close to where part of my class was sitting. I decided to step over 25 kids to check out what was going on. I wish I hadn’t. One of my students was standing, bent over with large amounts of vomit surging from his mouth. While the other teachers were repositioning the children away from the growing lake of vomit on the floor, I stood there with my student trying to reassure him while we were waiting for another teacher to get a trash can so we could move the student out of the way and up to the nurse’s office. Before I continue I should inform newer readers about my Achilles Heal, my Kryptonite, if you will, in teaching, and that is dealing with vomit. I am a sympathetic puker. If I see it, hear it, or smell it, I will also begin to hurl. One of the aides took the student up to the nurse and I was left to “guard” the puke so no other students would accidentally walk through it. For the next 25 minutes I get the pleasure of standing over a pile of vomit rivaling the size of Lake Michigan, trying not to throw up myself. It was the hardest thing I have ever done this school year. I did enjoy the rather astute observation of one of my other students: “That was a rather significant amount. What did he eat?” Since the parade took so long, we only had eight minutes to have the party in our rooms which consisted of me saying, “Quickly children, put this candy and these snacks in your back pack and leave. Have a safe Halloween!”

After the mercifully short Halloween party, I headed to the nearest potty and did what I had the urge to do since I saw the pool of vomit. Since then my stomach has felt queezy, I can’t get up enough nerve to eat anything fearing that my stomach will reject it. Hopefully, I will feel better in the morning.

Ugh.

Class dismissed!

Good gravy! I was a little concerned on one of those problems. Yikesamo! Since I passed, I will go ahead and post these results.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Found via Page 132.

Math class dismissed!

• Welcome/Intros
• Halloween is Evil
• We must like evil
• Haunted houses for Jesus
• Scaring the what out?!?!?
• What’s in the numbers
• The Eleven: Things You Don’t Want to get While Trick or Treating
• CL News
• Whoops
• An AED?
• The music is early
• Blog News
• Later Taters

You can manually download the episode here.

Or subscribe using the following address:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/clpodcast

My Odeo Channel

Originally recorded October 23, 2005
40:04
27.5 MB

Returning to hibernation.

Class dismissed!

It happens twice a year here at WIT?!?!? Parent/Teacher Conferences.

This week WIT?!?!? will be experiencing a media blackout (somewhat akin to a large solar flare sending out an EM pulse frying all electronics in a 20 mile radius… or not).

Feel free to amuse yourself in the archives and the other fine blogs I have linked to the left right.

Class dismissed!

Who knew my blog could make me money. According to this simple quiz, it can.

In case you are curious on how that dollar amount was found:

…this little applet which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

The idea of starting over again doesn’t appeal to me, but for that price I could probably manage. So anyone wanna buy a blog? Let the bidding begin in the comments.

Link found at Simply Kimberly.

Class dismissed!

I was at the MOREnet Technology conference on Monday and Tuesday. That meant that my class had a sub. My class this year, hasn’t been to successful with subs. This week I encouraged the sub to give no slack. Be mean and start out mean. It is one thing that my class seems to understand. The sub took my suggestions to heart and she did an excellent job.

Before I left I was talking to one of my students and told him to keep everyone in line.

“I will,” he replied.

After I got back I asked the same student if he kept on my class. He slapped his forehead. “OH NO! I forgot to do that.” He paused. “But you know what Mr. W? I really think that the sub had a good handle on that, she didn’t really need my help.”

No truer words have been spoken.

When I checked my e-mail I had an e-mail from a teacher who was quizzing Abner about the sub.

His response as recorded by the sub slightly altered:

I asked Abner who his sub was and he said Mrs. He said when all the bad kids get in trouble it messes things up for us. It is like we are on the edge of a mountain waiting to fall down it.

Very profound analogy I thought!!

Class dismissed!

• Intros
• This is a VSE (Very Special Episode)
• Possible Guest
• Will Avoiding Evil die?
• What was that post about?
• Pause
• We discuss the post, at length - Free will, let the hate mail fly
• Le Renard Arrives!!!! Let the Special begin!
• WD40
• Hidden bloopers
• Another Pause
• Death and destruction has happened
• Depression sets in
• What you missed
• A Quick Cool list - No will to go on
• Craig doesn’t shorten his Cool List
• JD is a curse
• I gotta split
• What a stinky thing to happen
• Bye

You can manually download the episode here.

Or subscribe using the following address:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/clpodcast

My Odeo Channel

Originally recorded October 16, 2005
35:14
24.3 MB

A new TBC podcast is up as well with a third to come soon.

Class dismissed!

Currently, our writing project in our class is writing a set of instructions. During the pre-writing, after students had chosen a topic, I had students write down the steps involved in a simple numerated list as a kind of outline for the draft writing that would come later. During the pre-writing process, I tell students that if they don’t know how to spell a word it should be circled and corrected later in the writing process (underlined in the example below).

Abner’s list I found interesting:

How to Have a war and win it

1. Have a cause
2. know your enemy
3. have prepared soliders
4. have or get setup camps and forts
5. degein a language (perferably secret)
6. fight
7. come home or keep on fighting
8. go back to start if you wish to keep on fighting

Friday one of my students raised their hand and informed me that the cursive alphabet in the classroom was not in order.

“You’re trying to make me look, aren’t you?”

“No,” she said.

“I think I would have noticed…” I said as I turned to look at the alphabet.

A B C D E F G H I J M N O P Q K L R S T U V W X Y Z

Oh crap.

Immediately I thought of all the people that have been in my room who either haven’t said anything or also didn’t notice: administrators galore, two faculty meetings, images of my class have been on the local cable channel!

Oh crap.

Then I remember how long it took me to put that stupid thing up there. Since the room is new and the wall are made out of dry wall, there are only a few things that I am allowed to use on the wall, and none of them are cheap. All told it took me about two hours to get that alphabet up there.

Then I begin to consider how much damage would be done to my students if I didn’t change it. Their alphabetical order skills could be hampered for years. I guess I have to change it.

Class dismissed!