Day 168: 10 days left

We’re watching a movie right now....so that the children may live another day.
Either my student’s behavior has become incrementally worse the past 8 days, or I’m slowly losing my mind. The last 3 weeks of school are an exercise of patience on the part of all involved. Kids don’t want to learn, teachers don’t want to teach, schedules that have been set all year long demand to be broken. Thus the reason my floor is littered with crayon bits, small pieces of paper and cupcake crumbs. Oh, did I mention that we’re celebrating a birthday a day until school gets out? Only 9 birthdays to go... I really need to remember to celebrate summer birthdays earlier next year.
My only consolation for my crabby behavior right now (and my justification for the movie) is that I can now smile when a student says something to me that is remotely funny. The alternative to smiling today has been yelling, scolding, apathy and ...the teacher glare. Even that’s not working. Something needs to go. I hope it’s me.
The way the day started off was not a good sign. Marla’s sub hadn’t shown up yet and Shauna was in a meeting with Emmy and others, so we had three classrooms without teachers. Much to my chagrin all the classes were behaving themselves without any supervision. MY CLASS, on the other hand, had two adults and the kids were still loud and jumping off the walls.
I left them with Miss Cindy and went to the quiet of the reading room to do the final reading testing of the year. Success! They all are at grade level in reading except for 6. 3 of those kids are in resource and though we saw progress, going from reading 1 wpm to 12 wpm isn’t aa great as I was hoping for. The other 3, however, all averaged 25 wpm better than the beginning of the year. I’m starting to think that all our hard work this year is actually paying off. Their end-of-level testing will show none of this. It will show that my kids aren’t reading well enough to pass first grade and they will assume that I’m not a very good teacher because of it. Nowhere will it show that Josh wrote his very first real sentence in February: "The zombie came out of the T.V." It won’t show that Megan was reading so poorly that she couldn’t sound out "cat" and now she’s reading "She said I could go outside and play in the snow." It won’t show that Crystal finally mastered digraphs in her spelling after 2 long months of teaching and re-teaching. Teaching is a thankless job in more ways than one.
The kids have left now. We had a whirlwind end of the day what with the movie taking so long. We had to cram in centers and Josh’s birthday, which included juice boxes, cupcakes, and fancy napkins. A rare treat in this classroom. The painting we did after lunch is almost dry. I’m going to take a paint brush and some black paint and make some semblance of the tables and chairs they painted for our scenery. I’ll also have to outline the words "ChuckE.Cheese" because once Miguel and Abby painted the words yellow and orange they decided to paint all the rest of the space yellow, orange and red. The words are in there somewhere and I’m determined to bring them out!
Tomorrow should be interesting. I had a talk with Chance today about consequences. He seemed receptive. Of course, he seemed receptive the last time we had that talk and that didn’t stop him from running away from school-twice. But I’ll worry about all that tomorrow.