Hump!

I lost the will to go on today.

(I can't type b/c my husband won't stop talking)

I don't know what it was, but by mid-morning I was just DONE with this day. My motivation levels bottomed out, and I wondered if I could sit in the corner and do nothing. Would anyone notice?

I am tired of bashing my students over the heads with pleas that they do their work, move around the classroom and freaking stay on task. I spend my day running from one "help me!" to the next, and I feel like I don't get a damn thing done. It's frustrating.

So I pulled back and let the day slide by. The afternoon went quite nicely, given my relative inattention (or maybe because of it?), and then it was over.

After the students went home, Kati and I sat and talked for a while. We talked about ways to encourage our students to go to *each other* for help so that we can do our jobs. If they can't help each other out, what is the POINT of being in a multi-age classroom? So we've got a plan - tomorrow we have the discussion about why we are grouped together, and we try to help them see that they can and ought to help each other find the answers. We've got this long, narrow piece of whiteboard that we're going to use to create a master list of "go-to" people - students who self-select to be helpers in specific areas. Then we are going to tell the students that when they need HELP, they must first exhaust all of their available resources - classmates, dictionaries, thesaurus, encyclopedia, the internet, etc. Only after they have thoroughly exhausted all other avenues may they come to a teacher. We hope to train them not to think of us as the fount or repository of all knowledge, after all, there may be someone sitting right next to them who knows the answer!

On Wednesday afternoons we have time set aside for nomenclature work. I think this will be a very good time to have very short meetings with each student - Kati and I both - to check on their progress for the week in our respective areas. I will check to see what language works the students have completed, and Kati will check math. We will both check the cultural subjects. It has been far too long since I had personal meetings with the students. I am looking forward to it.

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Case Study: JS came to me this morning with her morning task (punctuation private eye) asking for help. She had written and edited the first two - of three - sentences, but she was sure she needed my help to write the last one. I pointed out that she was nearly done and that her edits in the first two sentences were (mostly) correct, and then I sent her back to finish.

I came upon her a while later and found her to be exactly where I had left her! What the heck? I sat down to check on her and see what was holding her up. That's when I noticed she had something in her mouth! Remembering that this is the button kid, I asked what was in her mouth, and she promptly produced the clippy part of a mechanical pencil. She had snapped it off and had it in her mouth! I took it from her and reminded her of the button incident, joking that she's "not the kind of kid who can focus with something in her mouth." She giggled and agreed, and she was done with the final sentence in a matter of minutes.

In the afternoon she was upset to realize that her nomenclature for the days of the week was missing. I wonder if it's at home? I never did see it return. Anyway, she was hung up for a few minutes on the fact that she couldn't work on it, but I suggested she work on another one. Her eyes lit up like she had never considered that a possibility. I asked her which one she wanted to do, and she said she wanted to do one with lines. I helped her find a geometry nomenclature with lines, and she got happily to work. She completed two pages in the book before time was up - which comparatively isn't much but was a marked improvement for this child.