But by next Friday we’ll have reached the end of this mammoth term. Usually you know it’s week ten and you just have to get the kids through those last few days when they’ve really just had enough of each other. This time though… there was still two more weeks to go.

My lot though haven’t done too bad a job of putting up with each other in the lead up to the end of term. Sure, they’re occasionally getting narky with each other (that’s an educational term) and are starting to get on each other’s goat, but generally they’re trying to to completely wind each other up. This means I tend to leave work each night with all my hair and my sanity a little further away from the edge than could otherwise be the case. But… I’ve worked out how to best manage them and we’re running along quite smoothly.

Loudly, but smoothly!

But then there was this afternoon…

Rotations. I’m running the music rotation for our five grades. Two each week, and my own grade once a fortnight. Today… today I had two other grades for the final time this term. And they were both absolutely mad…

Now, my own kids are by no means perfect. They’re quite probably the noisiest, rowdiest and more talkative bunch of kids in the entire school. But at least they generally work as well as they can and genuinely like or at least openly tolerate each other. Also, there’s not a single behaviour problem amongst them. They could just talk underwater with a mouthful of marbles. In fact, one of the other teachers today after having them for Rotations herself asked me whether I was going to go deaf by the end of the year. Yes. They’re a talkative bunch.

But… after half a year, I’ve learned to appreciate all their little positive sides and little antics. And to be honest, they more than balance out the rowdy, talkative bits that make sitting a test a fair old challenge for me when trying to get them to sit still, shut up, and not try to help each other out. Yes, they’re that helpful for each other that they’d even help each other out in all innocence through a test!

Meanwhile though… I’ve just sat through two sessions after lunch with two grades that didn’t want to listen, couldn’t keep their mouths shut, and generally just weren’t in the right frame of mind to do anything.

Yes… quite a lot like my lot, eh?

But… I’ve grown used to my lot…

I guess it’s like they all say… you can’t smell your own, eh?

Well, that’s probably not quite true. They were standing in a long row across the netball court playing ‘Elimination’ together. You know the game – the first person has a shot at goal (on a basketball backboard), and if they get the goal, they go to the end of the line and are still in. If they miss, the next player has their turn and if they get it in, the first person is out. Play continues until one person is left. Well, they were playing that, and half of them were from my grade last year. I wandered across mainly because I noticed the kid who was out lying down on the asphalt so I had to go across and ask if he was out.

‘Yep! HE got me out!!’ while pointing with a friendly accusing finger to one of the other boys.

‘HE got you out? Gee, you must really suck!‘

‘Yep!’

Anyway, this lead to half of them crowding around asking that great question the kids from your previous year always end up asking you…

‘We were your best grade, weren’t we, Mr V?’

How do you answer that?

There are probably new teachers out there right now wondering how you mould the kids into a perfect grade. How you change the behaviour of the whole group to fit that perfect mould. Where they listen intently, work hard, produce great work that all comes out great, don’t talk out of line and behave impeccably all day. Well, to those people, I say ‘don’t fix what ain’t broke‘!

Bad behaviour, yeah, for sure, work on changing that… but who really wants a perfect grade? A perfect grade is what you make of it. Let’s take that question from above again.

‘We were the best grade, weren’t we, Mr V?’

How do you answer that?

It’s true, last year’s group were fantastic. And they quite possibly pipped the grade before that as the best I’ve had, although there are kids in each grade I’ve really enjoyed. Okay, there have been a few grades that have given me merry hell all year, but I take the approach that if you can find one of two kids in each grade that make it absolutely worth your while to come to work every day, then no matter what the rest of the grade’s like, you can still enjoy your job.

Fortunately, the last few years have been very good. It’s been a while since I’ve had what I’d consider a ‘hard’ grade. And boy, was that particular one a doozy! On the plus side though, I still get along really well with one of the kids and keep in touch fairly regularly, so I also see that year as one I wouldn’t have swapped.

But how do you answer the kids when they ask you that? Because you know it’s going to filter back to the kids you’re teaching right now, and probably to the kids you taught the year before, who asked you last year if they were the best. And so on and so on.

I’ve got a really interesting mob this year too. Not a single behaviour problem amongst the whole lot of them. Not a single kid on medication or tablets. And often not a single kid who would rather sit still and listen than have a good old chat with whoever may currently be sitting next to them.

Yep. They’re a great, big, dirty mob of chin-waggers. And it’s taken me until nearly the end of May to regularly get them sitting relatively quietly on the floor to listen to me. It’s only these last few weeks where they’ve cottoned on to the fact that, hey, guess what, I’M the bloke you’re supposed to be listening to, not Noddy sitting next to you!

So yes, each day I’ll work to keep them listening and not carrying on their own conversations or piping up with their own contributions to the discussion without bothering with the process of putting their hand up first and waiting their turn. I mean… that just takes too long, eh? By the time Mr V gets ’round to me it’ll be too late, and besides… what I have to say is so funny it’ll make you all wet yourselves!!

Yep. It’s one of those groups of kids.

But… really… do I need to clamp down on them and turn them into a bunch of quiet, attentive little gnomes sitting serenely before me? They generally work hard, they get along with each other, and they look out for each other. Okay, I had to have a stern little chat with one feller who gave one across the face to one of the girls during lunchtime, but he stood in front of everyone afterwards and told them why our grade wouldn’t get a Yard Behaviour award this week. A one off blue like that doesn’t tarnish the kid for the whole year.

I honestly couldn’t see this group of kids working as well if they sat quietly all day and barely said ‘boo’. It just wouldn’t be right. Actually, it’d be downright spooky!

So no… while they’ll talk the handle off a door while underwater with a mouthful of marbles, I think I’ll put up with that side of them in return for a group that enjoy coming each day, enjoy each other’s company, and make me laugh.

Who wants a perfect grade? I reckon I’ve got one pretty close as it is.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the personal information I have access to both now and previously with children past and present. I consider myself an honest, loyal sort of person, so the information and knowledge I have about certain kids (well, all of them, really, but in some cases the information about some kids is more… personal… than others) will stay safely away from the ears of people who don’t need to know, but sometimes I pity the way the world is turning when innocent little events make me look at stuff like this in a more simple light.

It’s a pretty straightforward professional rule. As a teacher, I’m not allowed to disclose personal information about any of the kids to anybody outside of the school staff, although you don’t generally have to because much of that sort of information is available for us through the school records anyway. It’s a rule that makes perfect sense, too. You can’t just fling the odd phone number, address or medical status of the kids out willy nilly to any old character that wanders in to ask for it. Who knows what purpose they may have for the information? You can never be too safe, can you?

But how do you explain that to an eight year old?

In our room, each grade has a class roll. The names of all of the kids in the grade are listed there alphabetically by surname, and as you’d expect, we keep records of which days they have missed, whether they’ve gone to medical appointments, extended holidays or gone home early because their little brother’s broken his arm playing ‘I’m a bigger moron than you’ (the rules of which are usually to jump off the highest surface possible – bonus points if it’s a hard surface underneath!). It also holds information such as parent names, birthdates, addresses and phone numbers. Obviously, the kids aren’t meant to go looking through it because of the sensitive information inside it. Not that they care – they just like looking at all the little marks I make on each page. But this is where the boundaries get a little blurry sometimes.

You see, the kids know their addresses and phone numbers are in there. They’re not interested enough to look, they just know they’re there. So last Friday this little eight year old feller spent his Free Time Friday (once he’d finished his weekly work, naturally) trotting around the room collecting phone numbers from some of the other boys so he could ring them to come to his birthday party sometime this week. One of the kids couldn’t remember his, so he came up to me with what I thought was a good little solution to his problem.

‘Mr V, can you look in the roll and tell me his phone number so I can ring him about my birthday?’

I have to say no.

Although he accepted that I wasn’t allowed to do that, try as I might, he just couldn’t understand the reason why.

If only they could stay that innocent longer, eh?

Technorati Tags: privacy, schools

Well, I’m holding out against these invaders. My lolly jar is staying firmly on my desk and I’ll keep using it until some bureaucrat in a fancy suit makes it officially illegal and damaging to the chance to continue my career and forces me to remove it. Let me run through a few things.

This riled me yesterday afternoon while I was reading the daily Herald Sun newspaper after I’d spent the day at work. Specifically, the article ‘Mothers sour on sweets‘. More than 95% of parents surveyed claim their kids are receiving unhealthy treats for performing well. Surprise surprise! Of course they are. No argument there. Used well, it’s a cheap and effective and, more importantly, fun, little thing for the kids involved. Apparently though, according to these figures, 90% of these parents disapprove of the practice. News to me. I’ve yet to have any parent complain about the lolly jar sitting in plain sight on my desk. When most parents see it for the first time they look down at their little darling and suggest ‘you’d better behave if you want one of those, eh?’ In fact… I get a lot more complaints from parents about running the kids around the oval for various reasons.

Ironically, I read this article after spending the day with 60 odd kids at our local district school sports! I’ll post about that one later for a bit of good, light hearted stuff!

Back to this article though. It seems to even imply a negative response to the practice of kids bringing lolly bags and cupcakes to share with their class on their birthdays. It’s the kid’s birthday! If that’s not a traditional time to celebrate with a lolly or a little bit of cake, then when is? You see the kids walking in as proud as punch with another year on their age and a tupperware box filled with a cupcake for each kid (and the teacher, mind you!) that will take all of three bites to consume. Let the kids have their day, eh?

And yes, apparently there is a childhood obesity epidemic we’re not helping to remedy too. The odd lolly given out as a prize for working their backsides off compared to three or four laps of the oval each week. Which side of the ‘healthy/unhealthy’ kid ledger am I likely to have those kids on?

I’ve just looked through the class photos of each of my grades over the eight years I’ve been teaching. If I had to be mean and nasty, I could count 18 kids who would possibly be either fat or obese. Six of these play sport at quite a high level all the same. That’s less than 20 kids out of a total of about 420. Puppy fat, baby fat and kids who you know are going to shoot up and become string beans I’m not counting, and I don’t think they should be. Yep, lots of kids are unhealthily fat, but I’ve yet to see this range of 20-40% that is regularly bandied around. Personally, my figures are about 2%, but I must just be a little kinder on the little fellers burning off their baby fat.

Anyway, this is the way the lolly jar works on my desk. Firstly, if anyone is going to get fat from it, it’s going to be me. When the kids are elsewhere and I’m working alone in the room, I’m going to graze from the jar myself. Not to mention my practice of eating one of these lollies in front of the kids when they’re working too loudly. A quiet ‘you’re too noisy, I get a lolly’ shuts them up a lot more efficiently than calling out ‘too much noise, lower the volume or lose your tongue!’

Okay, that phrase has worked at times too, but the kids know you’re joking.

At the end of each week, we hold a raffle draw. One ticket is drawn out for each day we’ve been at school that week. Usually five, then. And each winning kid gets to choose one lolly from the jar. The largest lolly in this jar is probably a musk stick which has been broken in two. The rest are usually licorice allsorts, chocolate bullets or jelly beans. No matter the size, they win one lolly. So at the end of the week, five kids get one lolly. And you can bet there are fifteen to twenty other kids wishing they were the lucky winners instead. All for one lolly.

At the end of each fortnight, we see which table group won with the most table points. These lucky kids get two lollies for their two weeks of good work. Which means, if they’re lucky enough to also win the raffle draw, they walk out at the end of the week with three lollies!

We then add up the points for all four tables. If this combined total is higher than our previous high score, then every kid gets one lolly as a reward for the whole grade working well. This happens maybe once a term, which is good, because otherwise I’d be running out of money refilling my stocks! So, again, if a kid is really lucky that week, they might get a raffle prize, win the table points, and the grade might break their points record. Which means the kid might walk away at the end of the week with a total of four lollies.

Which apparently will set them on the path of childhood obesity.

I’m going to go back to the start of the week though and begin again. Monday mornings, unless it’s absolutely belting it down with rain, the kids all do a lap of the oval after assembly. Complaints fall on deaf ears unless they can show either a note from their parents or a plaster cast on their leg. As often as possible, the half hour before lunch after maths is a huff’n'puff session. Twenty odd minutes of physical activity outside after, yep, a lap of the oval. The kids could do up to six laps of this oval each week. Adding in the distance from the room to the oval and back, that’s about a kilometre over the week alread with recess and lunchtimes still to come.

We have the favourite ‘apple slinky’ machine in the room where at recess and lunchtime, kids can peel, core and slinky their apples to eat. Up goes the apple consumption of the school by about 200%! After lunch during silent reading, the kids are also allowed to eat any left over fruit they’ve brought from home. Twice a term we usually have a ‘healthy lunch’ day as well. If the kids have water in their drink bottles, they can keep them on their tables and use them throughout the day. Lots of healthy options and nutrition and fitness happening all week.

But at the end of the week a kid might get four lollies!

Surely there’s room for the odd lolly amidst all the fitness, healthy eating and exercise we also promote.

Yes, I know there are fat kids out there and schools are working their own weight off trying to bend their curriculum and timetables around new guidelines and requirements being passed down to us to keep these kids fit and healthy, but it goes too far sometimes. No lollies in the jar for the odd little treat that makes being a kid so much fun? Hopefully my parents will continue to let me reward their kids with the odd little morsel of sweet, sugary delight without worrying that I’m damaging the health of their little prides and joys.

I know there are a few readers out there with kids of their own. I’m looking at this purely from my side of the debate, but I honestly can’t see any serious reason other than allergies or similar to particular additives and so forth where, run like this (as the vast majorities of classrooms seem to) could realistically be seen as negligent. I’d be interested in any responses to either side, but I’ll say again though that I’ll fight to keep my lolly jar until they tell me ‘lose the jar or lose your job’.

Let the kids be kids while they still can, I reckon.

Cheers.

Technorati Tags: childhood obesity, health, children’s health, lollies, teaching

And outside the window, an entire flock of flying pigs.

No. A day will come, and if we’re honest, it will come tomorrow, when you will walk into your classroom, fully intent on endowing upon the children new and exciting pieces of knowledge and improve talents, that you look around and… you can’t find your desk.

You know it was there. You saw it yesterday. Or was it the day before. Maybe it was last week. Anyway, you know it’s there somewhere because, I mean honestly, who’s going to pinch a desk? I mean… those things weigh a truckload, eh? Exactly. But still… the fact remains. You can’t see it.

Why? Because it’s submerged under that deluge of paperwork, kids correction, planning folders, kids show-and-tell bits and pieces they’ve left there for six weeks, the odd lonely hair clip (lost as well) and quite probably, somewhere beneath the crust, that ham, salad and beetroot sandwich you were really looking forward to eating last fortnight. What do you do about it? Do you spend your lunchtime and recess and an hour after school sorting through everything with the greatest of care? Rein in some sort of order and file everything where it should be? Correction in a pile by your bag (which you haven’t remembered to take home for the last two weeks anyway, but the intention is always good). Show-and-tell bits and pieces distributed into the corresponding child’s locker tub. Planning folders open in the centre of the desk so you always know what you’re doing.

Or do you sit the bin where your chair usually goes, reach across to the back of the desk, drag everything forward and watch with desperate satisfaction as everything crashes into the depths of that black plastic bin liner and start with a clean slate?

The first one sounds like that utopia again, the second sounds easier. One doesn’t exist, and the other gets you in strife when report writing comes around and you haven’t got anything to report on except your gut instincts. And you can’t really back them up without all that paperwork, eh?

No. So you perform a balancing act. You get yourself through the rest of the term and tackle the desk on a day during the holidays. Yes, much of that day is spent finding it… but once you’ve found it you’re halfway there.

Spend a good hour at least sorting everything into various categories (or, if you want the easy, realistic term, piles) on the floor, and keep that recycling box handy too. Correction there, ready to be done once you’re finished, various learning area books and texts back onto the shelves. It’s amazing how you didn’t have time to put them there when you were finished with them first, eh? Fair dinkum, those kids are a distraction, aren’t they? Eventually you’ll find that your piles have become neater, many of them will have been placed in more appropriate locations (and the bin is generally not one of those places, no matter how tempting it may be – unless it’s old work that’s no longer necessary because you’ve taken down the kids’ results, I suppose. Your decision, I guess).

Finally, when much of your bits and pieces are back into some sort of order and logical locations, set your desk out. Get those pencils into their tub in the corner, straighten out that planning folder (we might have to have a post about that too, eh?) and stand back to admire your clean and sparkling desk… of which you can now see almost half of the surface of! Enjoy the order and the neatness of the piece of art you’ve created, and go home content with the world.

Because next week you’ll be back to the start again.

Those kids are a big distraction, eh?

Related posts: Teaching Tutorial 1: How to start your day

Technorati tags: teaching, tutorial, cleaning

You’ve done the hard yards through the first few weeks setting your various rules and expectations. You’ve relocated certain sections of your classroom population to a term of service keeping the rubbish bin company. You’ve proven that, just because you’re doing the knock-kneed dance of the bloated bladder, doesn’t mean that the teacher’s going to cave into your boredom and work-avoidance tactic and let you spend five minutes of your handwriting time wandering the slightly stale refuge of the toilets until you think you’ve reached that length of time where, any more and you’re pushing it, and any less and the other boys will think you’ve caved in.

No. This is the point where the kids have woken up to the fact that, despite all the evidence, you’re the teacher and, knock me down with a feather, you’re actually running this sanitised Lord of the Flies tribe of egos and insecurities.

For me, that point arrived at 9:35 this morning, ten minutes or so into our final reading block Learning Centre activity for the week.

All four tables were working quietly, helping each other out with hints and pointers, and if they were talking about something other than their work, they were still working AT THE SAME TIME! Granted, a bit of that might have been because the one table filled with boys were doing the mix and match cloud activity and half of them had spread themselves across the floor to give themselves room to organise their cloud pictures, names and descriptions and were therefore far enough away from each other not to flick each other’s ears while the other poor kid wasn’t looking. Still, they were all working properly, and it was quiet, serene and peaceful in the classroom.

So, of course, there was only one thing I could possibly do.

I gave all four tables about 50 points each over the next twenty minutes until the session was finished.

That point might have arrived, but a healthy dose of blatant bribery hardly ever goes astray, eh?

Whether others may think it morally ethical or not, or grizzle about rewarding kids with abstract things like table points or even, heaven forbid in this age of apparently obese Australian children, give them a lollyroo, the kids kept working well all day. It was a fantastic end to the week, and left me, the poor feller in charge who’s hoping day by day his facade of a teacher who really knows what’s going on will last one more day, feeling quite proud of them all. They think well of me, they want to be here, and they’re enjoy their learning. It can only mean respect.

Then I found the rubber spider on my desk after I’d sent them all home…