*Guys, it feels SOOOO good to be back blogging again. Even though I desperately needed the break, it was kind of a love/hate thing because almost all I could think about the whole time was how much I missed the therapy of getting all the details of my days out onscreen so they weren’t all rattling inside my head. Plus I was planning posts like crazy during any spare moments in my day—it’s as if I’m unable to live life without planning blog posts around everything going on. While on the one hand, that’s kind of screwed up, on the other, well….there are worse hobbies I could have, right?
*Yesterday I was teaching my country swing class here at the school how to do an easy (but impressive-looking) lift—I was playing the boy’s part, and I had picked one of the smallest girls (all 4′ 9″ of her) to be my partner. And you know what happened?! We both ended up crashing gloriously on the floor because I totally lost my balance. I don’t think I will ever live this down. I mean, if it had happened in a room full of people my own age, I couldn’t have cared less, but do any of you truly remember how 7th grade is?
*I will be the laughingstock for the rest of the year. I already had a girl shriek at me as I passed her in the lunch room yesterday after the incident, “Mrs. Meidell, you actually DROPPED that girl? She’s so tiny!”
*(Any chocolates and/or or Diet Dr. Peppers for my future troubles for said incident would be appreciated.)
*On an unrelated note, I ran in a 5K over the weekend. This was the first 5K I’ve run since my first one last year, and I was super excited going into it because I’d actually trained for this one and was hoping to get an excellent time (which, for me, is anything less than 9 mins/mile on average). I ended up being pretty disappointed, though—I only beat last year’s time by 2 minutes, and when I ran in this one last year, I hadn’t been running for months beforehand! So it goes, I guess.
*Can I brag about my outfit for a minute guys? As you know, I catch onto fashion stuff pretty slowly, but I thought my first attempt at mixing prints/patterns here turned out pretty good. If nothing else, it’s a sign of how much my style has evolved in the past three years because I would have NEVER put these pieces together before. Are you a fan of mixing patterns/prints?
*Funny teaching story (for me, anyway—not so much for the students):
Last Monday (so a week from yesterday), my Spanish class was signed up to use the computer lab like we do every Monday to review vocabulary on Quizlet. It’s usually one of my favorite days of the week because the kids are usually completely engaged in the review games, and I get a little peace and quiet and some extra time to grade papers. So last Monday, everything was going hunky-dory until this one student comes up to me and informs me that people have somehow enabled the discussion board and are slinging insults, swear words, you-name-it back and forth on it. I marched back to her computer, checked the board, and told the class they’d better knock it off or they’d lose computer privileges for the rest of the day. (The reason why I didn’t just punish the students who were involved was because they’re all logged onto the same account, and the new computers in that particular lab don’t require the students to log in under their own student number, so I had absolutely no way of tracking who was involved.)
The students were good for about 5 minutes until some mysterious stinker managed to get back on and type some dumb comment like, “he he where did everyone go” or something like that.
In an impressively calm voice, I told the students to log off their computers and walk in absolute silence back to the classroom. With impressive calm I told the students to take their desks and face the walls, and with impressive calm I told them to write the numbers from 1-100 in Spanish over and over again for the remainder of the class period (a total of almost 30 minutes).
(I’m not lying—-I was calm as a summer’s morning about the whole thing, which probably just made it freakier.)
When there were still five minutes left of class, I told them all to face me, and I proceeded to tell them (very gently) that if things like this continued to happen, I would make their life a living hell in my class.
You’d think I’d dropped the F-bomb by the way the kids reacted, but I quickly put a stop to all the gasps with a single look.
I don’t think I’m going to have any more problems in my Spanish class.
*That story was a lot longer than I thought it’d be. Sorry about that. I’m just so proud of how my blood pressure didn’t raise in the slightest during the whole encounter—this marks new territory for me as a teacher, friends. It also marks the first time I actually had to follow through on a class-wide threat.
*Wanna know what else marks out new territory? The fact that I pretty much had only pleasant (or at least non-confrontational) parent-teacher conferences last week. True, there was one parent who obviously thought her son could do no wrong and started to get pretty defensive with me, but it sure didn’t escalate anymore after I told her that her son had been caught blatantly cheating on an exam.
*New territory, friends. This is good.
*What is also good is that I get no fewer than THREE days off this week from school (starting tomorrow) for our fall break. Long live vacation days!
*What would you do with three days full of blissful nothingness ahead of you?
