Doin' It

Decided that I'm having 3 key difficulties in my job working with underprivileged elementary students:

1. Keeping up constant energy / patience - There comes a point when you want to blow up and just yell and accept nothing less than perfect manners from every kid you ever encounter in your future. But you can't. You just want to yell at them to stop being kids. Just be like me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
UNDERSTAND WHAT I SAY YOU STUPID LITTLE SHIT! Makes me think of when I was in elementary school. Not even elementary school, but high school. I wreaked havoc in my 11th grade Spanish class, for no particular reason. Just some girls to impress and some bros to clown around with. Your mindset is totally different when you have to be there. I doubt I was much better in elementary school. Karma really is a dirty ho.

2. Trying to think like them - Trying not to toot my own horn, but most subjects in school were not hard for me. I had a good family and a great nursery school and kindergarten. When I switched from Private elementary to Public I felt pretty ahead of the game. None of the kids I work with has ever been ahead of the game. It's always a fight to catch up. There are smart kids at the school, but I don't work with them. I deal with the neglected, oppressed kids who were never taught teh value of education. The term "oppressed" was included because of a 2nd grade boy I work with. 2nd grade. Can't get through the alphabet. But this boy can color. Today was the first time we had to color-in outlined objects. He was creative, and always kept his creativity inside the boundaries of the guidelines. Not many second graders can draw without going crazy with the colors and shapes in the end. But there we were still trying to teach him the difference bewteen 'm' and 'n'. "EM!!!" "EN!!!" You stupid little bastard how do you not get this... He just has a different mind. What do we do about kids like this?

3. Balancing helping and being a distraction - Example: I've learned you can't sit cross-legged on teh floor with kids under 2nd grade if there is an group activity that requires there attention. They can't focus on the teacher, because they're climbing all over you. It seems at first thought that getting right in there with the kids would be beneficial, but it backfires. Example 2: In 6th grade, I miss the math lectures but come in for tutoring and homework help. Since I don't know how the material was taught to them, I sometimes teach a method they've never seen before. They don't always realize it's accomplishing the same thing just in a different manner. They think they've learned 2 topics. But now I need to keep asking the teacher if this is the right way to go, and that gets annoying for them.

Funny moment today:
Scene: 1st grade. Early morning. We are learning teh different between minutes and hours by asking the kids to count upwards from zero when we set a 1 minute timer. Ideally, they would count to 60. (60 minutes in an hour.) When it was done, the teacher asked the students what they got. Abotu 6 hands went up:

1st student: 89 seconds (reasonable, kids count fast, whatever, no big deal)
2nd: 134 seconds (errr... kinda totally off but acceptable)
3rd: 9 seconds (Yeaaaaa, she didn't understand the game...)
4th: A pause, a look around teh room, then... 10 seconds (Obviously copying the 3rd students answer)
5th: the last student went with... 8:30. A short silence ensued while everyone pondered that answer internally. I cracked a cheshire cat grin.