Posts Tagged ‘wild things’

Not just a couple of weeks, but a couple of months.  I needed to get FAR away from the wild things, and I did.   I roamed all over.
But now tomorrow’s the first day of the new year, and today was wrap-up of last year.
We got our scores today, both last year’s class’s results and this [...]

OMG.  It’s not a fluke (as I half-feared when I went to bed last night).  They really are tamer.  Calmer.  More focused.  And most importantly, LEARNING!
I’ve never had a class like this one, where I doubted on a daily basis my ability to get through to them and teach them the standards they’re supposed to [...]

All first and second grade teacher RELISH winter break.  No duh, you say.  Who wouldn’t devour three weeks off, not a care in the world (NOTE: failing economy with daily headlines about the Governator cutting jobs, cutting education budgets, cutting the school year, cutting yacht taxes… hmm…one of these things just doesn’t belong here.)  But [...]

It’s that time of the year.  The most wonderful time, according to some.  The most hectic time, according to teachers.
In the three weeks between Thanksgiving and Xmas, we have to train 100 wild creatures to stand tall, suck in their guts, memorize, and sing–not shout, roar, yell, screech, or otherwise mangle–not one but two songs [...]

Antonio moved to Wisconsin.  Again.
Kelly moved next door (after the social worker showed up after the my-mommy-hits-me-with-a-belt incident after a week had gone by since I reported it after which her mommy kept her out of school for three days and threatened to take her to another school unless the principal switched her out of [...]

Last week José smiled. On a fairly regular basis. When he wasn’t frowning, that is.
And, he sat downstage right or left most of the time we were at the rug, rather than practically out the door and with his back to me.
I considered all this enormous progress and worked hard to acknowledge [...]

The first month of school is a crucial time in the life of a classroom. Don’t meld them into a working group, and you pay for it for the rest of the year. Classroom life is chaos. Teaching and learning are repeatedly interrupted by stretches of wildness. Days are exhausting. [...]

How do you feel about lines? Most adults, I think, HATE them, unless we’re already in one, and someone cuts into it. Then we want the orderly justice a line promises, be it on the freeway or at Costco. Our inner wild thing wants to become a ruthless enforcer of line order.
Wild kid [...]

It’s the weekend. The Wild Things are roaring their terrible roars at home and not in my ears. In the silence I find myself thinking about José.
José who’s always playing with his erasers. Who sits as far away from me as possible. Who likes to be last in line and alone [...]

We’re such creatures of habit. What worked before is what we gravitate towards, instinctually, it seems. Why does it take so much effort to approach things anew? And when are we willing to try?
My kids from the last two years were abstract thinkers. They loved symbolic manipulation. For most of them, [...]