A Few Things...

I am 18 weeks along now and the belly is starting to showing. I should post some picture but I am not a huge fan of showing of my fatness. Anywho, Monday is the ultra sound which is way exciting! Hopefully the baby spreads it's legs and shows us what it is (that is, after all, the one time it is allowed to do that in public). All my girl students think that it's a girl and my boy students think it's a boy. One of my student's logic behind it being a girl is that I already have a boy so it has to be a girl. We'll see if her logic pans out...

I had parent teacher conferences after Fall Break. I actually met with all but one student's parents which was really unusual. Most of the time ELL parents don't come because of the language barrier. All the conferences were extremely enlightening. Literally all the parents were exactly like their children. My one student who cried for an hour once because it was his mother's birthday and something might happen to her (yes that was his reasoning), has a mother who told also about her anxieties and her fears of leaving the house as a child. DING! Then there was this other mother who was very flamboyant and frankly a little crazy--just like her ADD son. DING again! And then I had a middle eastern father who talked for an hour about how his people's brains function differently then our people's (no basis in fact but he was quite sure that he was correct in all this). Isn't it interesting how his son has quite an imagination and can tell stories that never end. Yeah- the conferences were actually quite fun- no angry parents, just interesting ones :)

Anywho, my student's have been driving me a little wacko lately. As I said I had a boy ( a second grader) who cried for an hour one day ( I should say sobbed loudly for an hour). It turns out though that he was faking the anxieties (maybe his mother was too). It seems that yelling at him and threatening him with the Principal's Office gets him to stop- immediately. Sure I look evil yelling at this sobbing child but I would do anything to get it to stop. Now, however, I have a new crying child. At least she's in first grade so it's less weird that she's crying for her mom and at least her crying is soft and consolable. But still...they're wearing me out. Also, my little Brazilian girl is now gone. She is moving back to Brazil because her mom lost her student visa. Unfortunately, this really whacked her out and she was so horrible this week. It makes me sad because she had been progressing so amazingly well. But it also made me crazy because she was such a stinker all week! And then there's my third graders who could NOT stop giggling because they saw a drawing of some boys butt in a book. Oi!

Well, that's probably enough venting about my students. I think (and hope) they will shape up since Halloween will be over when I see them again. Tonight Steven will be Nemo (if he will let us put on his costume) and this should be fun since last year Steven couldn't even walk to go trick-or-treating. He really can't say "trick-or-treat" but I am hoping he will at least say "more please" that's polite right? I'm hoping the funness of tonight will make up for all the craziness of this past week :)