three day weekend

I could not get out of my apartment today. Literally, I was so exhausted from the week that I haven't even picked up the phone. There are some people that you can relate your week to (mainly teacher friends), but for the most part those in my life don't have a clue about what I'm talking about. So I spent a total day NOT on any school work, and just spent the day on the couch reading and napping. An indulgance, for sure.

As for the class that was not behaving in a manner anywhere acceptable at IS Prep (this school is strict, no joking around), and not meeting with them on Friday, I informed them that too much material was left untaught, and that they were required to do a research report. Typed.

I anticipated the majority of the students would try to avoid it, but I was pretty surprised with about a 60% return rate. Some of the students began begging me to grant them a homework pardon with pleas of excuses the ranged from the normal "I left it on my Mom's flashdrive" to the "my printer is dry." I always give kids that approach me with tech excuses the benefit of the doubt, so long if it comes in the next day.

I was wholly impressed with some of the submissions, a few of which had handwritten notes apologizing for their behavior. For those that didn't submit, I tracked them down at the end of their last class of the day to issue letters home. A couple of them absolutely had a screaming melt-down. Parents 0f our school know, for the most part, that we don't kid around. Kids are to be uniform, prepared, and behaved. They have to produce. And they probably get more homework than they would like, but that's the way it is. And parents don't like getting these kinds of letters.

But being so small has its advantage. When we issued our first progress reports, we actually checked the parents' signatures against those on file. About 10% of our sneaky sixth-graders were discovered to have forged the report. And believe me, those parents were furious. And perplexed that the school actually does this.

So off they went with letters in hand. And definitely not happy.

Great to spend a day doing absolutely nothing.