The unbelievable

Students often question why I take pictures of what happens in the classroom and my response is because no one will believe these types of things happen in a classroom. Therefore I need to gather evidence to prove that such shenanigans occur in today's classroom. Case in point. A student did not have a normal size pencil so he decided to pull out this jumbo pencil and complete his work with. Might I add that this pencil required him to use a pair of scissors to sharpen. You see these are the things that people outside of school will not believe.  Here I am teaching a normal lesson about the Dust Bowl and what do I see from the corner of my eye but an enormous pencil being used. For those that are wondering the student did proceed to use this larger than life pencil to complete this assignment even though he was offered multiple normal size pencils. In fact, he continued to use this jumbo pencil for the next few weeks. I do not blame him, this pencil will most likely see him through high school. 

A year in review

Year six is in the books. This year was a nice change from the first five years of teaching. I taught two 8th grade English classes filled with a mix of gen. ed. and ESE students. I was given the opportunity to co-teach 7th grade English this year which was a wonderful experience. Co-teaching is a lot like parenting. Instead of two parents you have two teachers in the classroom. Students are interesting when they are trying to figure out this way of teaching. They often ask who is the actual teacher. For some odd reason they find it strange that there needs to be two teachers instead of one. We never really told them the real reason for why there must be two teachers. One is for the general education students and the other one is for the special education students. A couple students take having two teachers as an advantage. For example, if I say you cannot use the restroom they will wait two minutes (or two seconds) to ask Ms. C if they can use the restroom. Both of our responses are the same. This scenario is depicted in the picture. I just told a student no for getting a drink and then once I turn around he decides to ask Ms. C for a drink...the response was also no.