Two Weeks Left

I only have two weeks left at my job. This makes me sad on so many levels. One of my teens told their little sister, who is one of my fifth graders. I have known her since she was in second grade… now she won’t stop coming up to me and giving me this look of sadness. GAH. I don’t know how to tell all the rest of the kids really… I think, maybe… I will do it on the Wednesday before I go, and then do something for them that Friday. Makes my stomach hurt.

On a related note, my little brother (I say little, he’s only a year younger than me) is going to take up my job! Pretty cool I think! I brought him into work one day with me, just to hang out and get out of the house… and my supervisor was duly impressed with the way he worked with the kids and handled himself. There was another test day and an interview… and now it’s all in place. I think my fifth graders are going to like him a lot. Pretty awesome that he is taking up residence there, really.

I have played a lot of Capture the Flag with my teens… I’m amazed at how much they like it!!! And damn if some of them aren’t super fast. I can run for the long haul, but I’m terrible at sprinting. Since the weather has been cold we sit outside and our hands go numb while we attempt to dart across lines in the dark. My legs have been sore for a week… probably a sign that I need to be outside more… erm. How do I say goodbye to my teenagers? Maybe we will have a party on that Thursday before the semester ends. Ok ok. I have to stop thinking about these things it is getting pretty ridiculous. I hope that the Teen Program manages to stay strong after I leave the Learning Center.

Balance of Power

As I have mentioned before, this past semester we’ve accrued new staff. First, it was three women. We were all finally situated aaaaaand then one of them had to leave. So now there is a guy and two women. Even though children don’t articulate it, it does take a considerable amount of time to build a good solid foundation. It is very rare for someone to be able to walk in a class room and instantly command their respect.

As such is the dilemma in my work place at the moment. Over the summer, the students lost three staff that had been around for a year or longer, in one case she had been there for five years. That leaves only two of us who have been at the Learning Center for about three years or longer. This December, will be the end of my time there.

I need to move on, and find a full time job. I also want to travel a bit before I come back to start a Masters degree of some kind. I don’t like thinking about leaving, and I am regretting telling my teenagers ahead of time. At least once a day someone comes up to me and says some version of “Don’t go Miss Cassie!!!” To call it heartbreaking would be the understatement of the century.

Anyways. I keep wondering what things will be like when I’m gone. Especially since some of the new staff are having a very difficult time managing their class. When the children are particularly bad, usually the other staff will come find me or my other senior coworker. How will the balance shift? Who will be the staff person who manages to get everyone quiet? Who is the person that the kids will seek out when they want to call home or when they are upset about something? I just wish I be a fly on the wall for a day or two and watch these transformations.

Some times, time is all a person needs in order to form the right relationship with their students. Time to build that trust. But, there are other ways… people work in jobs all the time where the kids are always in flux and there isn’t room to develop a relationship slowly. How do you work to gain the trust of kids who are used to authority figures leaving? Is it more about respect or is it about friendship? What is the best way to go about cultivating that balance so that a group of unruly third graders becomes at least somewhat easier to handle? I need to look up tips for these things.

Super Star!

Last week, I cut my hair. I got bangs and I dyed it. I didn’t think the dye would be all that dramatic… my hair is naturally very dark, but has got lighter with all the sun I got and the fact that I straighten and style it regularly. SO I had Ray (Ray is wonderful by the way, he is now stationed at Hairy Situations on South Congress) color my hair so that it all matched the dark color of my roots. The change was pretty dramatic, and kids are awesome when it comes to change.

Every day, I wait outside to greet the kids when they pull up in the bus. I knew exactly when they all recognized me because the back of the bus (where all my fifth and fourth graders sit) absolutely exploded into chaos. Ten fifth graders immediately started screaming my name and shouting about my hair. They were so loud that the bus driver got angry with them and told them to quiet down. Then the little kids started to pile off the bus. Here are some snippets of things that kids/students have said to me over the last week as they see my hair.

*sneaky voice* “What did you do to your haaaaaair?”

“Miss Cassie, you look gooooood. Did you paint it?”

“You look… different.”

“Wow Miss Cassie! You hair looks nice!”

“Is that Miss Cassie? Miss Cassie?”

My favorite was Henry, he came up to me while I was inside:

“Miss Cassie, with your hair, and your sunglasses, you look, you look, you look like a super star!”

And then the teenagers who all had extremely different reactions. One conversation went a bit like this:

“Why did you change your hair?”
“Because it needed to be trimmed and fixed.”
“It looks really different. It’s dark.”
“I know, it will lighten up a bit after I wash it. Do you like it?”
“Yeah…. I mean…”
“Yeah?”
“You look like Evelyn Salt.”
“Really? But who looks better?” (Keep in mind at this point I’m just giving him a hard time, he blushed.)
“… You….”

Or then there was the opposite end of the spectrum, which occurred yesterday when I showed up to work wearing my new (and much-needed) glasses, and a black shirt.

“I know!!! She looks like a goth emo kid!!!”

Iiiiiieeeeee think I prefer the Salt one. Heheh. What do you think?

     

Bwahaha.

When Things Go Bad

Children, are not angels. They are miniature people without “filters” of what’s appropriate (that most, not all people gain as they age). The lack of filters is compounded upon the fact that their brains aren’t fully developed, and they are very “ego centric”. Not to be confused with egotistical, ego centric means that they have a hard time seeing beyond their own immediate world. They can’t fully comprehend other people’s perspectives or that other people aren’t immediately seeing and feeling what they are feeling.

My favorite example of the “ego centric” mindset is from when I was little. I would get a cut on my arm, and of course it hurt. But I was so sure that my mom didn’t believe me… and while she was putting the band-aid on, I held my arm up into her face.
“But mom, it hurts!”
“I know sweetie.”
“No mom, feel it! Feel it!”
I wanted her to touch my cut, and feel the pain I was feeling… Heh.

These are part of the reasons why children get in trouble. They don’t have the right and wrong filter, and they can’t see very far past their own nose. Very rarely are they just intentionally malicious. Even then, I’m convinced most maliciousness is the result of self-preservation. Well, what do you do when they misbehave? Especially when they’re not your own child and it has to be within certain boundaries? Here’s a list of various disciplinary options.

5. Sit Down and Put Your Head Down

This one only works with certain kids and certain groups. For some kids it is mortifying to be called out in front of all the others and then forced to sit away from them. This worked with my fifth grade girls who hated to be made to sit away from each other and the rest of the group, silently. Especially since they all had crushes on various boys within the group. However, not so effective with a kindergarten or first grader… their attention span is so short and they are incapable of taking the punishment seriously. Usually they just end up giggling or something.

4. Write It Out

One of the most volatile group of kids I had, was a group of third graders. Their personalities were all just extremely different, none of them were good friends, and some of them truly hated each other. I left them alone for five minutes once, to go talk to another teacher… and when I was walking back to the room I heard one of the boys actually screaming at three girls. In the end I took three of the girls, and had them write 50 times: “I will keep my hands to myself at all times.” They weren’t happy in the end, but neither was I.

3. Laps.

There was a summer when the kids just couldn’t behave. They couldn’t get quiet when it was time to get quiet, and were constantly complaining. Well, our summers are very active and so… After two straight weeks of being frustrated, we as a team that if they couldn’t get quiet… then as a group they were going to go outside and run laps. Three. Sweaty, grouchy children who got quiet the next time the lights were dimmed.

2. Walk.

One of the biggest problems with kids, is that they run indoors. Yelling “Walk!” only goes so far, and they’re really good at ignoring the sound of an authoritative voice… So. Whenever I see a kid running across the room or the building, I send them all the way back to the start and make them walk it nice and slow. Once, I made a boy walk back and forth across a room three times, because I’d caught him running twice already that day.

1. Computer Time.

The best part of the day for 95% of the kids at the Learning Center is computer time. And the number one threat is: “I’m going to take away five (or ten) minutes of your computer time.” Occasionally, a particularly bad kid can lose his computer time for the rest of the day. But, they don’t get to do anything else… They have to sit at the table in the middle of the room with their head down and listen to the other kids talk about whatever it is they’re doing on the computer.

Do you have any options that you love to use? At home or elsewhere? What have you found absolutely does not work?

Sweet Potato Cookies

Over the summer we had classes on a different continent each week, one of the most fun was Africa. The kids enjoyed all the projects we had lined up, and they liked hearing about the animals that were over there. One of the more common and traditional foods that come from many countries across the continent is the sweet potato. This recipe was a lot of fun to do, and pretty simple. Although, when you do it with the younger kids it takes a bit of extra work.

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup butter or margarine
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 egg
• 1 cup grated, raw sweet potato

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt into a medium bowl. Set aside.

3. Cream the butter or margarine with the sugar in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the lemon peel, nutmeg, honey, and egg. Then stir in the grated sweet potato.

4. Blend in the flour mixture into the sweet potato mixture.

5. Place tounded teaspoons of the cookie dough onto an ungreased cookie sheet. The cookies should be spaced at least 1/2 inch apart.

6. Bake for 7 minutes. Remove cookies fom the sheet and cool on a rack.

If you’re working with smaller children, I suggest having most of the tedious prep work done ahead of time. However, with fourth grade and up it’s a perfectly good practice to have them do all the measuring and grating, even though it will be a little messy. I promise, these suckers are tasty.

This recipe came from a book which we used to put together all sorts of cultural cooking activities for the kids: The Kids’ Multicultural Cookbook by Deanna F. Cook. You can find it here on Amazon.