Tug of War

So lately I've been getting annoyed by little things...having to repeat myself 50 million times, telling students to get their notebooks out of the bins/get a pen or pencil/write down the warm-up/read the board/etc./etc./etc. I pray for patience, but for pete's sake....it's MARCH! How many months has the warm-up been on the board? How many months have the materials needed been on the front table when you come in? How many months have we been using the notebooks EVERY DAY?

I finally got wise yesterday and wrote this, instead of my usual "Copy and solve in your notebook on your next page of notes."


And wouldn't you know it...I only had 1 student ask me where to write the warm-up problem. (I guess there's one in every bunch.) Another student exclaimed, "Wow, Miss! You're writing on the board like we're a bunch of special kids." I just told her, "You're all special to me..." [*big smile*] She laughed.

But even despite my occasional annoyances, they do things to brighten my days. Like how they totally got into this one game I had them play. We were learning quadrilaterals and their properties, so I made up this game as a spin off of the "Who Am I?" game you sometimes play at parties, where you have to guess what famous person you are. I knew they weren't going to be cool with putting paper on their foreheads or backs though, so this is what we did...


HAHAHA. I wasn't sure they would actually wear the hats for fear of being ridiculed, but a strange thing happened. The students that refused to wear them were the ones being teased! ("Come on, why don't you just do it? We all have them on... You too afraid?") Soon the whole class was walking around in these birthday hats with pictures of shapes on them, talking to others about their properties. So stinkin cute. I had to take pictures. One girl called over to me, "Miss Hooker! Take a picture of me too!" I turned around and oh boy... THIS is what I saw.


And I knew then that this is why we do it. This is the back-and-forth about being a teacher. You have to take the good with the bad, because if we all quit on the bad days, we'd miss out on so much.