Magnetic Personality

Joe Cruz has arrived, and he's a cute little guy! On his first day in my class, he tried very hard to fit in. He's made friends and smiles all the time. He struggles academically, but we can work with that. He also struggles behaviorally, and we can work with that. He has yet to struggle "cussingly," and if he does, we will work with that.

Sadly, I have a nasty little cold and had to be absent yesterday, his second day in our class. I felt guilty, but I must prioritize my health sometimes.

More importantly, I must prioritize my social life. I have Bon Jovi tickets for this weekend and CAN NOT miss the opportunity to, yet again, don my 1986 Slippery When Wet tour tee shirt!

Mock all you want. I've gotta let it rock and never say goodbye to my favorite band from high school. I'm looking forward to getting wild in the streets, but hope I don't catch some sort of social disease. I've been livin' on a prayer since my dear friend said she would like to take me with her to this concert. Without love for this band, I would never be able to scream, "I'd die for you, Jon" at the concert. I wanted to go to this concert, dead or alive.

(If you are not a Bon Jovi fan, I realize that last paragraph made no sense to you and you now think I am some sort of obsessed groupie. Trust me, I'm not. Just go with it.)

Now, back to my class.

As I mentioned, I've been sick. If the tedium of writing sub plans were not enough to keep my hacking body from staying home, I've got bigger problems. I have bad luck when it comes to substitute teachers in my class this year. It's not the substitutes that are the problem, it's the kids. Like every class, they test the limits when I am away. Only, it's not with your basic chattiness and stretching the boundaries of class rules.

My kids test the limits with destruction of school property and graffiti. Last time, they wrote nasty words and scribbled all over the walls in the coat closet. The offending students thought that doing it in pencil was not actual graffiti because it could be erased.

Lesson learned there: Even erasable graffiti earns you a visit from the local police department and a suspension.

When I returned today, I was happy to learn there was no graffiti this time, phheeeeww.

Nope, this time one of my girls took a magnet off my whiteboard and ran it all over one of the computer screens, distorting the image on the screen.

The note from the sub just said "a girl" did it and that she was told to come forward and confess upon my return. That was not necessary though. It took my class 0.000007 milliseconds to tell me who it was when I saw them in the morning.

Of course, she told me she "dropped the magnet" on the monitor, but couldn't explain how it fell in a circular path all around the screen.

Then she explained that she did run a magnet all over the screen but "did not know" what the result would be, but couldn't explain how everyone else knew not to put magnets on computers nor why they could cite no fewer than three times I had explained to our entire class how bad magnets are for computers.

Finally, she admitted that she knew what she was doing and knew it would have negative results. She fessed up…to me, that is. Of course she told her mother (when she picked her up for her suspension for destruction of school property) that she "did not know" that magnets were bad for computers.

AAARRGGHHHHH!!!!!!

As any good mother would do when she thought her child was being unfairly accused of a serious incident, she defended her child's actions because her child "did not know what would happen if she put a magnet on a computer screen." By the end of the conversation though, she began to realize that her child was more aware of the consequences of her actions than the kid originally let on.

So Mom blamed me.

She's probably right. How could I be irresponsible enough to use magnets on my whiteboard when there are computers in the room? Furthermore, how could I expect a 10 year old to resist the urge to knowingly destroy one of the monitors?

She's right. Maybe I should be the one suspended?

Don't tempt me…