Today was: A School Holiday - NO SCHOOL TODAY

I've got to say, I'm still kind of on a high from how great last week was - especially Thursday. Like I said, things just WORKED on Thursday - it all just felt so RIGHT. To be perfectly honest, I haven't felt so good, and in such a positive state of mind, in a LONG time - and I mean a L-O-N-G time. Plus, I suppose I'm on a high right now because I just got back from doing a Metreon "double feature" [NO SCHOOL TODAY!] and saw two fantastic movies - School of Rock was a great, fun, sentimental movie that I really appreciated because it's about appreciating kids, and Kill Bill: Volume 1 was JUST PLAIN AMAZING.

So, there's this one girl in class [oh, I WISH I could put her name in print here, because it is such an awesome name, but, alas...] who I find absolutely adorable [yeah, I think I say that about each and every kid...]. Every morning whenever the kids are given time to read from their Browsing Boxes [each week they pick two books from the class library to "read" all week] she runs up to me and, with puppy-dog eyes, pleads, "Will you read with me?" She's one of the best readers in the class so I usually just say something like, "Why don't you get started and I'll make my way around to you? I'm going to walk around and see how everyone is doing..." On Thursday I thought, "Ok, it's about time that I sat down and gave her my full attention." The book she chose to read with me was a book that we had read as a class earlier in the week called What's My Favorite Color?. It's pretty short, so we read through it 3 or 4 times, and, the last couple of times, SHE READ IT ALL BY HERSELF. I was STUNNED but managed to motion to Miles that he should witness this - he, too, was really amazed. Oh, and after the second time that she had read the book by herself she looked at me and said, "Ok, I'm going to read this by myself now. You can go away."

There's this thing that I've found you can do with kids to get them to read: if they say that they want you to read the book to them, begin to do so, but, occasionally pause for a while before a word and, 9 times out of 10, the kid will step up and try to read the word themself. It's almost as brilliant as the "I'm going to count down from 5 and by the time I get to 0 you'd all better be sitting quietly..." threat. For some reason, counting down gets kids to do ANYTHING - and the most amazing part is that they do what you want them to do EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVEN'T SAID WHAT THE CONSEQUENCE WILL BE IF THEY AREN'T WHERE THEY NEED TO BE WHEN YOU GET TO ZERO.

At lunch time, this one woman who works in our classroom two mornings a week was talking to me about the girl with autism. "You know, I think she REALLY likes you," she said. Well, if constantly picking at my sleeve, threatening to hit me in the face, rolling behind me and lifting up my shirt, and actually sitting up [at least for a couple of minutes] after I yell "Sit up!" at her is her way of saying that she likes me, then, yes, I suppose she likes me. The girl in the wheelchair has had a "substitute" para working with her - a guy who seems to be able to speak Cantonese, but doesn't seem to know how to handle the girl with autism. Twice this week, he's talked sternly to her and she's moved away from him and hid behind me. As I mentioned, the girl with autism is getting stickers every time she does something that we want her to do - well, on Thursday she got a sticker from the Resource teacher and instead of sticking it to her folder, the girl with autism walked up to me and stuck the sticker she had just gotten on my sleeve. Are these signs that she likes me? The woman in the lunch room said, "So, what's going to happen when you aren't here next semester?" I got really choked up and asked that we change the subject.

The other thing that happened during lunch was a Dental Awareness briefing in the teachers' lounge. Apparently, this woman is going to be visiting every classroom in the coming weeks to talk to the kids about good dental hygiene. It just took me back to 1st grade when we had to brush our teeth a couple of times a year with this toothpaste that was the NASTIEST stuff I had EVER put in my mouth. It was like REALLY gritty, sandy MUD, and one time, right before we went down to the gym to brush with this crap, I asked my teacher if I could go to the bathroom. I sat in the stall for 20 minutes and got out of having to do it. Thankfully, soon after that, the dental health program switched and we only had to gargle with flouride.

At my seminar on Thursday night, when it came time to talk about the chapter that we had to read for that night [yeah, we have HOMEWORK every week - as if being in the classroom all day isn't enough...] my professor said, "You know what? We're supposed to go over this chapter but I'm sure you guys read it and know what's going on. Eric mentioned to me last week that he would find it valuable if we either got into school groups or grade level groups, so, let's do that instead." Whoo-hoo!

I took the RICA test on Saturday afternoon and feel pretty good about it. When I left the test site I thought to myself, "I feel like I did pretty well on that". Now, I've talked to a number of people who took it in the past and thought that they BOMBED the test and still passed - so, I figure that I'm probably in a pretty good place. If it don't pass it will be because I answered the questions the way that I thought they should be answered. To explain, in the simplest terms, there are two major schools of thought when it comes to teaching language arts. On one side, you've got the traditional method of starting from the bottom - teaching kids how to form words with letters and letter sounds and THEN putting the words into a context. On the other side you've got those more "progressive" thinkers who believe that you should start with context - seeing and beginning to identify letters and words in sentences and literature. I'm a member of the latter school, and both programs that I've been involved in [at IU and SFSU] have taught us to teach in this fashion. Unfortunately, I think that the test wanted us to answer the questions from the former point of view. Oh well, my fate will be revealed to me on November 7th.