Tards not ready for upper level sports

Due to an assembly, the recess times had to be adjusted. Because of this, my class had to go out to recess with the upper grades.

My tards were not ready for this. They were getting beat badly in wall-ball and basketball. Brad got hit in the head and knocked over by the tetherball. He was playing against a kid twice his size. The kid served the ball and Brad went to swat at it. He missed and got clocked in the head instead. All the kids laughed.

Augusta and his bling-bling

Augusta comes to school with this huge, cheap, gawdy looking watch on. He was so proud of it, and would position his body in ways that best displayed the watch. He made a comment to a couple of kids in the hall way about his "bling-bling", while showcasing the watch. Word got out, and at the next recess, everyone was making fun of him, saying shit to him about his bling-bling, and about how his dad was probably wondering where his watch is.

At one point, a student grabbed at the watch. Augusta flipped out, threw his arm up over his head and started to shriek. He took the watch off and stuffed it in his coat pocket, warning others not to mess with his bling-bling. He then stormed into the office to call his mom so he could go home and shower.

Tards learn about different races

Ivan and the old new kid are both at the sink, washing their hands before they eat snack. Ivan is half Caucasian and half African-American. Evan's skin is, indeed, brown. The old new kid keeps telling Ivan to keep washing his hands, they are still brown and dirty. The old new kid truly knows no better then to make a comment of this sort, he is six years old and retarded.

Finally, after a good two minutes of the old new kid criticizing Evan's hand washing techniques, the old new kid screams out

"TEACHER, EVAN'S HANDS WON'T TURN NOT BROWN."

It was at that point that I read the class "Elmer the Elephant", a book about skin color differences. We discussed it afterward, I really think the majority of them caught the message.

Tard has problems with change

I assign classroom jobs to my kids. The jobs include titles such as: line leader, messengers, librarians, door holders, etc. I change these jobs every Monday.

Last week, the old new kid and another student were the messengers. This means that they both walk the attendance sheet down to the office in the morning. They were the messengers every morning last week.

This Monday morning, the old new kid could not handle the fact that he was no longer the messenger. He seriously thought I was fucking with him. I kept telling him that the jobs change every Monday, but he continued to argue.

Finally, he busts out loudly with, "It was Me. Me and that brown kid were the messengers." While saying this, he is also pointing at poor Evan. He then said again, "The brown kid and me are it." I cut him off at that, but it was damn funny.

Mom's math sucks

I have been having many problems getting the old new kid to complete and turn in his homework. Keep in mind that the only reason he gets homework is because he is too busy dinking around in class to get his work done. I have been sending unfinished work home in his homework folder, and it has not been coming back. Finally I decide to call home. I speak with his mother, who is younger then me. She seemed frightened by my call, and I am sure she was so nervous that she flushed everything she had. His mother assured me that the work was at home and it was completed. She would send it to school with her son the next day.

The next day the homework comes in. It is obvious that the mother did it, not her son. It was adult handwriting, which in no way resembles 6 year old tard writing. There is one part of the homework where you have to read short story problems and turn them into a numbers subtraction problem (i.e. Jamie has nine turtles, she gives four to Tom, how many turtles does Jamie now have? The answer would look like
                                                     9
                                                    -4
                                                     5
However, the mom had a different way of writing these problems out. This is exactly how she wrote them out:
        7                   5                     3                     4
     -11                  -9                    -7                   -11  

What a dumb ass. I hung the mom's work on our staff bulletin board, it is that good.

Student mismanages money

I am in a fifth grade classroom, observing one of my students while she participates in classroom activities. Lunchtime rolls around, and she begs me to stay and eat lunch with her, so I do.

About halfway into lunch, she starts furiously searching through her pockets for money that she had brought to school. In response to her frantic tantrum, one of the girls (who is not retarded) says, "You already lost your 31 dollars once today...and YESTERDAY!! You lost it yesterday, and Mrs. Bach told you yesterday to not bring that much money to school!!"

The tard gets upset, and starts up with a very annoying combination of crying and whining. She relocates to the corner of the room, curls up into a little ball, and pulls her hooded sweatshirt around her entire body. I slowly coax her out of it with some Starburst and old easter jelly beans.

I then focus on the girl who had claimed she had repeatedly lost her money. Her recount of the multiple losses killed me. She said that on Monday, 31 dollars had been found stuffed into the cracks of an upper cubby. The tard went all day without realizing she had lost it in the first place. By the end of the day, she figured it out and claimed her money. She also received a lecture from her regular classroom teacher about not bringing that much money to school.

On Tuesday, there was a wadded up 31 dollars on the floor by the overhead projector. The teacher put it up on the wipe board. Still, she goes all morning without noticing her 31 dollars is missing. When she realized it was hers and claimed it, she got another lecture from her teacher about money at school.

And then to top it off, the freak-out over the again, missing, 31 dollars.

Brian likes movies

Brian's parents are my age and they watch movies and let him watch too. This is all he fucking talks about--movies. Of course I think it is funny, but it has spiraled out of control to the point that I have to repeatedly tell him, "Brian, you are not on topic."

Monday he saw Goldmember. He kept saying, "Shmoke and a Pancake, Waffle and a cigar, Bong and a blintz." As he was saying this, he would extend a hand to me, as if he was offering me something. It was funny, but also disturbing.

As I was putting him on the bus on Friday he was telling me about the movie eight legged freaks and about how his mom spanks him really hard on the bottom everyday.

St. Paddy's Day:

he new kid came in today wearing a fucking black top hat and had a black plastic cauldron full of gold foiled chocolate coins. The cauldron hung from the front of his walker. He actually came to school as a leprechaun, although he never could verbalize that. He would just respond "yes" when asked by others if he was, indeed, a leprechaun. He gave goofy smiles, and kids would take a shitload of chocolate coins out of his bucket. They abused the "take one" privilege until the coins were all gone, at about 9:45 a.m.

We had a small St. Patrick's Day party in the afternoon. The new kids mother made each kid a shamrock cookie with green frosting. She also made green kool-aid, but it was pretty nasty. I think it might have been sugar-free or something.
The whole gesture was very nice of her. At the end of the party,  when I probed the kids to thank her, amongst many "Thank You's," I hear Augusta mutter, "Thanks for the Green Water."

Lewis becomes obsessed

Lewis is very intelligent, but he displays odd and compulsive behaviors. He is really funny though. He is very good at spelling, and even won his classroom spelling bee, which made him a participant in the school spelling bee. He practiced like an anorexic ballerina for the entire week before the school spelling bee. On the big day, he told me he could not be more ready.

There are about twenty contestants in the spelling bee. One of the students walks up to the microphone to spell, and Lewis gets up out of his chair and walks toward her, staring intently at her shoes.

The girl had the kind of shoes on that light up when you walk. Lewis is fixated on these shoes like I have never seen him fixate in anything before. He immediately gets up and walks over to her, gets on his hands and knees and stares, places his face about 8 inches from her shoes, and stares right at them. He is literally on his hands and knees, at the microphone, staring at this girls shoes. Snickering could be heard faintly throughout the gym.

The administrator of the spelling bee warned Lewis that he needed to return to his seat. He may have heard her, but he was not listening. He was asking the girl questions about her shoes, and she just stared at him in silent disbelief.

She warns him one more time to return to his seat, he pays no attention to her and is disqualified. He still will not leave the stage. I had to go up there and remove him. It was not pretty. I lied to him and told him that I had a pair of the light up sneakers in my classroom. This was the only reason he followed me off the stage.

New mother reads her Machiavelli:

The new kids mom has cleverly worked it so that her son is now the most popular kid in my class. She has extended her pattern of daily gift-giving beyond me.

She now brings in little surprises for the kids, and she MAKES her son pass them out. He has no clue about why she is there, and why he is struggling to hand out rice-krispy treats via his walker. But he does it, and this makes the kids like him. Sometimes he will even give into Augusta's greedy attempts to coerce him into giving him an extra treat, leaving himself without one.

This mother has entirely taken over the 15 minute period in our day that is referred to as "snack time". Fuck everyone else's nasty donations--on Thursday she brought in EGG ROLLS that she had made herself. They were so good that I would have fought Augusta for the last one.

Wednesday was the day she brought in the cake. This day has become legendary in our classroom. The kids refer to this day as "Bunny Cake Day". It was a cake, shaped like a bunny with colored coconut sprinkles on the frosting to form eyes, nose and mouth. It also had Jelly Beans along the outside.

When she brought her son in the morning, she set the cake on the front table. The kids admired the fucking thing throughout the morning, and were overjoyed when she returned at 11:00 a.m. to serve it. Along with little pint size chocolate milk cartons, of course.

It is so funny to see how many kids now will play with the new kid. Especially kids like Tyler, who will do anything he can to extort money from him. And Augusta!! He always sits next to the new kid at lunchtime. The new kid is easily talked out of anything in his lunchbox. The new kid often goes hungry.