~A Bit More Than A Paragraph
2004-01-30 - 6:11 p.m.

Viv sent me a message yesterday, which I read after the kids had gone home: *wugs* Hope you are having a good first kid-day back. And if your class is evil, I'll buy you a cast iron, continually red hot poker. ?_? zzzzt! *sizzle* muahahahahaha that'll teach em. FROM: Poker Lady.

Damn, I love that girl! She cracks me up! And I really needed the laugh by the end of the day (I've misstyped laugh as luagh so often that I felt the urge to correct laugh instead!).

It wasn't that I had a bad day, but after lunch signalled the emergence of Problem Boy. I won't go into his issues too much, but let's just say that he's got really low literacy and numeracy abilities, broken home, little attention, bad mood swings, doesn't like hard work, doesn't know how to behave. Not all the time do these things come through, but he's definitely my Problem Boy of the year. At APS, we have only two recesses (which has become the norm since I left primary school), with 2 hours in the morning before a 30 minute morning recess, and hour and a half before an hour lunch recess and then another hour and a half (that should get us from 9-3:30, I think!). Until lunchtime, Problem Boy was fine, a bit needy in the work department, but his behaviour was not exceptional. I suspect that spending pretty much all of lunch time inside because of a torrential thunderstorm didn't help his mood, but after lunch he was naughty, willfully disobedient and rude to other students. Until then, the class had been beeeautiful and I was loving having 2/3s instead of Preps. After lunch, this boy kind of coloured my perception of the whole day. One big difference between naughty grade Preps and naughty grade 2s is that the grade 2 kid is a hardened case.

I wasn't depressed like I had been sometimes last year, but it was disappointing to have that kind of behaviour on day 1. Problem Child didn't rear her poor ugly little head until about two weeks into the proceedings last year. It was just a little discouraging to know I'm going to have to deal with this boy for the whole year.

Today he was naughty enough before recess that I thought I'd try having him removed from the class for a bit (it's down the track in the discipline process at APS, so it wasn't a big strange move or anything) because he was swearing at kids and being disobedient. After recess I pretty much had him away from the rest of the students. We did work on the whiteboard together (making and solving addition and subtraction sums out of the students birthday dates), while Problem Boy made noises, jumped around the place and generally behaved disruptively while we ignored him from just enough of a distance. At lunchtime the kids played outside the whole time and I had a discussion about Problem Boy with his former teacher, which smoothed out a lot of things about him for me. After lunch we did a lot of less thinking work - colouring the Australian Flag, decorating paper for the cover of their workbooks and a bit of snakes 'n' ladderish games if they finished their work - and he was mostly really well behaved (well, for Problem Boy). So the day ended well and I go home happy. Hehe, the final session always colours my perception of the day!

As for the rest of the kids, they're not perfect, but they're fine. There're a few boys especially who get a bit too talkative and silly, and one boy who has already tried to push the boundaries a bit, but none of them (so far) seem like they'll be the huge problems that I had last year. Even Problem Boy I can put up with if he's the only one. It was having two - or five, really - last year who were constant problems, coupled with the fact that they were all Preps and therefore were really prone to being uncontrollable and silly anyway, that just made some days nightmarish. After two days, I certainly can look back and appreciate some things about the preps, but mostly I just love how these 2/3s work and think and pay attention and carry out instructions! Coming from preps, if I have to sometimes repeat myself or remind students to do the right thing, it's still less than I'm used to!