rubinc in nyc!

The third quarter ends a week from tomorrow, and a lot more students than usual are failing/perilously close to failing. This is due to a combination of the marking period being much shorter than the previous two, and me being much stricter about not accepting work that is late and/or obviously half-assed. Anyway, I realized that I can’t really fail half of the seventh grade, so I decided to offer a bailout package to my failing students. It’s a packet of a bunch of review work from the past unit, as well as a two page essay assignment on the topic “Why I Am Failing Science and How I Will Convince Ms. Rubin That I Should Pass.” I gave each failing student a piece of paper with the following on it:

I (DO/DO NOT) accept Ms. Rubin’s bailout package so that I can pass science.

Signature: ____________________________________________________

This way none of them can claim that they didn’t know they were failing or what they had to do to pass. Only one student chose the “DO NOT” option, but one quick parent phone call later and I have 100% buy in. I’m sort of a vindictive teacher.

Hopefully they will all complete the package and learn something from it, and not use it to give themselves paper airpline bonuses for being such great students.

I’m on my school’s Technology Committee, and at our meeting to today we had a sales rep from Tequipment (the SMARTboard people) come and show us all the sweet stuff we could get for the school with our technology budget next year. Highlights included:

• Personal remotes for each student, which they use to “click in” answers for questions I ask them on the SMARTboard, which in turn compiles their responses in useful ways. That way you can instantly see what percent of students understands each questions, and you can also see exactly which students missed each question. For those of you who went to MIT with me, it’s like the PRS system used in Physics TEAL.
• A tablet-style mini-SMARTboard. It’s basically a tablet PC that connects wirelessly to the SMARTboard, so you can stand anywhere in the room and write on it, and whatever you write shows up on the board. It makes me think of that scene in Matilda where she uses her mind powers to make the chalk write on the board by itself - I want to get it, hide in the closet with it while someone else is teaching, and then make weird and cryptic messages appear on the SMARTboard like I’m the ghost of the brother they murdered.
• A personal teacher audio system. The teacher gets a wireless head mic, and the room is set up with a bunch of speakers. I am obsessed with the idea of being able to boom out “STOP TALKING!!!” in surround sound, without even having to raise my voice. Plus, I would look like I was performing live in concert, and it would be awesome.

I have no idea if we’ll actually be getting any of those things, but it’s sure fun to imagine what my classroom would be like next year if we did…

I decided to combine my love for crossword puzzles with my desire for a low-stress Friday after being sick, and the result was surprisingly successful. After I announced that the first table to solve the puzzle in each class got extra credit points, a lot of my students really got into trying to finish it, hopefully with the side effect of learning some vocabulary. I think crossword puzzles will be a new way to review vocabulary at the end of each unit - since students can use their notes they are able to solve with enough effort that they actually have to think, but not so much that they get frustrated and give up, as often happens. As one kid put it after I helped him with the first few clues, “You mean, I just put the words in the squares?? Cool!” It was a nice teacher moment.

Another nice teacher moment was when I took three girls out after school. I was sort of annoyed because they wanted to go to Subway, which is probably the most expensive of the fast food options, but the clerk was totally awesome and only charged the price of kids’ meals - even though each girl got a 6″ sub that wasn’t from the kids’ meal menu. I think he figured out that I was a teacher taking my students out, and decided to be nice to me. The girls spent the entire time informing me about who they have crushes on and who is dating who; it was kind of cute how excited they were to be telling me all the latest seventh grade gossip. Also, they sang the “five dollar footlong” Subway song about a million times, and were quite proud of how clever that made them. I honestly think that was their primary reason for choosing Subway over McDonald’s.

I wonder how many of my readers are going to print out that crossword and try to solve it…

I don’t feel good

I’m only posting so I won’t get a bunch of emails asking if I finally got stabbed to death with a binder.

Sometimes this job makes me feel like I have bipolar disorder. At 2:45 I’m screaming at Chris and Christina to stop fighting in the hallway (cause: Chris calling Christina “vomit;” highlight: Chris using the cast on his broken arm as a bludgeon), and at 3:15 I’m enjoying a calm afterschool snack at McDonald’s with Oryn and James, while we chat about everything from getting into college to how cell phones work (highlight: “It would be too hard to be a science teacher, because you have to memorize everything in the notes - you don’t even have cue cards or anything!”).

Also, in a brilliant feat of dyslexia, when I was selecting the materials for my Amgen grant and meant to get 8 packs of multicolored markers, I accidentally got “multicultural” ones. Now my kids can make posters and projects in all the colors of tan that they want!

I handed out progress reports today, since the grading period ends in two and a half weeks and an alarmingly high number of kids are failing. I hate doing progress reports, because even though every time I hand them out I introduce them with a whole “This is the grade you have earned, and crumpling up your grade report and throwing it in the trash isn’t going to improve it,” that’s inevitably what happens. The kids always scream “HOW YOU GIVE ME A 52?!?!?!” at me, like the list of 7 missing homeworks and 2 failed quizzes isn’t enough of an explanation. And then  they all want me to stay after school with them all night the eve of grade finalizations to make up all the work they’re missing…sigh.

My sister is visiting NYC for her spring break, so she came to visit science club after school today. The kids all thought having two Ms. Rubin’s was hilarious, and wanted to show her everything in our classroom. It was kind of cute, actually. Of course, the kids who come to science club aren’t the same “YOU FAILING ME YOU FAILING ME YOU FAILING MEEEEEE!!!!” kids.

We had another guest in our classroom today, and he gave a rather intense lesson about the evils of any food that is not organic, whole wheat, and raw. The elephant in the room was the fact that I take my kids to McDonald’s and Burger King as a reward, despite the fact that those establishments meet none of the above criteria. In fact, I’m taking Seri and Porsche there on Wednesday. Seri, who doesn’t really have a filter between her brain and her mouth, shouted out, “But Ms. Rubin is taking us to McDonald’s on Wedneday!” Porsche, who is a bit more savvy in the ways of the world, quickly gave Seri a shove and corrected her before the presenter could respond, “No she’s not, she’s taking us to a salad buffet.” She then shot me a look like, “don’t worry Ms. Rubin, I got you covered.”

Middle schoolers are pretty dumb. As soon as one of them does something, all of them are doing the same thing. Usually it’s something stupid, but relatively minor - for instance, since the first day of school there has been an never-ending series of memes that make their way across the seventh grade. Each word or phrase randomly appears in one class, then gradually works its way into all four classes, and then suddenly drops out of existence. Examples:

• “Daddy!” - the kids just scream it out, loudly and without reason, with as much elongation in the “a” as possible. So usually its not “Daddy!” so much as “Daaaaaaaaaaady!” They also write this all over their papers and desks.
• “Whoever doesn’t _________, your mother doesn’t love you.” - I was actually there for the birth of this one. A class was being really rambunctious at dismissal, and I told them I wasn’t letting them go until they sat in their seats and stopped yelling. Troy, one of the more popular kids, screamed out “Whoever doesn’t shut up, your mother doesn’t love you!” It became an instant hit, and kids used it for weeks, substituting verbs of their choice.
• Using what I think is supposed to be a British accent, but really sounds more like a speech impediment - Pretty self-explanatory. This one actually never made it out of the CTT (half special-ed) class; I wonder why…

But the most recent trend isn’t a meme, it’s a piercing. One of the popular kids got a lip stud last week, and seriosly about two dozen kids have acquired them since then. It is mind-boggling to me that my kids are so into conforming that they are piercing their lips, and also that their parents are letting them. Worst of all, it’s a really dumb-looking piercing - it’s a little metal stud under the right corner of the lip, and it looks like the kids perpetually have food on their face. I kind of want to pay a cool kid to tattoo a radish on their forehead, and see how long it takes for all the other kids to get permanent face vegetables…

Since my school is K-8, we had a half day today for the elementary school parent-teacher conferences (middle schools and elementary schools have different, Dept.-of-Ed.-scheduled PTC days). The middle school teachers got the afternoon for professional development, so Ms. L and I had a glorious three hours to finish unpacking the LAST of the boxes from the grant - yes, it has taken this long!

The highlight was definitely our attempt to put together the Van de Graaff generator we bought. It came completely disassembled - the motor, the belt, the pulleys, everything was in pieces! I knew we were in trouble when the first thing I saw upon opening the box was a plastic bag full of various screws, bolts, nuts, wire nuts, and other things I didn’t even recognize. After an hour of working exclusively on the motor and its stand, we are done with 8 of the 17 assembley steps. Hopefully we can finish it during lunch tomorrow… I’m excited to turn it on, but also slightly apprehensive that one of us will get electrocuted.

Once everything is assembled and put away, we are going to label all the cabinets and make a master list of their contents. I am so excited about this orgy of organization that I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight!

Tareque, in the middle of a lesson about the relation between diet, diabetes, and obesity: “Miss, doesn’t knowing this take all the fun out of your life?” I’m sure he wouldn’t have asked if I had also taught them my “If-You-Don’t-Look-At-The-Nutrition-Information-It-Doesn’t-Count” diet philosophy.

Alan, in the middle of a random human body lesson, “MISS! Are we going to digest a frog?!?” Umm, I hope not…