rubinc in nyc!

The back of my school is separated by a narrow alley from an apartment building. Today, in the middle of a lesson that was actually going quite smoothly for once, Taneya shrieked and pointed out the window. There was an obese naked man walking around in his apartment, apparently oblivious to the fact that his window faces a school.

To be fair, he wasn’t completely naked - he was holding a towel over his crotch, like he just got out of the shower. But still, trying to get the lesson back on track after that was pretty futile.

Thirty-nine days!

Telling the kids my nose is runny because I have swine flu (really it’s allergies), then standing near the misbehaving ones and sneezing ominously.

Forty days!

Today the seventh grade had a field trip to see Disney’s Earth. Personally, I thought it was awesome. The footage was amazing, the music was really nice, and I learned some cool new things - did you know that lions will attack full-grown elephants? Unfortunately, it was a bit much for the 12-year-old attention span, and most of the students either talked or napped through the whole thing. If that’s what they do while watching a polar bear fight a walrus, I guess I don’t feel so bad that they do it in my class too.

After the movies, we went to a park for the rest of the afternoon. It was a beautiful day out and it was fun to watch the kids run around and play like actual kids, although it would have been more enjoyable if I wasn’t dying of allergies - numerous kids came over to me to ask “What’s wrong with you, Ms. Rubin??” Some choice quotes:

• “Gee Ms. Rubin, it’s a shame you spend your life studying science but you can’t actually enjoy it because you allergic.”
• “Look Ms. Rubin, I found a plant!” (Said by a kid who brought me a pine cone, meanwhile we were surrounded by nothing but trees, grass, and flowers.)
• “Ms. Rubin, you heard about that new disease [swine flu]? You working on fixing that?” Yes, in my spare time, I am curing all kinds of deadly viruses. That’s why I’m a seventh grade science teacher.

Forty-one days!

I have to be honest, when I first heard about the Bronx teacher who called in a bomb threat to his school I was a little jealous. I have a TFA friend who teaches there, they evacuated the whole building and almost all the kids got picked up early by their parents - he finished the day with just six kids, so they went out and played baseball. Not that I’d want to play baseball, but… Too bad none of the teachers at my school are slightly unhinged.

And now they’re closing schools in Queens for swine flu! I guess I’m a little less jealous of those schools, since so far the flu has been killing people in my exact age range, but I want a random holiday too! Why can’t my school just spring a little gas leak, or have a power problem, or something benign like that?

On the bright side, I wore a dress to school today (a rare occurance, for those of you who don’t know me), and from the way the kids reacted you’d have thought it was Wacky Wednesday again. I think sometimes they forget that I’m a girl.
Forty-two days!

Me: I like to dip my french fries in milkshakes.

Student: Ew, really? Strawberry or vanilla?

Me: Actually, chocolate.

Student: THEY MAKE CHOCOLATE MILKSHAKES?!?!

Of all the things I have taught my students, I think this was the most important. Forty-three days…

Now I teach self-contained special ed! Well, sort of… Self-contained special ed means there are 12 students, 1 teacher, and 1 paraprofessional. Until recently, the seventh grade had two such classes, neither of which I ever taught. But one of the teachers left, and finding a replacement at this time of the year isn’t feasible. So several of the students were transferred into the other self-contained class and several were mainstreamed (put into regular ed classes - including the ones I teach), but 5 were still left without a teacher. These are the five who for whatever reason, academic or behavioral, cannot handle being in a general ed classroom.

So three days a week these five will be taught be a long-term sub, and the other two days they are getting shuttled between various school personnel (the librarian, the literacy coach, the teacher mentor…) in a bizarre hodge-podge of a schedule. Apparently there was still one period left uncovered, however, and someone noticed my glorious three-preps-in-one-day Fridays. Alas, tomorrow will be the last one of those.

But I’m actually kind of excited about teaching them, because:

1. It’s only one period a week, and only eight more weeks.
2. It’s only five kids, two of which I know and have a good relationship with from extracurricular stuff. Plus, the paraprofessional will be there. I hope I don’t have to eat these words later, but how bad can five kids be?
3. I was told by the administration that since I’ll only have eight classes with them and they’ve never had a real science teacher, I should basically just pick my eight favorite lab activities from the year and do one each time. Fun!
4. Since I already teach the maximum number of periods allowed, I’ll get paid overtime! That means an extra $40 or so a week, woohoo!

And in a hopefully-unrelated note, I can’t quite tell how serious the author of this piece is, but I’m oddly close to agreeing with him in a way I never would have thought possible had I never actually been inside a contemporary classroom.

Forty-four days!

Robert walked briskly into the room while pumping his arms at his sides, then plopped down in his chair. Beth patted him on the back and declared, “Nice speed-walking!”

Garth, a giant lump of a boy who has been held back several times and almost never talks, saved up enough points for me to take him to KFC. While we were waiting for the food I idly commented on one of their posters that I didn’t know KFC was founded in 1939. Garth blurted out “I did!”, then looked embarassed and said “but I’m not telling you how.” I finally persuaded him to spill the beans: “Miss, I love the Food Network.”

And, my personal favorite, Emmanuel burst into the room and, totally unprompted, declared, “I never wanna grow up because when you get old you have to get a prostate exam! EW!”  Umm… I guess I’m glad I’m not a dude.

Forty-five days!

UPDATE: I forgot to give a special shout out to my fabulous sister, who last night called a Spanish-speaking parent for me after I got desperate waiting for the school translator to be in. Majoring in Latin American Studies has a purpose!

A new mixed drink, you ask? Nope, it’s what one of the science club kids thought the title of “Osmosis Jones” was. And he totally accepted that it had a bizarre name like that without question… makes me wonder what else they mishear but dutifully believe since I say it. Hmm.

I had an oddly nice feeling this morning on the way to work, and it was nothing. It’s hard to explain, but I just didn’t feel anything - no pit in my stomach thinking about bringing 709 up from lunch, no looming sense of doom about Guillarmo being off his medication since coming back from break, no preemptive headaches about grading or making posters or calling parents. I just felt like I was on my way to work, and that was that. It was actually pretty awesome. Maybe I’ve finally hit that upswing in the first year teaching curve that was supposed to start back in January?

However, when I got to the Subway station I felt AWESOME, because for the first time ever I saw the dude changing the ad posters! I’m always excited when I get to the station and a new poster is up, but I’ve never seen them actually being changed out before… it was definitely almost as defining a moment in my life as my teaching epiphany five minutes beforehand.

Forty-six more days!

I was expecting the first day back from spring break to be absolutely heinous, but it ended up being quite tolerable. I actually found myself missing a select few students over the break, so having them to look forward to kind of offset having to deal with the students I was secretly hoping would move away or get mono or something.

One student in particular seemed to have some sort of transformation over the break. Jean is one of the 15-year-old girls who has to miss school to go to court for the assault charges being pressed against her - she’s usually doesn’t act out in class, but she just sits in the back and doesn’t do anything besides her nails. Today, however, she got really into the lesson. We started our unit on plants, which I find really boring so I tried to make the first lesson as fun as possible by talking about venus fly-traps and corpse lilies and giant lily pads.  I guess it worked on Jean, because she was sitting in the front and asking awesome questions and raising her hand for every question. At one point I said, “I keep seeing the same hands, I want to see some different ones,” so Jean exhasperatedly put down the hand she had been raising and raised the other one instead! What a TFA moment.

Forty-seven more teaching days until summer vacation!

Today was the last day of school before our glorious, eleven-day spring break! We watched Osmosis Jones, which is surprisingly biologically accurate. Osmosis Jones is a cop/white blood cell inside Bill Murray, and he’s working with a cold pill to stop a virus from taking over the body. There are lots of cute little biology jokes thrown in, like when Jones and the pill see a shady character hustling on a street corner - the cold pill says, “that’s a virus, we should arrest him!” and Jones replies, “Nah, he used to be a virus but now he works for us; he’s a flu shot.” Ha! My kids didn’t seem to get most of those jokes, but they really liked the movie - and tough-as-nails, too-cool-for-school Larissa actually cried when it looked like Bill Murray was going to die. That was my second favorite part of the whole day. My first favorite was when the infamous Tareque bashfully gave me a giant chocolate rabbit wrapped in pink tin foil for Easter.
I’ll be doing nothing but sleeping and eating for the next week and a half, and back on the 20th!