Thursday, April 19, 2012

It really happens. I kid you not.

Hi, hello, greetings! I should be showering right about now, but I figured I'd give myself a bit of time to get the blog back up to speed. 

While I haven't been as productive as I'd like to be in the blogging world, I have been moderately-very productive in the exercise world. I say moderately because there have been a couple days here and there where we haven't worked out, but the past 2 days I've had a for real excuse since I've been battling a cold that I think I picked up at the testing location for my Illinois teaching certification (no joke there were over 1,000 people all testing at the same time) or on my ride home on the Red Line. For those of you, which is honestly probably all of you, who are not from the Chicagoland area, the Red Line is the El that I consider to be the most germ-laden. Whenever I'm on it, I feel as though my skin looks something like this:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX5sJwqVymy_w9zXVQ48O7bKpdG9pDXhmaWSsNPwaepXDF0KlLgxhcIuyXdseZLscX3gsj1tw29wuB_sCuzQB3p8OvxafiuLPA5JNEgxDY2pJEPLshroyUQqAP8evwB6FQFlQWuutU-xmf/s1600/germs.jpg
And lo and behold, approximately 72 hours after riding the Red Line, the tell-tale signs of sickness set in. Curse you, filthy El.

For those of you paying attention, yes I did just cite the source where I found that picture. Our kids have been working on projects where they have been learning to cite their sources so I figured I'd practice what I've been preaching. 

I've got some super funny kid stories, mostly revolving around two of my favorite students. I know we're not exactly supposed to have favorites (it's not like there are rules against this type of thing) but you just can't help finding some kids more fun to interact with than others. 

In one of my math groups, I have just two third graders. Today I told them that they could earn five minutes of free time at the end of math if they had good behavior. They worked really hard to earn it and I decided to treat them with a game of Pictionary on the Smartboard. They absolutely love using the Smartboard, and to be honest, so do I. Even though it's just a fancy, electronic whiteboard of sorts, it's still really fun. To make the game fair, I told them both to just pick animals to draw. 

On the first boy's turn, he drew a three-legged animal with floppy ears and a bunny tail. It was a dog. On my first turn I drew a pretty awesome flamingo. It was totally obvious that it was a flamingo. When I was done drawing they both just stared at me blankly like, "Umm, what?" I wrote the word pink. No response. I started writing out the word "flamingo". Blank stares. I made the noises they make. Nothin. These boys truly had no idea what a flamingo was/is! So much for my super easy drawing!

When the second boy had his first turn, he started off drawing another animal with a long neck. At first I thought he was just copying my idea of the flamingo, but eventually his drawing turned into something like this:
Sadly, I couldn't take pictures of the student's actual drawing, but I assure you, this reproduction is spot on.

Any guesses?

Well, clearly it's a giraffe. With bird legs. Just two of them instead of four. 

I helped the other boy guess giraffe because he was absolutely stumped. He, in turn, created something along these lines:
Are you as befuddled as I was?! The correct answer is: a snake that has just eaten a deer.

"How morbid!", you might say to yourself. Well yes and no. Yes because who draws an animal that has another animal inside of it?! But no because this is actually a really good thing. And by that I mean it shows that I am effective as a teacher beeeecaaaauuuussseee, today during our language arts session, we read a story about snakes and how they live, including how they eat their prey. We then Googled pictures of snakes that had just eaten and we saw a picture of a very large snake that had consumed a small deer. It really happens. I kid you not. 

So while his Pictionary choice was not what I would have chosen, it was flattering to see that he really did pay attention to me during language arts. 

It's almost 10:00 and that's the time I told myself I'd post this and move on with my evening. I'll be back again soon. Perhaps this weekend if my sickness doesn't evolve into some crippling, debilitating disorder. Gah, I hope not. I'm subbing tomorrow! 

Happy almost Friday!
-A


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