Frustrations and Surprises

Frustration: I e-mailed a couple of parents about gum-chewing today. Gum-chewing. I don't know... maybe you better organized teacher types send off referrals and fire off phone messages for that sort of thing on a regular basis.... but I never bothered with it. I figure, if I'm going to contact a parent - there's got to be a fairly substantial behavior or performance issue. Nope... gum-chewing. I even talked to a counselor about it. Why? Because I had directed these two girls, both of whom are returning students... to throw out their gum on a daily basis since the first day of school. I've talked to both of them individually - one of them yesterday. Today we played the game of "I'm going to hide my chewing from you." Fuck that. I refuse to spend my class time totally distracted by the process of trying to catch these girls in the act. Technically, it's defiance... albeit a really lame form of defiance, and I feel stupid making this much fuss over it. Phhhh.

Surprise: So, I have this mostly 7th-grade beginning band class that I've basically yelled at almost every day since the beginning of school. I don't hate them, but they constantly do stuff that I have to react to. So I yell a lot. There are a few that I'm going to try to have removed... but that's another blog. Anyway - we're about a month into the school year, and I figured that they all think I'm a big grouch.

Well, today I got the call that my wife was being sent to the maternity ward at beautiful Ocean View Hospital. I immediately called the front office and told them that I was leaving, and that I needed coverage. I quickly told my class where I was going, and why... and they got really excited for me. One kid even hugged me (and I'm pretty sure it was the kid I yelled "shut up" to yesterday)

Go figure.

Well, it turns out that my wife wasn't going into labor. When she went to her exam, the Ob/Gyn noticed that the baby's heart beat was slowing. Fearing a situation where he might have had to do a C-section, he immediately sent her to be monitored, and told her to call me. By the time I got to the hospital, the baby's heart rate had recovered, and everything looked good. They let us go.

I guess we'll see how they react when I come back to class tomorrow :-)