Bad day gone good...

I have two brothers in my 3A period, the one from hell mentioned in my last post.  OB (older brother) is in 10th grade and YB (younger brother) is in 9th.  OB wasn't in class yesterday for the mess and this morning he apologized for, um, choosing to miss that day.  Seems YB ripped him a new one for not being there.  "Why?" I asked.  As the story goes, YB knew that OB would have kept the thieving little b...... from, as YB put it, disrespecting me by stealing from me.  Now the irony here is that neither one of them was willing to even confirm the name of the thief, let alone turn him in.  As a matter of fact, only two students were willing to name names, one of them was the student caught with the soda.  This is a definite high school dichotomy, wanting to prevent the theft but not willing to turn on a fellow student.  Unless my memory has failed me over the last 3 years, I remember it being a lot different in jr. high.  In a 9th grade class I would have had at least 3 or 4 students willingly name the student (after everyone was long gone, like after school).  8th grade would have a fourth to 3 fourths of the class naming the student, depending on how popular the particular student was, and of course after school or sometime when it couldn't be linked back to them.  7th grade, on the other hand, I would have had half the class tell me even before the period was over.  I exaggerate a little bit, but you get the idea.

Anyhoo, I've got a lock on the fridge now, and at least I know, in their own subtle ways, these kids are going to let thief-boy know it ain't appreciated.

3rd Period from Hell

9th graders, gotta love them.  My 3A class has always been one of the harder ones, it's a mix of all 4 grades, but heavy on the 9th graders.  Like usual, they were talking all through the starter, when I'm trying to take roll and get it entered into the computer.  Three times I had to interrupt the process and stop some student from doing something they knew they shouldn't be doing.  Three times I had to start over because I lost my place and wanted to make sure attendance was accurate.  Then some schmuck interrupts me with "why does it take you so long to take roll?"  My nerves are a little frayed, this is proving to be one of the most complicated and trying end of the years I've had since, well, even my first year wasn't so bad.  At least that year I was looking forward to the end.  This year, as frustrating as it is, I find myself wishing the end would never come.  Well, ok, only some of the time.  It fluctuates between that and wishing tomorrow was the last day.  Well, they got a 5 minute lecture on how I get the roll done in no time in all my other classes, and that it's their behavior that makes me take so long.  I probably was a little harsher that I needed to be, (no, I didn't call them names or swear), but I did get class started right after that.

About half way through the class I'm in back helping a student on their assignment and when I head back to the front of the room I notice one of the 9th graders receive something from another student and immediately hide is between him and the wall.  This, of course, got my curiosity up.  So I asked him about it.  Yes, I got the innocent routine, and he kept it up even to the point of being hauled down to the vice principal's office.  As soon as he got up to follow me down to the office I turned around and looked to see if he had passed it to the student behind him.  He hadn't.  It was sitting there right under his seat.  One of my diet Cokes.  From in my fridge.  Now, anyone who has worked with me knows that I can tolerate a lot of crap in my classroom, but one of the things that hits a nerve (and my nerves are already frayed) is having stuff stolen from me.  Just bugs me.  Probably because when I was 5 or 6 my dad hauled me down to the Five & Dime and made me walk in, return the Matchbox car I had stolen and apologize to the store clerk.

Immediately he starts in with this story about him finding the soda rolling across the room, and that he didn't steal it.  I told him that I beleived he didn't steal it, but that I didn't beleive the rolling across the floor story and that I was sure he knew had actually stolen it.  I asked him who really stole it, he still claimed the finding it on the floor story, so I gave him a little lecture about receiving stolen goods and brought him down to the office.  Turns out, surprisingly, he knew who had taken it out of my fridge.

So, now I'm off to get a lock for my fridge.  I don't count my sodas all the time, so even though I know of one other time soda was stolen out of it, I can't say they were the only two instances.