a work in progress

Life is pretty good at school right now, everyday is still a headache but I’ve developed some really good relationships with many of my kids.  For instance there is one student, we’ll call her Missy, she wanted nothing to do with me at the beginning of the year. In class she is extremely loud and obnoxious.   If you remember in a much earlier blog I talked about students running across desks. I was talking about Missy.  The girl is crazy! But she is always happy and doesn’t seem to really care about anything. She just does what she wants when she wants and if she gets suspended…whatever. 

So you can imagine how hard it might be to get a child like that to do some work. Every day I would ask “Missy, you want me to show you how to do these math problems?” “Naw!” she’d respond “you goofy”. So I would leave her be and work with other students. Finally one day I caught her cheating so instead of taking the paper away (I’ve done that to students before, the result is not pretty), I sat next to her and asked “do you expect to get credit on a paper you didn’t do?” She just laughed and said “yeah, Mr. Andy”.  “I can’t do that, cheating is an automatic F.”  Well she was ready to get in a yelling match, but I stopped her and said “Why don’t you show me you can do a problem by yourself, or I can show you how to do it and we can work out the rest of the problems”  “ ’ight, Mr. V show me how to do it”  So I did, and now she lets me work with her, and she’s always talking with me and even asked me (jokingly) if I’d be her godfather. So now that’s what she calls me. We definitely have our off days and she is very disrespectful to my other teammates and her teachers but at least she’s willing to try and learn. A HUGE improvement.

I’ll tell you all about a young man who gave me almost as much trouble in my next post.

Love ya!