Let's play tag?

I went back up to Cambridge/Boston this past weekend, and I had a delayed flight late last night; consequentially, I was pretty tired when I got to school this morning. I was even too tired to make myself some lunch, so I stopped at McDonalds before work and bought two sausage biscuits to be my midday fuel—this, however, will definitely not become a habit.

I spent about half the day teaching and the other half of the day doing paperwork and conducting a parent/student meeting. Tomorrow I am going to have to focus only on paperwork. A student from one of my math classes asked me today, “When are you coming back?!” I told her that I was coming back very soon, and I missed being in there with them. I was ambivalent about the exchange because I was happy that they wanted me back; however, I was sad that I had not been there.

In my last period (social studies) class, it was an adventure as usual. Today’s adventure started off with a student asking me, “What are you looking at?” when he saw me looking at him. I was like, “what?” And asked him to repeat what he said—he then repeated it. “Step outside,” I said immediately.

We had a conversation, and then we returned to the classroom. Later, on we had to leave again—then he decided he wanted to play a game of tag. That is, he wanted to run around the school have me chase him. While he ran, I walked at a fast pace and called out to the hall monitors to catch him. He finally ran out of breath, and I took him down to talk to my department head. I called his mom after school and set up a parent conference. I hope it helps.

I had a talk with another student after school. It was the one who jumped at me the other day. It was a good discussion, and I can see that he really wants to work on his behavior. I told him I do not expect him to be perfect, but that I want to see steady improvement each day. I know that it won’t be easy, but I’m optimistic that we will get some good work done together.