Absolutely Normal Chaos (yeah its the name of a book)

ok... we all arrived to tutor around the same time today. four of us... and one of the other girls comes back from the room and tells us all that Mrs. Taylor is not in and the kids have all been split up around the school until she gets there around 11. So we decide to have the kids meet us at the office so that we can still meet with them for the day. The principal had the list of all the classrooms where the kids were, so she had the secreteries call them down. The lady from the VIPS program said she would meet with her kid on Friday so she left... about 2 minutes later her reading buddy came to the office... the poor thing was so confused... Norbit was absent today... so i decided to take the VIPS lady's buddy. Once we had all of our buddies, we were put in a classroom to work. We are not supposed to be left unattended with students, but the principal told us that if we wanted we could keep the door open and teachers would check on us when they walked down the hallway, which they did frequently... it was basically no different then any other day... or so we thought... the kids were absolutely nuts... they were pulled out of these classes... my buddy for the day, Kwami, was placed in a 6th grade classroom for the morning, hes in second grade. he was very quiet at first, which is understandable because it was a very confusing morning, and it didnt help that i was very unprepared for his skill level. He moved much quicker than Norbit and he was on a much more advanced reading level. he quickly became bored with my activities and we spent time going over books about science, which was really cool. he was very interested in math, so we worked on his times tables..... he can multiply through the 5's, most of the 6's, and some of the 7's and 8's... it was crazy... he became very animated and chatty once we struck an interest. he is extremely intelligent, and he was very let down that his tutor left (because of course miss latte had the brilliance to say outloud "oh... i feel so bad... she left...."). i made up the excuse that she had errands to run and that she told me to tell him that she promised she would see him on friday, he seemed much better after that. the other kids were not so well behaved. Diane had to tell her buddy repeatedly that if she did not do her work she was going back to class... Miss Latte's buddy was off the wall.... and the fourth girls buddy was on the cranky side... with their head teacher not in the building they were a whole different set of kids.... there was no control. we even walked them back to their other classrooms because we didn't trust them to not wander off. Kwami walked into the wrong classroom, and when he finally found the right door, he was in a class with kids who could have taken me on with a good fight.... it was nuts... poor little quiet kwami with the big scary kids. but yeah... he didnt seem intimidated.... he just bounced inside and sat down. lots of confusion today.... hope friday is better....

Pumpkin Muffin Pandemonium!!!

yeah so... instead of the kids doing word wizards this morning, mrs. taylor decided that they were going to bake pumpkin muffins.... it was a really good idea, and we figured it would be a lot of fun to help the kids out... what made it really amusing is that technically baking is not allowed in Fortes because the people in charge believe it takes away from reading and writing... but hell why not...

the kids with reading buddies got to go first, so of course the five kids who were privileged were more excited then anything ive ever seen, Norbit felt he needed to shoot me a huge smile and a big thumbs up... then they went to wash their hands (twice) and get the ingredients off the table... Norbit was in charge of adding the three spoons of oil... the worst episode was when Akasha tried to crack the egg, she picked it up to see if it had cracked and half of the egg white fell out on her shirt and on the floor. she managed to save the yoke though... and the batter looked like it was fine... they got to spoon it out into little ceramic pots to be baked in the cafeteria oven.

well that set the kids off. diane and i had volunteered to take on Josiah as well today because his reading buddy wasn't going to be there. you would have thought he would behaved for us, not the case... if anything he was even more off the wall. there was definately jealousy between Norbit and Akasha, at one point Akasha said to Josiah that Diane was her reading buddy, not his... much possessiveness here. Norbit and Josiah also do not play well together when they are playing games. Competition is crazy. A few times I had to grab the game pieces and have Norbit explain to me why i had stopped the game. He knew he was misbehaving, Josiah didn't care. Josiah just seemed to want to get Norbit wound up.

We're gonna clap our crazies out...... orrrr not....

holy god... maybe todays tutoring session reflected my conflict that i am currently having versus my high school friends, but today just felt absolutely insane!!! the kids were so rambunctious that the teacher actually had to come out and tell them to calm down because the classes around us were being disturbed. a few times i had to tell Norbit he needed to calm down or he would be returning to class. as promised we didnt write today much to his relief, and i had him read to me instead. also we worked on second grade candy land for the first time. he handled those words better than he handled the first grade words... it was rather amusing... we also attempted to work on the "nonsense words fluency" matching game that we were given... only problem being the kids could see right through the copies of the cards and could find the matches wayyyy too easily. so i have to fix that today after im done blogging...

it was also rather amusing that the infamous miss latte was talking to another of the girls in the program, saying that their 15 hours were done, so they were done.... and i felt i should inform them that if they read their packets carefully, the reading buddies program was 25 hours of community serice... to which she responded with "well you must be confused, the school of ed is 25 hours..." like i dont know what im talking about.... so of course she checked her packet, and VOILA!!! 25 HOURS!!! dumb blond... but instead of doing the right thing and sticking with it with her reading buddy, she instead says to the other girl "do you think we could finish our hours somewhere else?" like what the hell are they here for?? obviously they are not here to help the students, they are here to help themselves, which i find truly disgusting... if you dont want to help kids learn, then why the hell are you in an education program??? Diane and I are the only ones who don't run out the door on our buddies after our time is up, we hang around to talk to mrs taylor so that we can let her know the areas that we can see improvement in, and also to get feedback on how they are improving in class... we are also (most likely) the only ones who are genuinely interested in staying on after our 25 hours are done so that we can continue to help our buddies... we have bonds with them... obviously better ones then the other tutors have... im sorry.... im very aggravated with crap like this... its absolutely rediculous.... and if you havent seen this about me before... dang... you gotta start reading more!!!

Goodness Gasseous....

ok so let me just start with the fact that my reading buddy did nothing but fart while he did his work today.... ok now that that is out of my system... i can talk about everything else...

i was very pleased when i came in today and Norbit had the "Word Watcher" symbol next to his name and another word on the board... which basically means hes used 6 words!!! i was so excited!!! then the kids did this thing where the teacher put on a cd with sing-a-long songs for a big book... but the song was weird... it was called "Loud Blows the Wind", sung to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel". Basically the task was to identify all of the long "o" sounds in the book, given that they had to find the "oa" and "ow" sounds.

Once we got the reading buddies outside, I found that Norbit was in a very good mood, and he was wide awake, which was a big change from last week when he was constantly tired. We did the cube activity again, and because the paper cube had withstood two uses, i promised him he could crush the cube when we were done. He really must have wanted to stomp on the cube cuz he did his assignment in under 5 minutes.... and i told him to take his time. After he did his words out and wrote his sentances, we worked on the word packet thing... he aced A21 so we moved onto A22 right away. he stumbled a few times but i think it was more because he wanted to move onto another activity... stay on one thing too long and he gets bored...

i also told him that if he aced all the words in the first grade candy land (and didnt cheat) that we would attempt to do the second grade candy land on friday... he didnt cheat for the first game and tried so hard not to cheat on the second game that i let him cheat on the third game... by that time we had 5 minutes left so we just played with the colors anyway.

don't know what else there is to say.... i had a comment about something that happened in class but i didnt get a chance to write it down before going with our buddies, and now ive forgotten... yeah... so that didnt work....

A missed post

Yesterday was sorta crazy in that I went from tutoring to work to bowling... and when I got home at 11:30 I forgot to post on my blog... but I'll do it now I suppose. The classroom observation went well.... they were doing their "word wizard" words, and I was very excited that Norbit had four words on the board!!!! He got two more from the time I last saw him... which is awesome. The class then read a book and made a lost of the long e words that they could find... under the categories of "ee" and "ea"... they did really well, but some of them took the easy way out and used "leaves" after someone had already put "leave" and just argued that "leave" did not have an s on the end. It was rather amusing actually. Then the kids were given a word search to do on veterans day... which was really distracting for the tutors because the kids only wanted to do that... it was like a game to them.

The kids were absolutely evil... we don't know if it was because they have a long weekend, or what the deal was... but everybody seemed to be catching flack from the kids.... I got a lot of "I don't want to do that"... and it wasn't because Norbit was tired today... he was wide awake... one of the other kids Josaiah.... (again, not a real name but I couldn't think of any more from the movie...) was so hyper he was like that freakin' crazy squirrel in "Over the Hedge"..... it was a little bit like this.... sodoyouwantmetogetyouatimercuziknowwheretheyareandillgetoneandyoucanhavethisblueoneandhereillshowyouhowtoworkitohyouhavecoloredpencislwowcaniborrowonecanicanicani???
yeah it was a little like that.
I had to make Norbit understand that for me to help him with his word search we had to get our own work done first..... which he did as fast as he could lol..... and he did it correctly too which was awesome. I had him read to me today... and he wasn't very fluent, he sounded very robotic and unsure. Something we will have to work on... its funny, they call it the Reading Buddy program, but it should be more like writing buddies... we're more encouraged to help them with their spelling and their writing of words... it was difficult.
We returned them to class after and Diane and I came to the conclusion that the reason that Friday's are so tough for us is because there are at least 6 tutors out in the hallway at a time... on Wednesdays there are only three... with so many kids and tutors out there, the mood changes from one to where they want to learn, to one where all they care about is the fact that they are all out there with friends. It is good to know that they like us coming to see them though... one kid walking down the hallway stopped to make fun of his younger brother who has a reading buddy, and Diane's buddy countered with "Yeah, well do YOU have a reading buddy? huh? tell me... I didn't think so..." it was really kind of funny to see her defend herself and the rest of us like that... it lets us know they care.

Boys Will Be Boys

Norbit was moody, he didn't want to do much and he kept insisting that he was tired. He has now reached the point where he sees me enter the classroom and he makes sure he says hi. We were observing the kids while they did their word wizard section of class... apparently they have modified the thing so that kids have a little more confidence. Norbit had a word on the board when I got there and he added another one once they had gotten started. I decided to try to encourage him to use some of his new words, and the word we chose for him to work on is "wonder"... I told him that I hoped that he would have that word on the board by the next time I came to visit. He spent a lot of time complaining so we did not get much done today, also we started work late because of an incident in the classroom...
Mrs. Taylor said something today that made me think a bit... she told the kids that the classroom "was not a democracy, it was a dictatorship" and explained what each meant... but she used it in reference to the Word Wizard thing, because some kids do not enjoy wearing the hat or the badge when they become Word Wizard. Instead of finding something else to do with the kids to make them comfortable it was basically, you're doing this whether you like it or not... there is a power there that I feel was being slightly misused... Mrs. Taylor is very nice and insightful... but that comment just irked me a bit. I feel that to force a child to do something like that is to degrade the child... and it might even be a humliating experiance for them... if this happened to me as a young child I would probably not be confident with answering questions put towards me because I would be embarrassed in the end.

Missing My Buddy :(

ok so I went to tutor Norbit today... and... he wasn't there... i'm suspecting too much candy lol...
so instead I spent my hour and a half observing and giving aid to Diane and her reading buddy Cinderella (obviously, a name change).
This of course was after observing the class, it took me seconds to realize my buddy wasn't there... and one of the other boys was trying to whisper it to me subtley when Mrs. Taylor wasn't looking. I happened to come in during the crowning of the "Word Wizard", so I took a look at the board of words that kids have used in sentances... Norbit is the only child who does not have any words at all.... that concerns me... the words are not difficult... but based on what I've seen he's probably just not paying attention. After one of the other girls had been given the wizard hat to wear for the day, the class went over the list of "rules" they had come up with with Mrs. George the reading coach... basically stating they they don't talk over each other, they don't copy each other, and they're polite when adding thier own information. Surprisingly this went very well with them until they were told to turn to the kids sitting next to them and make a prediction about what was going to happen in the book. They were only given a few minutes, but only a small fraction of that time was actually spent talking about the topic, other things popped up here there and everywhere in their conversations. They also get very confused about he concept of "shaving off thier hair"... which was one of thier stories revolved around... instead they kept saying that the main character "shaved off her head". That was interesting...
When observing Cinderella and Diane, I noticed many differences and similarities between teaching styles and learning styles, as compared to Norbit and myself. Diane tries to help Cinderella remember things by using memorable phrases, like when I told Norbit there were no "kows" in his "costume" which he remembered lol... Cinderella, unlike Norbit, was easily distracted by the kids being sent out of various classes for misbehaviour... especially once one of them started shouting "I'm the chosen one!"... hmm... too much Star Wars perhaps?
They are alike in the fact that instead of spreading out their written ideas and words onto seperate lines, they try to fit everything on the line they start with, even if they have to squash it all together. It was also hard for me to observe, especially because Cinderella wanted me to interact with them, Diane didn't mind, we get along really well, and we all communicate when we're all in the hallway tutoring. The kids all see us come in while they are doing circle time and they say hi to every tutor that they get along with... even if they're not thier own...
Kids are nicer about copying each others phrases and thoughts then they were when I was in school. If you stole another kids idea, after they had already stated it you would have gotten "that was my idea stupid!"... these kids just agree with each other... even when Nemo (another chosen name) copied Cinderella to say that his birthday is tommorow... but he couldn't tell us what tommorow was, and when asked if his birthday was in November he answered no. Cinderella could, so yes it probably is her birthday. I did enjoy watching Diane and Cinderella working together today, it gave me that chance to compare how the kids work... I really do hope that my buddy feels better on Wednesday....