Warpath

Last Tuesday, Mr. B was not having it. Your parents won't pick up the phone? Phone disconnected? Your behavior atrocious? I was sufficiently aggravated after school that, after making several phone calls home, I stopped by the houses of a few children. At the first house, several other kids went rolling by on bikes while I stood in the middle of the street with my behavior tracker and gradebook, breaking it down for one particular girl's father. The looks on their faces made it worthwhile; one kid almost crashed, and another asked in a slightly petrified voice, "Are you coming to my house?"

To which I calmly replied, "Are you going to start listening in my class?"

And the pack of kids all tore out of there on their bikes, presuambly to beg their parents to go out for dinner that night. That definitely gave me some cred with the other kids.

I went back to the school, made more phone calls, and worked on lesson planning. I went to make one last phone call, and realized this particular child had given me a wrong number. This annoyed me enough that I looked up her address, threw my things in the car, and drove the few hundred feet to her house. Try and dupe Mr. B when you live on the same block? Bad call.

I've also started stacking up kids for lunch detention for weeks.

And I think it's paying dividends--yesterday, 7 of my 8 classes ran like clockwork. It was damn nice. The lesson helped, but so did the pacification of several upstarts. It didn't hit me until lunch--I hadn't written anyone up! Go me :-)