singin' the grade 7 blues

[velvetpage]

Hello friends! I'm still not sure if I'll enjoy baring my soul online, but hey, it's worth a try. It's actually a weird concept, a diary that people not only can read, but are expected to read and even comment on.

I recently made one of those huge, life-changing, thirty-minute committments and joined Curves. After two weeks, I have slightly defined muscles I didn't know existed! So far it's good, but a bit lonely. I didn't join up with anyone, and I don't know anyone who goes there, so the only people I exchange greetings with are the staff who have learned my name. I should sign up my mother-in-law and get her to go with me sometimes. Of course, that begs the question: if she and I are both working out, who's got Elizabeth? Oh well. . . Daddy time it is!

The school year is winding down, and it can't end soon enough. I can't even imagine what I would do in a job where there was no lengthy break and complete emotional down-time periodically every year. How do people manage, working with the same personalities day in, day out for a decade? On the other hand, if I actually enjoyed my teaching assignment, I might feel differently. I don't like grade 7, but always before there have been a few redeeming kids in the class - the ones who are really great kids stuck in a horrible group dynamic. This time there are exactly two kids like that, and one of them has been sick for a week and a half. (Yes, I counted. There are some kids it's really difficult not to make into teachers' pets, and she's one of them.) Most of my class I really don't like. They're sneaky, pessimistic, complaining, spoiled, lazy, and listen to very irritating music. My room was trashed three days after I returned in March. Nothing was destroyed, but papers and books were strewn everywhere. A DVD I had rented for them on Tuesday was stolen before we even watched it. I have it on good authority it was taken and slipped into another kid's binder as a practical joke, and the other kid didn't find it until he went home that night. It was returned Wednesday, shortly after a wet kleenex placed on my chair got one of my little angels suspended for two days. Yesterday we were outside doing a drama lesson, and one of my kids climbed the fence behind the baseball diamond. When I realized what was happening, he was on the horizontal part that overhangs the plate. He also got sent home. What can I do with these kids when I can't even trust them to stay on the ground!?!

I feel better now. Hopefully next year I'll get a better job, at a different school, teaching a subject and grade I enjoy.

Comments

[wggthegnoll.livejournal.com]

I tend to use my LJ more to comment in other people's journals, but every once and a while it's nice to use as a soapbox. Nice to have you on my friend's list.

Oh, and I know the perfect solutions to those grade 7's. Kill them! Kill them all!! Bwhahaahahaha.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

I would like to express my support for the "kill all 7th graders" plan, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

If you can find a way to do that so nobody will figure out it's me, let me know. (Uh-oh. Now the RCMP could track this livejournal and figure out that I'd been planning it. . . oh well. I guess they'll grow out of it, and I won't be around to watch that painful process much longer. I'll let them live. Most of them.)

[kesmun.livejournal.com]

I have to endorse the "Kill them all" philosophy of dealing with seventh graders.

Well, actually, since most of them outgrow their seventh-gradedness, just lock them in a barrel and shove food in at regular intervals until they do grow out of it.

*Friended*

[mr-weasel.livejournal.com]

Hullo! *waves*

How do people manage, working with the same personalities day in, day out for a decade?

Faking insanity often helps...that and changing jobs occassionally to delude oneself into thinking things will be different at the new job.

Keeping one's eye firmly on a loftier goal than the next paycheque also helps.

See you! *waves*

[thebitterguy]

Keeping one's eye firmly on a loftier goal than the next paycheque also helps.

Au contraire, mon ami. If you huddle down and start counting pennies as the day goes by, you can make it. If you think "I could..." you end up killing LOTS of PEOPLE!

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

Brave! Seventh graders have to be the most awful age group there is in a school. I remember certain elements back in my Grade 7 class make my french teacher have a nervous breakdown and quit. I didn't blame her! There was one day that she asked everyone to hand in their textbooks, and several of the malcontents threw them. At her head. I hope your bunch is better than they were! I work with 4 to 6 year olds, but it's year round, and we all sigh with envy at the school holiday break ;)

My sister works at the Curves in Dundas! A lot of people seem to go at regular times, you may end up with an excercise buddy who goes at the same times you do.

grade 7's

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

My grade 7 class (that is, when I was a student) managed to run two music teachers right out of the school. The last was only there for about two months. I've been the grade 7 French teacher, and it's hell. More on that in a future journal. . . I have very specific ideas about the problem with French in this province.

Re: grade 7's

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

I'll be glad to hear them! I took French through to university, but there were several years in grade school where it was a boring wasteland. At least I could occupy myself with the storybooks assigned for the year, they were really good.

[kianir.livejournal.com]

Junior high is a war zone. (That was 7th, 8th, 9th grade where I lived.) My junior high wsa run efficiently and harshly, like a prison, and I can't imagine it any other way. We had two-minute passing periods, strict hall pass rules, burly janitors, and zero tolerance on fights (this was, for once, a good use of zero tolerance -- my 7th grade year, I remember all the blood spatters on the patio outside the cafeteria.) That whole three-year period is just Psychotic Hormone Imbalance Time.

Then high school was vastly superior. There were still cliques, vast immaturity, and kids with serious internal emotional problems, but at least people were in the post-puberty phase of having a little bit of mental balance and self-control. If I had to teach, that's where I'd be.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I've considered high school, but the thing is, I'm short. Shorter than a lot of my grade 7's, as a matter of fact. I liked grade 4 in large part because they still had to look up to me. Besides, a huge part of high school French is grade 9, because it's the only compulsory year, and that would be really bad until you'd had a few groups and word got around that you'd flunk anyone who didn't work their little butt off in your class. I don't want to go there.

[anidada.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I admire teachers tremendously for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the ability to put up with other people's children -- the factor which inevitably turns me off the idea of teaching at any grade level. But dealing with the newly-pubescent is a truly terrifying prospect (it's bad enough dealing with them on public transit, I can't imagine trying to get them to settle down and focus on schoolwork!). A lovely high-school drama teacher friend of mine once said that adolescents should just be turned loose until their hormones stop boiling over, and on some levels I agree (though the idea that they'd be wandering around with nothing to do during the day is rather scary, too). You're a brave lass, and I hope that you find something more rational for next year.

Working out is a smashing idea -- gotta build up those pipes so that you can intimidate the kids! ;D

(P.S. I friended you, of course. *grin*)

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

Hey - welcome aboard the lj train.

I have absolutely no useful advice to give about Grade 7s. I was so completely self-absorbed as a Grade 7 student that I would not be at all surprised to learn I had spent those years in a coma and dreamed everything and everyone I encountered - including the people I still know. I have, of course, avoided all Grade 7s scrupulously since then.

Still - I don't know many other people who like their jobs, so why should you have fun either ;)

Alex