Ich werde überleben

Anyone who is learning a language on DuoLingo knows this feeling.  We are stalked by this Linguistic Strigiformes daily.  This is often accompanied by the message, "These reminders don't seam to be working. We'll stop sending them for now."  Know how long that is?  Like a day and a half.  

I'm learning German for the hell of it.  It's a part of my ancestry and I'm a nerd who likes to learn new things.  While I was out of work, I had more time to devote to this endeavor.  Now that I'm trying to rebuild this classroom I inherited, I haven't been as faithful to the owl.  I had a serious streak going for a while, but lost it.  And the bird is relentless about it.  Had I known I was going to be teaching in a school with such a large Hispanic population, I may have considered learning Spanish.  Maybe that will be the next language.  For now, I'm enjoying German quite a bit.  

Today in math when I asked my struggling third grade learners (two of which are ELL) how many toes they have, I was met with a series of incorrect answers.  When I asked how many foot fingers they have, they all knew there are 10.  You may use the terminology, foot fingers, if you wish.  I haven't patented that yet. 

Toes aside, we actually had a successful math rotation today.  I was quite proud of my para and myself.  For just meeting two weeks ago, we really gel as a team.  Her knowledge of the classroom and students from last year is a huge plus.

I had to have a hallway conversation with our newest student today. Any teacher will tell you, hallway talks are never good.  He is a Caucasian child in a classroom with 3 African-American students, and he harbors some ill will about their race.  Comments such as, "I hate Martin Luther King. I don't like African-Americans," are made on the daily.  I let him know that he doesn't have to like the people in his class, but I will not tolerate this sort of thing in my room.  That was met with, "Well you're not doing your job. They think they're better than me and you're not taking my side."  Sigh.  

Note, this child is on the autism spectrum so things need to be explained in a concrete way.  I told him, "If you keep saying these things and making them mad, they're going to beat the crap out of you. Is that what you're looking for?"  That seemed to get through. We're now working on how to ignore things we don't like.  It's a work in progress.

I really like this job. Seriously.