Index Cards first.
B.E.D. gave me one that said, "My brother's yahrtzeit was yesterday. Last night my someone tripped over my younger brother's feeding tube and pulled it out. He had to go to the hospital and he came home at 4 in the morning."
Wow.
S.G.L. gave me one that said, "I'm so excited for this new writing. I already wrote 120 words."
It's good to know she likes something. I wrote an encouraging remark on hers.
C.O. wrote a continuation to last week's card. "I'm not embarrassed of girls seeing me come over to you. I'm embarrassed of you!"
I wrote back, "You weren't embarrassed when I lived down the block!"
Hee Hee
Most girls asked me if I had enjoyed the high school play. To tell you the truth, it was a waste of a motzei shabbos. It was SO DUMB!!
M.R. cute as ever, wrote, "Did you enjoy the play? I didn't."
Yum!
G.S. wrote something borderline fresh, "If you want to know how to keep an idiot busy for hours, turn this card over." On the other side she had written the same thing.
I just wrote, "Very cute!" Even though I would've loved to kill her. J/K
T.K. wrote "I'm so excited for the biography project."
I knew for a fact that she was being sarcastic, so I asked her if she was sarcastic, where were her quotation marks. (We just finished learning about them.)
I taught the girls today about the Committee of correspondence and I was trying to explain to them why it was so effective at spreading the feelings in the colonies.
the girls weren't getting it, so I taught them the "smile game."
I made them all stop smiling and I was the only one who was allowed to smile. I them took the smile off my face and "threw" it to a girl in the class. She them "caught" the smile, showed it off, and threw it to someone else.
Well, that's the way it's supposed to work, but of course, the girls weren't very good at it, and they kept giggling out of turn.
I stopped the game and asked them why they were giggling if they didn't "have" the smile. T.K. (7a) told me it was because it was catchy.
She proved my point. Spirit is catchy. That's what the Committee of correspondence was.
Best spontaneous lesson I've ever given. I'm still smiling!
Later on, I tried to teach the kids what is what like in the colonies without tea. I had them imagine the Coca-Cola company going out of business.
The girls were really getting into it, and then I asked them what would happen if coffee beans were outlawed in this country. I meant for them to tell me what their parents would feel like, but C.O. yelled out, "Starbucks would go out of business!"
Big Problem. Starbucks' milk isn't certified as stringently as the milk that most people in this community drink, and therefore most girls didn't even know what Starbucks was.
I had to explain to them that Starbucks was a cafe chain that specialized in coffee. And I crossed my fingers and hoped it'd be the end of it.
But C.O. continued, "Yeah, I go there all the time, if you don't drink their milk, you can ask for soy milk. It's kosher."
I had to explain to the girls that it was not something most of them would drink, and C.O. finally shut up.
I was terrified that a kid was going to tell her mother about our lesson on Starbucks, and the mother would call the school.
I didn't need to get it from the principal, so I went over to her. I told her what had happened, and she saw it from my point of view (!). Now, if a mother calls, she'll know what happened and she might defend me. Yay!
Now, if you don't mind, I will go back to the teacher's room and go get my Starbucks Frappuchino. There's nothing like an iced coffee at the end of a long day.
