Thursday, November 09, 2006

10 freaking weeks

I've been on a roll recently with calling parents. Parent meetings have become my new best friend. Literally. Christiana (another TFA teacher) and I have the same students and we've been tag-teaming them for a couple of weeks to improve behavior. It's actually working. Today I hit my limit with one of my students, Gaby. Gaby is a sweet kid. I can't say I'm overly attached to her because she's basically never in my class. She is one of my two students who is perpetually late to my first hour class. I only have her for first hour every other day (the other day she is in Christina's first hour) and she is literally 20 minutes late every time I see her. She'd been telling me that her brother always dropped her off late. I found out today she's been lying. For 10 weeks. I called her mom in today and she said she'd been dropping her off early for breakfast every day. Seriously, for ten weeks this girl has been sneaking off somewhere to be with someone or do something instead of coming to class. I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm still frustrated at the ones who are getting under my radar. With Gaby, I honestly just had bigger fish to fry, couldn't reach her mom and had to use a translator since she speaks Spanish. It wasn't until now, when she's failing and stilllllllllll.... tardy that she finally got caught.

I'm still trying to figure out a suitable punishment. I'm thinking since she's been coming early to "eat breakfast" she can now come early to work in mine in Christina's classrooms. This way, she won't be confused when the bell rings because she'll already be in our classrooms.

We'll see what goes down with Gaby, but I have to say I've seen some major results with these conferences so far. Alejandro is on task and has stopped wearing bulky sweatshirts. Saul is doing his work, is helpful and respectful. Elsy and Isabel are still being total pains, but a bunch of kids have shaped up. I'm calling home to three more kids tonight.

Other than that, things are a little sketch as far as schedules go. I lost three kids to the GT switch, but two are still on my roster. I've yet to see them. I have no idea who the GT kids are. I also have some random girl on my roster who is in the other teacher's class. Weird. We haven't hired a teacher to replace Mallory. I'm worried about her kids. They're just not getting the support they need. They deserve better than that and it's really frustrating to see.

I've had two Jimmy free days since he cursed at his math teacher yesterday and never made it to my class yesterday. He was suspended today and will be in SRC tomorrow. I can't say I'm sorry. He was being a pain because he'd already read half our book. Now, by the time he gets back to class... we'll be caught up to him! Funny how that works.

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