I'll punch you in the head

The alarm clock buzzed every ten minutes for an hour before it turned off. I still laid under my blankets desperately hiding from the cold reality of a winter Monday morning, the first day of my spring semester classes. The cats ran across the bed and over me, in their best efforts to wake me up for their breakfast. My alarm began its attempts at waking me up at six, but I refused to leave my warm cocoon until seven twenty. I was dreading this day since Friday. I was in for several hours of mind numbing classes after a full day of work. I was less than looking forward to it.

I was rushing to work because I was running late, due to my late waking up. There are things that you never realize that will throw off your entire morning and cause your children to throw a fit. I burned a new morning meeting cd, a short and sweet version. Honestly, morning meeting had gotten out of hand. We could go without two color songs or two number songs, one is quite enough. There is not enough time in the day to waste it with that nonsense. Due to this and the current cd skipping, I burned a new cd. I ordered the songs, the same as it had been, or atleast I thought so. I began playing the cd, first it started with the wrong song and then it was skipping. This just set off half of my kids. Eric was basically infuriated that the songs were out of order and then to top that, now it was skipping. How could I?

I quickly tried to fix the cd, but remembered I had it as a play list on my ipod. I used that instead, knowing that it would not skip despite the lack of order. Which I realized happened because I never named the tracks correctly is why they are all mixed up. After this meltdown, we attempted to move one with our schedules.

Shortly after, one students, well call him Jarod decided that he felt like it was about time for him to have his own personal meltdown. Jarod will have his daily bouts of flipping out. He does the most amazing gymnastics around and about the room, as he screams and cries over something seemingly ridiculous. For example, for the longest time the morning meeting book were on rings. A simple, silver ring held the book together. For weeks, every morning he would fuss over these books, finding something about turning the page so frustrating that he would usually throw the book across the room and toss his entire body onto the ground. If only I was slightly overestimating. Today, he was throwing a hissy fit filled with his usually whining during our literacy lesson.

After a few moments of his delightfulness, I banished him to the desk. In my class, if you cannot follow rules during the group activity you can move to your desk and finish your work alone. In my two by four foot room, his desk is about a foot and half away but it does the trick most of the time. Even when the kids act as if they'd don't want any part of the activity, it kills them to be removed. However, Jarod will either quickly get over it and be ready to return or will continue his fit for the entire morning. Luckily for me, he decided this would be a long morning. He lay on the floor as pair "sit down" with a visual prompt, a picture of a student sitting which reads "sit down." We continue this while he is screaming, "stop yelling or I'll punch you in the head." An important side note, one that I shared with Jarod is that he was the only one screaming. I try to get him to sit down for about fifteen long minutes. He refuses, is incoherently screaming and yelling. At this time, the paraprofessionals have taken over feeling and spelling bingo.

Time continued and he calmed down, I moved him to an area where he could continue to calm down and we could continue our activity. Two of my three paraprofessionals went to lunch and it was me and one other. Jamie of course had to go to the bathroom, so my last and final paraprofessional took him. I was teaching my kids about where they live, in New York City and what is special about living here with a chart sized graphic organizer. As we were doing this, Jarod decided he still had more in him. He was now running around the room, screaming. I kept sending him back to the seat and he kept coming back. Now, I am trying to run a lesson while getting up every minute to take Jarod back to his seat, all while he is screaming. I sat between Jarod and the rest of the class, so I could monitor him while trying to complete the lesson. I was spelling out the words for the Eric who was writing on the board for me, when Jarod is screaming behind me. I turn around to find he has removed his shoes and is attempting to scale a cabinet. What I want to ask him, is "seriously, what are you doing?"

Finally the my savior, the paraprofessional returned to be the monitor of Jarod so I could continue the lesson. I returned to the group at the kidney table. Now, they were using the graphic organizer to respond to a letter I had written them. As part of our Pen Pal program, I have them practice writing letters back forth to me. While doing this, Zach gets up and take Jermeys pencil because he needs an eraser and Zach flies at him and grabs him. I quickly dissolved that. All over an eraser, Zach is willing to tackle him to the ground. Then Jermey is being fresh and telling me how he doesn't want to do this. The Tommy smacks his hand. Sigh. Sometimes I just can't help but laughing, like really??? What are you doing? Nothing is simple. Nothing. After, I called chaos to order, we completed our work successful and went to lunch.

The amount of effort it takes to get throw one lesson is amazing. Sometimes I don't know how I make it through.


BTW: these are not the actual names of my studets, but random names I assign to them in order to tell the sotry of my day.