Week 14

This week at Summit went better than last week because I knew exactly what to expect and I become more bold in my actions. I had one student actually approach with his body only about an inch from mine and try to talk down to me and I was a bit thrown off by that. I didn't back down though. The good news is I didn't make any students cry! The students worked on and finished their letters Monday through Wednesday. Today they started writing a story to make a movie. It is pretty cool that our W210 class came up with an idea that Lynda liked enough to continue even after we stopped teaching.

Yesterday one of the students decided she did not like her letter and that she wanted to start over with only about 30 minutes left. I offered to type for her and after some giggling she said ok. She started something like this - "What up mom? Today in school we started talking about something gross. I have a permission slip you have to sign. We talked about puberty. We also talked about..." and then she stopped. She didn't want to say the words. So, she asked me to guess what else they talked about. Umm... no way! I did NOT want to be the person to be introducing new words to this student if all they learned about was puberty and I guessed something like sex. She showed me the list of words though on the permission slip and although sex was not one of them, sexually transmitted diseases and abstinence were on the sheet. lol, I guess I kind of forgot how awkward it was back in 4th grade when we all learned about those things in school. Poor girl.

Today the stories were going well. I worked with the same student as last week for most of the class until she was adament that I was making her story bad so I left. Then she complained for about 5 minutes because nobody was helping her. I really wish I knew what was wrong with these students. I suppose I should check out the links Anne sent me sometime after this video for the class is done (I'm bitter about this movie, but that will be for a different journal). After I left that girl, I went and talked to four girls in the corner. I gave praise to the two that were working and tried to help keep the other two off of the Internet. Eventually they switched computers and I was able to talk one of them back into working (I told her once she finished her 3rd paragraph she could stop) but the other just wouldn't work. The worst part though is that the two girls were abusing another classmate. The girl who refused to work specifically said in her story that her and her friends did not like the loser ----. Then at one point a group of girls were chanting "prep" over and over again, in reference to the same girl they called a loser in the story. Girl bullying sucks. If there is a physical fight (as there was today between the girl being bullied and one of the bullies) someone can always stand between the two students, especially at the elementary school age, but what do you do about verbal abuse? I can't make the girls stop talking. Once they moved to the other side of the room the bullying slowed down, but it only started again (and appeared to spread) once the group gathered to go to the bus. I know there have been studies done on female bullying (the verbal and psychological abuse attack more than the physical abuse approach) because I've read them before but I don't recall reading any solutions in the articles.

I was shocked today by a few students who weren't misbehaving. One boy sat down immediately and wrote a story. It was only about 1/3 of a page long and it ended abruptly but he typed it up quickly. I talked with him and he said that this wasn't even half of one chapter of a book he had written at home. Writing at home! Isn't that cool? There was another girl who I didn't even know was in the group. She was so quiet and worked so hard that I never even notice until she asked me how to save and I saw she was done. I was impressed with that too. The third girl who was well behaved frightened me slightly. She was working hard and I went to check up on her because things looked a little strange in her story. The problem was that this girl's spelling and grammar was SO horrible that the story no longer looked like anything except a scrambled mess of letters. afraid was a frade, casper was caper, friend was frend, and those are the ones closest to the real words. When I sat down to read her letter, I had NO idea what she had written. I had to ask her to read it to me. I left her with the spelling mistakes though. I figured that as long as she knew what she wrote, our jobs there were not to fix her spelling and grammar mistakes. We are there to help her create a story and such and creating a story is not dependent on being able to have other people read what you write, at least in the case of you making a movie. About 10 minutes later the director had fixed all the spelling mistakes. Oh well.