Spring Fever


I'm linking up with Jen from Ramblings of a Suburban Mom this week for "Thursday Thoughts."  This is really no different from my normal ramblings, except maybe I'll get a wider audience.  :)


I'm not sure what it is about mid-February, but my students always start behaving like insane people.  It's like they suddenly realized they just had their long vacation for the year and spring break is a little while off.  As I'm already in a behavior school, this amplifies the situation a little bit.  Spring restlessness can turn into all out chaos.


Over the past couple of weeks, the TimeHop app (which I LOVE) has been reminding me of some of my annual spring insanity.  Since I haven't posted them all to Facebook, here's a small sampling.

-- The kid that got upset and threw a desk at me.  This one really doesn't require a lot of explaining.

-- The entire classroom full of students (about six kids total) that lost their indoor privileges for nearly 2 weeks because they kept acting like wild animals in the classroom.  They wouldn't sit down, do work, stop moving the furniture around, stop throwing things, you name it.  I finally got fed up and taught class outside for two weeks.  The tables were bolted to the ground.  They hated it.  (While it is February, it is also Las Vegas... so no complaints about cold winter weather)

--The kids that got bored and started smoking weed in class.

For what its worth, I have a very good principal and all of those kids had to deal with the consequences of their actions.  None of those situations were ignored.  I know the two kids smoking weed were arrested, as I believe was the desk thrower.  The group of "outside" students were eventually suspended for a few days after even having to sit outside for two weeks in February didn't calm them down.

This year is no exception...  I have one student that I've sent to the office EVERY SINGLE DAY this week.  Since he hasn't done anything overtly horrible, he hasn't been suspended yet.  Yet.  However, he was supposed to spend two days in In House Suspension (little room all to yourself to do nothing but homework).  The IHS monitor had to leave early today, so he was sent back to class for the last 2 periods of the day -- which ironically are the two periods where he gets into the most trouble.  He barely made it 5 minutes into my class before he stood up next to his desk and started doing impressions of all of his teachers.  Not flattering, mind you.  I told him to stop, as he was being unkind and inappropriate.  Rather than do so, he amped it up.  <sigh>

But that's no big deal.  That's kids 101.  The most mind blowing thing that happened this week was the student that decided to urinate in the classroom.  I've heard some conflicting stories about this, so I'm not totally sure which one is true.  However, everyone (both adults and students) agrees the kid was upset because he wasn't allowed to use the restroom.  He'd just come in from lunch and his teacher told him to wait a few minutes so she could get class started.  The kid goes up to her in the front of the room and asks again. At that point, the story diverges somewhat:  some say he peed on her podium, others say he peed on her leg.  Either way, the kid opened up his pants and peed in the classroom & the teacher went home to change her clothes.  To her credit, she came straight back to school and taught the next period.  I would have been out of there so fast....


What can I say?  It's times like this that I understand why people used to think our feelings and behaviors were controlled by the seasons.

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