3/21/18

I officially have an LDS email account! Meaning that my call has been assigned and everything actually worked out and I’ll be opening it on Sunday as planned!

There are times where I love working at the elementary school, and times where kids do or say things that I almost can’t take. Today had a little of both.

The good: I work a lot with a third grader named Danniel (yes it is spelled with two n’s) and he has trouble concentrating and will often end up missing the beginning of lessons because he has to be at speech therapy. Today I was working with him on using visuals to represent elapsed time. (i.e. a triangle represents an hour passing whereas another shape represents blocks of time less than an hour)  He was having a bit of a tough time at first. He kept adding minutes in the hours place or just changing the hour to however many minutes he added at first. So I wrote on the whiteboard 2:30 and then drew a line over the colon and showed him that the first section is hours and the second is minutes. I explained that you can’t add hours to the minute numbers and vice versa because they’re different units. And then it totally clicked for him, I could see it. After he finished a problem by himself and got it right I told him he was basically a pro. The last problem was different and a lot harder than the others so I warned him that it wouldn’t be as easy. He just waved it off and said, “It’s okay, I’m a pro, remember? So I got this!” It honestly made me so happy. Usually when he comes across a hard problem he’ll get frustrated and not want to do it anymore. But he was so confident and all it took was one sentence from me. These are the things that make me so glad that I work there.

The not so good: I’ve gotten stuck with recess duty. It’s not too bad aside from having to discipline kids who act out or deal with slightly scraped up kids who are crying and insisting that they should see the nurse. (I send them every time because first aid and crying children are outside my jurisdiction.) Usually I just have to tell kids not to hog the swing sets or not to kick balls as far as they can because they’re upset they’re out of the game of Speed they were playing. But today is the worst I’ve had it so far. I was actually angry. I had a kid come up to me and let me know that there was a boy calling people “a dumb piece of s***” which is bad enough. But then he informed me that this kid was also picking on a boy with autism and calling him a psycho. Oh man did I chew this kid out. He tried to give sassy remarks back which honestly just ticked me off even more. I told him it was rude and completely insensitive to call people names, ESPECIALLY calling this boy with autism a psycho. This jerk had the nerve to say “Well that’s what he is.” I’m not 100% sure I have the authority to do this but I told the kid, “I don’t care if you think that, keep it to yourself. If it happens again you’re going to the principals office.” So being the “cool” kid he is he says, “I’ve already been suspended before.” But my comeback game was strong today so I said, “Good. Then you’ll know what to do.” I turned to the boy that let me know what was going on and said, “If this happens again let me know.” And then I walked away. I’m still boiling inside just thinking about it. Maybe I should have sent him to the office right then. It’s probably better this way though, now I have it set in place to send him the next time he does something like that.