You can either laugh or cry...

...and I'm choosing to laugh.

I have a little boy in my whose family is from Alabama. This morning, he's sharing this story with all of us about a time when he had "black letter day," or a day when something bad unexpectedly happens. He's just talkingtalkingtalking and we're all doing our best to practice our good listening skills when he says...

...So then we stayed there until the hell stopped.

An entire classroom of eyes swung to me, looking for my reaction. Fortunately, nobody said anything, just waited for my reaction. The rest of the conversation went like this:

Me: I'm sorry, you had to wait until what stopped??
Boy: Hell. You know, the hard balls that were hitting the car.
Me: Oh! Hail. Okay, you were saying....

And on he went. The rest of the kids released nervous relieved laughs.

This same child threw a sobbing fit an hour later when I wouldn't accept "I don't know" as responses to a chart asking him to make 5 predictions for the novel we're reading. He threw his pencil to the ceiling, cried "But I don't like to do work!" and proceeded to throw himself on his desk and sob. As this is an almost daily occurrence, I reprimanded him for throwing his pencil...and then let himself cry himself into heaves. He stopped eventually. I'm not joking when I say that he cries every single day, at least once. At home, this gets him out of work. At school, it doesn't get him anything. So he cries every day and we stand firm that when he's done he can continue his work. The other kids are so used to it by now, that they don't even blink or bother to tell me that he's crying again.

Then, during lunch, a coworker friend told me she had to speak to me. Our schoolwide strategy for the month of October was predicting. All of us, from K-5th grade, focused on this reading strategy throughout the month of October. At the end of the rally, each grade level came up with a cheer and we had a sort of mini pep rally in the cafeteria during lunch. My kids came up with a cheer and stomp routine, then taught it to the other 3 homerooms, and all 80-some kids performed it together yesterday. They were awesome! You could hear them, in sync, at the other end of the building. So cool. They're cheer contained the phrase "Practice gives students success!"

Afterwards, one very concerned 3rd grader approached my coworker:


Boy: Mrs. D! Those 4th graders were saying bad things!
Mrs. D: Really? I was there and I didn't hear anything bad. Are you sure you heard right?
Boy: Yes! Are they going to ALL get in trouble?
Mrs. D: Well, what exactly did you hear them say?
Boy (in now very hushed tones): They kept saying, "Practice gives students some SEX!!"

She corrected him, but then immediately shared his interpretation with any staff member who would listen.


I can honestly say, I'm never bored.