Why Fifth Graders Are Hazardous to Your Health

I've taught for a long time now. By my count I have led almost 12,000 class periods on one topic or another. You would think that it would be easy by now.

In some ways, it is. I am not challenged at all by the basic premises of teaching. There exists some truth which I wish to impart to the students. There also exist a variety of methods by which I can get said truth into the students. For the most part, I am successful.

So the fifth graders (all of them together) came in for their class today. I divided them up into teams for an opening game, and it went quite well. Then there were a few kids who had to retake a vocab quiz because of a mistake that I (not they) made last week. So I sent them out to the hallway to accomplish this feat. While they were quizzing, we inside were going to correct lesson 6 in their worktexts. Six of the students volunteered to correct two books at the same time. This went all right until the rest of the 5th graders began finishing their quizzes and trickled back into the classroom. Not wanting them to feel left out, I tried to redistribute books to correct as they continued to return. Soon this became difficult to manage. We didn't finish correcting until four minutes before the class hour ended. This did not give us enough time to put scores into the computer before they went back to class or practice any real skills.

So I sent back the 5th graders to their homerooms, having told them to leave their texts out on the tops of the desks. Of course I had another class coming in immediately who helped me get the stuff managed, but not until I had wasted ten minutes of their class time in doing so.

But the simple truth is, you just cannot rush a group of 25 fifth graders any faster than they happen to go. Though they are well behaved and basically cooperative, they are fifth graders. And that's that.

We are in rehearsal with the play. I had fun picking on one of my leads today who backed her parents' van into her friend's parents' Jetta on Friday night. Her little brother ratted her out during Latin 7 this morning. I spect that she will kill him before tomorrow.

Yes, we do academics at Schaeffer also. I knew you were going to ask.

All right, I saw the cutest thing this morning. We have a new teacher this year who is in his 40s (I assume) and absolutely immense - not fat - just extremely large. Besides lit and biology, he teaches kindergarten PE. As he and the kindergarteners were heading outside, I heard one little girl say to him in the coyest voice, "Do you notice anything different about me this morning?"

He replied, asking her if her headband was new.

I didn't hear the end of the story, since they went outside, but I knew that she was delighted with the attention.