ODR Outlook

Archive for September, 2010

my little JP

Back during my internship the supervising teachers would repeat it all the time. “Every class has one”. By “one” they mean disobedient, or stinky, or bad, or whatever you want to call it. They would warm me often that mine would come. They would say that it is inevitable. Now I have my first class. I waited on the first day to watch “the one” come in. I didn’t know what to expect. Would he/she be loud, annoying, ADD, stinky… I thought my “one” had arrived when JP came in and cried the whole first day. But he is in the process of getting student of the month for the first month of school for his first year of school! I thought it would be him, but God has turned my attitude of annoyance into love and he has improved so much. So I’m not sure if it’s just my class, or my year, or my attitude. But my class doesn’t have, you know….”the one”…. I love each of my students and they are all unique. They each have their own challenges, and some have more than others, but none of them stick out in my head as “the one” who causes trouble…and I am very thankful.

“Teacher, you so white and I’m so dark? It’s not fair”

-”Isn’t it funny that you want to be white and I want to be dark?”

“You want to be dark! Why you want to be dark teacher?”

-”I’m a white person.”

“You are so white, you must be a ghost.”

My “brightest” student asked me, or should I say TOLD me, to tie his show. (My students were gathered around the bathroom and a 9th grader was also waiting by the bathroom.) Since I was feeling lazy, I told my student to ask the older student to tie his show instead of me. He looked at the older student and looked back at me and said, “but he doesn’t know how to tie his shoe.” I looked down at the 9th grader’s shoe and saw the stylish shoes were both purposely untied. My student is bright after all. He put two and two together