Must be the rain

After several months of hot, hot weather, a still-hasn't-ended rainstorm started late Friday night. This brought the temperatures way down and made things a lot wetter. It also maybe (?) curbed some behavior problems I've been having.

Actually, I think it has a bit more to do with some other things I've been implementing. I've started a table competition, where each table (there are 6) starts with 10 tally marks on the board at the beginning of the day, and they lose marks through bad behavior, not showing work, etc, and they gain marks through participation, doing homework, etc. The table with the most tally marks at the end of the day gets an extra blue ticket per person.

My second class is slowly but surely shaping up. There are still a few talkers and kids who don't pay attention. But where it had been around 18 out of 22, now it's down to around 5 out of 22.

Academics is a slightly different story. I was not pleased at all with the scores on the test that the kids took last Friday. It was not a hard test at all, covering place value, number patterns, and number words. But out of 44 kids, only 4 got a perfect score, while 13 scored 50 or below. Most of the incorrect answers were made due to really really stupid mistakes. (Of course, I say "silly" mistakes in class -- but they are stupid mistakes like not adding correctly, or writing the wrong number down to add).

Oh well, I'll take what I can get and keep plowing the road ahead...

I need galoshes

For anyone outside of the greater Dallas area this morning, we received roughly 3 feet of rain between 7:15 and 7:45. This was the time that Anonymous Joe and I were out doing our morning crosswalk duty. We both had rain slickers on, but they didn't do much other than get wet, then soaked, then permeable.

I didn't take an umbrella outside because there was also a whole lot of thunder and lightning, and I didn't want to be holding my giant electricity rod up as a target. As a side note, I walked out with Ed U Cater at the end of the day, and he suggested that perhaps electrocution would have been a better alternative to the school day. I'm thinking Ed didn't have a very good day...

Anyway, as you might have guessed, I entered the school building looking and feeling as though I had jumped into a swimming pool. Pants, shirt sleeves, and hair dry quickly enough, but what was really bad was that my shoes and socks were drenched. My feet were not making pleasant sounds on the way down to my classroom.

As soon as I had the kids started on an exercise, I took off my shoes and socks and very hopefully placed them on my A/C vent. Where was all that oppressive heat from 2 months ago now that I actually needed it?? Alas, it was just cold air coming out, and that unfortunately doesn't dry things nearly as well.

So I walked around my room barefooted for the first hour. Then it occurred to me that kids go to the clinic for new socks and pants all the time! So I sent a student down to ask if they had any socks that I could have. Sure enough, they did! Nice, warm, dry socks.

Nothing much I could do about my shoes, so I put them back on. They were still wet, but at least with dry socks, I didn't feel like my toes were going to rot off.

Oh, and did I mention that I stopped a baby possum from entering the school this morning? When it was quickly apparent that I would get soaked outside, I ran back in to put my phone in the office. When I went back out through the main doors, something was scurrying towards me, and it wasn't a student!

I thought it was a mouse at first, but it had that weird, white triangular head and grey body, and it was running right at the door. I bravely wielded my STOP sign to hold it off. And I don't mean that I held it up and commanded it to stop. I whacked the darn thing once and then knocked it several feet away. It ran down into the flower bed and disappeared from sight. No idea what happened to it afterwards.


Today was the last review day before TAKS. We didn't do a whole lot other than go over homework, practice Volume one more time, and take it easy. I figure, if they don't know everything by now, they're not going to learn it today.

At the end of each class session, I told the kids that I was rooting for them and wanted them to do their very best, and that I would give them a high five like I normally do, or a hug, if they wanted one. As I said the word "hug," it was funny to watch some of their eyes grow huge.

In my morning class, the one that usually "gets it" more, it was probably a 70/30 split, with the majority going for high fives. In my afternoon (lower) class, it was 100% hugs.

Hopefully, I imparted some wisdom through osmosis. We'll find out tomorrow.

The Rainman cometh

Cloud break.

Gully washer.

Torrential downpour.

All of these terms could have been used to describe the rainfall this morning. After an incredibly soggy Texas summer, we had a couple of weeks with nary a drop of H2O falling from the sky. But that was broken over the past 24 hours, as many of us had an inkling to look up cubits and start building an ark.

My drive into work this morning wasn't that bad, but I am incredibly thankful that God invented golf umbrellas, because if I hadn't had mine, I think I would STILL be soaked and shivering.

Between 7:15 and 7:45 this morning, the rain fell down harder and faster than Michigan football in the polls. The street out in front of the school was practically a river (or as people down here say, a "crick"), and at times, I almost invoked the good name of the Gorton's fisherman to come and loan me his trademark outfit.

And for some reason, the heavy rain did NOT in the least cause a decline in the crazy driving out there. One guy parked his car in the middle of the street, and got out to walk his daughter across the other lane and onto the sidewalk. Even with me shouting, "Sir, you need to move your car -- there are six cars behind you!" he just nodded at me and said, "I know," and then proceeded to do exactly what he was already doing.

Oh well, I'd still take that crosswalk job over the gym monitoring job any day of the week. It might be wetter, but it's still a lot more fun.