so about teaching. i still don't know.

on monday we're going on a fieldtrip.

i wasn't gonna let this one kid go because he's massively irresponsible with his school and homework. he thinks he can get away with his laziness. i've had homework contracts with him, parent conference, phone calls home, notes home...but nothing helps. it actually infuriates me. he's so irresponsible. he never does any work. he's failing. he should have been retained last year. he doesn't know his multiplication tables. he never completes any assignments.

it makes me MAD.

so i wasn't going to take him on the fieldtrip.

but he's going.

why?

because this will probably be his only opportunity to ride in a boat and go whale watching, his only opportunity to play in tide pools, his only opportunity to go bird watching.

he has a 13 year old sister who's a druggie and sleeps around and runs away from home. after school he has to take care of his 3 younger bro's and sis's. his mom just had another baby. she's is SOOO not supportive of his education its ridiculous. she seems so indifferent - she said i could do whatever i wanted with him if he's not doing his work...if he fails, he fails, she said it was fine with her. they're really poor and all his papers are dirty and messy.

i don't want to talk about him anymore.

so i had this one girl say to me that she never knew reading could be fun. it was yesterday, during silent reading time, she comes up to me and tells me how she never knew that books were fun. she didn't know that there were so many different kinds of books. she said she didn't know that people read books just for fun, she thought books were only written for school work. she's one of my ELD students (ESL) and she said this all to me in her broken english. i could have hugged her right there. she still can't say a complete sentence or write a complete sentence in perfect english, but who the heck cares.

in my class, there were 18 students who were eligible to take this writing assessment exam thing (the other 10 are ESL). out of the 18, i had 6 get passing grades. the other 12 failed.

if you want to see the world's awesomest library, come to the Cerritos Public Library. i went there with john today...it was INSANE. we even saw one of the sharks in the HUGE aquarium eat one of the exotic fish. i think the neatest place in the city of cerritos is the library. it feels like an amusement park, only the main attraction is the books.