Stories to tell...

I realize, upon looking back on my posts, that I haven't been blogging very well. I haven't been sharing what's been going on in my daily life. I haven't taken the time to find the funny in my life. Believe me, it's there...I've just been ignoring it. With it being winter and still being in IL, it seems to be easier to find myself more depressed than happy. But a couple warm days and a forceful change of my outlook has brought me to this point. If I expect anyone to be reading my blogs, it really should be something worth reading. Take today.

So I'm a middle school math teacher for the time being. I've been doing this for six weeks now. Five more to go! Lately the eyes in the back of my head have started catching things that I'm sure I've just been missing for six weeks now. Like kids passing notes. Oh yes, I have become the teacher who manages to catch the notes that are DEFINITELY worth reading. Take last week. After I gave out the homework assignment for a class, I went back to my desk to start grading things while they worked. Well, somehow a boy in the class got a hold of a note between two of the girls in class. This guy is tall for an 8th grader, and one of the girls is the smallest in the school...shorter than him by a good 12 inches. She is bothering him to give her the note back and is most insistent. Disrupting the class is really not something I'm ok with, so I told this guy to give me the note and for the girl to sit down and do her work since she is failing my class. He dully gives me the note and I put it away for lunchtime reading. When I do read it later, it turns out the two girls were talking about sneaking out of their homes and then copying down math assignments from each other since one didn't have the work done (the one who, consequently, is five assignments behind and failing as well). Since it was a note, I couldn't do much. This week though, on Thursday, I was checking late assignments from some kids who happened to consist of two of the girls in the previous note. Well, it turns out they did the same assignment, on the same kind of paper, and happened to do the wrong assignment altogether. No kidding. So I got to pass out detentions for cheating yesterday. I stapled them to the assignment and then made an announcement to the entire class that cheating wasn't tolerated and that if you were going to cheat, it's just a shame it wasn't done well enough to fool me. I really enjoyed that whole episode.

One last note story...I also picked up two other notes yesterday (I told you I was getting good at this). I found out that there's a love triangle in m 7th grade class I have for both math and writing. I also found out that the sweet boy in the same class broke a girl's heart and likes someone else now. Oh the drama of junior high love. I remember those days. Haha.

I remember that I was the new kid in 7th grade and I had a crush on a boy in my class. I spent alot of that year sending him notes and trying to talk to him. It didn't work. Especially since my friends got together with him and sent me fake notes from him that he liked me too. It was pretty cruel. Then again, I wasn't so nice either. There was another guy in junior high who liked me, but I didn't like him at all. So every single day he would ask me out, and every single day I would turn him down. After months of this he finally stopped asking me and then we proceeded to go through four years of high school without saying a single word to each other (in a class of 28 that was a pretty impressive feat I would say). So I know junior high is a rough time, but they'll get past it and then life will move on. But for now, I'm torturing them the way I was tortured in school by my math teacher and just laugh to myself when I hear/read about the drama that is forefront to their lives. haha.