The Chocolate Milk Curse Continues

During the end of my first year teaching 6^th grade, my principal asked me to teach 5^th grade the coming year. This seemed stressful to me because everything was going to be different: the curriculum, my teammates, everything. However, once the school year started, I realized teaching wouldn’t really be that different. I still accidentally forgot to select the double-sided option on our copier and frantically pushed all the buttons to make it stop, I still sarcastically told my students that if they lost an important worksheet they would have to repeat the grade and they believed me, we still dressed up in group costumes for Halloween and spirit days, and my classroom still reeked of chocolate milk.  Here are some of the best moments of 5^th grade:

We learned how to use prefixes: As I was reading a book with a group of my students, we came across the word ‘Antifederalists’. I asked them if anyone knew what an antifederalist is, and while everyone else shrugged their shoulders or avoided eye contact with me, one boy reasoned, “Antifederalist is like AntiChrist. So they don’t believe in Christ.” In case you’re wondering, this is also the student who, during dodgeball, would stand in the center of the court claiming to be Samuel the Lamanite.

We played hard, and we worked hard (but somedays, not so much):

I introduced them to new music: Each year, our school has a dance festival where each grade performs a dance. My friend found a CLEAN version of the Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It”, and I taught the students a dance to perform for the school and their parents. After several practices, one of my students came to me during lunch and said, “That song has some kind of…weird…words. It’s just not really school appropriate.” I asked her to tell me what exact lyrics the song was saying, but she refused to say them out loud. Instead, she grabbed a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and handed it to me. The rest of my lunch was spent with me trying to convince her that NO, I was not playing a song at school that had the words “Weiner town” in it, and instead said “We in town”. I’m pretty sure she still doesn’t believe me. 

Children are still as honest and thoughtful as ever: One thing I love thinking about is what my students are going to do with their lives. Will the knowledge of fractions that I gave them inspire them to become incredible engineers, designing life changing technology? Will my love of US history inspire them to become the next president? One morning, the journal prompt for the day was, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” My favorite answer came  from a student who said, “I would like to get a waterproof phone and not get married. That’s because it would be too loud to have kids and an annoying wife.” I may not be the teacher of the future commander in chief, but at least my students will be able to have their phone survive if they drop it in the toilet.

Sometimes my students were honest, and sometimes they were TOO honest: Honesty is a great policy, but I don't think it really is the best policy when you make a thank you note for a volunteer who has been coming to teach your class and a student writes, “Thank you! But I never really paid attention to you.”

One student was VERY realistic about his homework: 

The chocolate milk curse continued: During my first year of teaching, one of my students left a carton of chocolate milk in their desk for WEEKS. Once I finally found the stink bomb, I vowed to myself I would never let that happen again. This year was going gloriously: our classroom was more than 365 days without the stench of rotting dairy until disaster struck. The last Monday morning of school, I unlocked my door and I could smell it. No, it wasn’t just a bad smell. It wasn’t an old apple or sweaty kids. It was chocolate milk, and it was rotting. I spent the thirty minutes before my students arrived tearing through my classroom. I looked in the trash cans, their desks, the bookshelves: NOTHING. Even the janitor came down because it smelled so bad. When my students arrived, I enlisted them in the search. (It’s really too bad the district people always choose to drop by the school when I’m teaching an actual lesson, instead of when I have all my students with their shirts covering their noses in the middle of a search party) There was only a few minutes of this until one student said, “Oh yeah….I forgot!! There’s chocolate milk on the ledge!!” In my classroom, there’s a ledge that’s too high for anyone to reach that goes all the way around the classroom. I’ve only ever used it to hang art projects from, but is also apparently a great hiding spot for fermented chocolate milk. My student was bottle flipping his chocolate milk and it “accidentally” ended up there. And then he conveniently forgot about it. It was that exact moment that my summer plans changed from “sitting by the pool” to “interviewing and hiring TSA officers to stand outside my classroom.”  

HAGS never stopped being cool: After our yearbook signing, I had one student who looked particularly unhappy. When I asked him what was wrong he said, “It’s just not fair. People are writing mean things in my yearbook. I don’t even know what it means!!” I opened his yearbook to see many scribbled “HAGS” all over the pages from his classmates. He was very relieved to find out that his peers were just hoping he would have a great summer instead of calling him an ugly, old woman. Of course there were also girls celebrating in the corner that a boy in their class wrote HAGS in their yearbook with a SMILEY FACE. Bring out the hidden chocolate milk and let’s celebrate!!

Was my definition of HAGS the only thing that my student will remember from this year? Hopefully not. HAGS!!