Well….
Today I found out two pieces of information about my fourth hour class.
1. A kid’s mom was apparently in the guidance office recently complaining loudly about how much work I apparently give her child. Her reasoning was that two weekends ago, her son was apparently working day and night Saturday and Sunday trying to get the poetry anthology done. What her son apparently neglected to mention was that: 1) I assigned it two weeks prior to the day it was due; 2) about half of it should have already been done if students were keeping up with daily work and; 3) I gave them ample class time to work.
Luckily, my CT stood up for me and backed me up on this because I had even gone over the rubric and the assignment with him before I had even assigned it. So nothing is going to happen. I just think it’s kind of ridiculous.
2. Today, I apparently sent a girl to the social worker in tears because of an article I had the class reading. We’re starting up Romeo and Juliet and I had the students reading a news article about a couple of teenagers who committed suicide because their parents didn’t approve a la R&J. Now I already had one student come up to me when I handed out the article telling me he wasn’t going to read it because his brother had just attempted suicide. I understood, and the next day had a different article to read.
This girl didn’t talk to me at all and since I know her a bit (she’s very quiet, shy, withdrawn, etc) I don’t really expect her to share super personal details. According to my CT who talked to the social worker, reading this article not only brought some dark thoughts to the forefront of her mind, but made the thoughts and feelings even worse.
So basically, since suicide is a huge issue in Romeo and Juliet, I might have to come up with a brand new novel unit for her (and possibly the other boy). I just feel awful that this happened. I had no idea that she was dealing with any of these issues — not that I should have, I suppose.
And luckily, my CT completely backed me up and supported me on this with the social worker and he’s going to help me out a lot if I end up making a different novel unit for her. Oh man. Differentiating instruction at it’s finest.
On the plus side… My kids really seemed to enjoy my puns activity using Laffy Taffy.
