Happy day after the day after Halloween, especially to my fellow educators of the elementary variety. I’m new at this, so this was my first time experiencing the post-trick-or-treats sugar hangovers at school, and WOWWWWW. It was a doozy. Cheers to us all for getting through it.
I’ve also been fighting with AI customer service here on Substack, because I couldn’t seem to find my own Notes anywhere on the platform. I’d write one, send it off to the void, and have no idea whether anyone could read it unless someone liked or commented on it. The robots kept telling me I could find it in my profile, or on my dashboard, but nope. Something weird in my settings? Nope. No idea. So frustrating. And yes, I admit I may have taken some of my frustration out on the bots too. Not just frustration with this situation, but life in general right now. I guess I was having a sugar hangover too.
But I just found it! Or maybe someone finally fixed it, because I’m pretty sure I’d looked in this very obvious place before. Anyhoo… note to self, it’s here: https://substack.com/@wecanbemagnificent
And here’s a round-up of some of the things my students said this week, if those notes ghosted you too:
“But I don’t want to like books!!!”
~ A screaming kindergartener in the hallway to a bedraggled social worker trying to get him to join his class in the library yesterday.
Oh kid, same. But I’m afraid they’re just too charming.
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Or…. are they? First grader looking around at all the spooky decorations that have materialized in the library since the last time she visited:
"I feel like I'm in hell"
I'm sure she meant helll...oween town.
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“Have a spider day!”
So said a kindergartener as his class made their way out of the library, after reading I’m Trying to Love Spiders by Bethany Barton, gaining a new appreciation for our arachnid friends. We made a giant, messy spider web of our own throughout the library with black yarn as we criss-crossed around the room finding a science book with a giant eyeball on the cover, a graphic novel with a dragon on it, a cookie book in the recently returned items cart, and so on. Everyone got a turn and we caught zero flies. I am still unraveling the mess! Tee hee!
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Meanwhile, in big kids:
There's a 5th grade girl who likes to come up to me on the playground and tattletale about silly things. Sometimes she says things like "he scratched his butt and then touched people" and other times it's things like using swear words or whatever. Almost always it's things I can do nothing about, especially because I'm hearing about it after the fact and probably it doesn't matter anyway. It's an interesting little cycle we go through - she comes at me on a little power trip, and then I deflate it with a minimal reaction. Then she thinks about it a minute and moves on to something else.
Yesterday may have been especially disappointing:
Her, pointing at a kid running by with a basketball: HE LIKES BOYS.
Me, shrugging: some people do.
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And finally, speaking of recess:
The 5th and 6th graders are now playing "Last Kids on Earth" on the playground. Which is a great and very popular book series, the entirety of which now exists in my library, thanks to me advocating for more new books last school year.
But it's also about a handful of kids fighting their way through a zombie apocalypse. So this game basically consists of half the kids pretending to be flesh eating zombies and the other half pretending to fight them. In inaccessible-to-adults places like the top of the jungle gym, where many a zombie massacre has now occurred.
I'm finding myself yelling things up at them like "I APPLAUD THE LITERARY REFERENCE BUT GET DOWN FROM THERE"
Mixed feelings.
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Happy Saturday y’all. We’ve earned it.