So glad I don't teach the upper grades!

The last half of last year was really hard for me...just check out the very beginning of my blog.

One of the worst days was this one.

Ms. Tours has not improved her classroom management skills. A bit earlier this year, many of the teachers came together and complained at the same time to Sr. Callejo. Her classes are out of control, children are getting hurt (because Ms. Tour can't keep control and teachers weren't finding out about the injuries ((children getting shoved off the stage)) until parents came to complain about them and students coming back from performing arts in such a state that no teaching could happen until they calmed down. Sr. Callejo had a meeting with Ms. Tours and she was told to create a behavior plan and stick to it. Months later, nothing has changes which became painfully obvious on Tuesday of last week.

She was not paying attention and a fight between Cosmo and Zarahe broke out. A serious one. Kids were egging them on, screaming and shouting. Zarahe started the fight, with Cosmo deflecting at the beginning and then (guessing at this part) said "F*%# it" to himself and fought back hard. The fight was about 25 seconds long (I know this because the kids decided to record it on their cell phones and I saw it later that afternoon) and wasn't broken up until the woman who works in the cafeteria came and broke it up. Ms. Tours could be heard in the background telling the kids to "stop it," she also asked some of the other sixth graders to break the fight up instead of doing it herself. (Um. Helloooooo.)

But this sort of begs the question. Now that we have middle school kids, what do you do if the kids start fighting? I got in between Cosmo and Fonzo last year (they had stopped throwing punches, but would've started up again I hadn't been there. I always thought that I would try to get between them, stop it, pull them apart. Ms. Hernandez said that she would never do that because the kids can get so angry and she wouldn't want to get hit. (To that I say "Bring it on.") But she also mentioned that she knew of teachers who had done that and then gotten into trouble for "man handling" the kids.