I’m so proud!

I had a great day at school today.  My students were awesome.  (now, I’m sure tomorrow will be a day from hell!)  For 6th and 7th hour, the Special Ed team went to Old Country Buffet.  24 of the SED students were able to go and 4 of us teachers.  I expected the worst.  I was really nervous about our kids going because they lack manners and the ability to BE QUIET.  Mind you, these kids LOOK totally normal, but most of them are mouthy, have social problems, emotional problems, ADD/ADHD and little altercations set them off.  I was assigned one student, Chris, who is a medicated ADHD student. I was in charge to stay in the vicinity to make sure he didn’t get into too much trouble.  He’s the cutest little kid, has such a sweet personality but my word he can’t stay focused for the life of him.  He is always behind in class because he daydreams, but he tries so hard.  So we get to OCB and I had envisioned it being empty and our wild heathens would run the place down. Oh no.  It was packed with little old folks eating lunch at 1:30.  I got REALLY nervous.  However, the kids pleasantly surprised all of us and had excellent manners and were great examples.  We got so many compliments, and the kids were so thrilled. They kept saying "Mrs. Barczak we got THREE compliments now!"   At first I wasn’t able to sit near Chris, but I told him I’d keep an eye on him to make sure he stayed out of trouble.  Well, turns out a seat opened up next to me so halfway through our meal he grabbed his plate and came to sit by me.  He was like my little shadow all day.  He sat with me on the bus too.  His stories cracked me up.  Then I went to go get dessert and he followed me and kept asking if I was getting cheesecake. I told him no and asked if he was getting some and he said "ehh I don’t know".  Just a funny little dude.  It was so nice to spend time with the kids outside of teaching them and get to know them a little more personally. 

Charles is another sweetie.  He is usually kind of wild in class, but he’s a good kid at heart.  He just gets sucked into the other kids bad antics when they start acting up in class.  Charles ends up following along.  He is on a behavior plan in school so each class he has to have the teacher fill it out with "poor, fair, good, great" based on his behavior/attitude/effort etc.  He’s always so proud of his behavior sheet when he’s doing good.  At OCB, he was trying to get sour cream for his taco.  The dish for it was way back on the buffet line and he was having trouble reaching it.  A little old man was next to him getting chopped tomoatoes on his taco, and I heard them chatting.  The old man asked Charles if he wanted some tomato on his taco and Charles said ‘Yea, please" and the old man scooped some on top of his taco.  Charles said Thank You and then offered to put some sour cream on the old man’s taco.  The old man said sure, and Charles helped him out.  It was so sweet.  They were both smiling and (haha) it just reminded me of some kind of commerial or something.  Then Charles started to walk away and the old man said "wait a minute, here, here’s a tootsie roll for you" and handed him a little tootsie roll. HOW CUTE. 

Needless to say, I was so proud to be there with those kids.  The waitress said that Lumen Christi school had been there earlier that day (Lumen Christi is an uppity private catholic school in our town) and she said our kids were being SO MUCH BETTER than them.  And our kids are inner city, mostly poor kids with dysfunctional families. 

Anyway, as I sit here and brag them up, I’m sure I’ll be headed for a hell of a day tomorrow.  Seems like whenever I say something good about these kids on my blog they go and give me hell the next day.  Wish me luck!

OHH I forgot to add— I told the kids Porter’s name today, and one of the girls in my class, Teaire, told me she thinks I should name the baby Taquarius.  Yes, you read it- Tah-quair-ee-us.  LOL.  I definitely have to add that one to Porter’s scrapbook.