The day did not go as I pictured it.
I never imagined that on the first morning back from break one of the first people I would see was that oppositional student walking down the hallway with a quart of Mountain Dew in his hand, just itching for someone to tell him it wasn't allowed in school. And I certainly didn't anticipate that my cross-century VCR-Smart Board hook-up would fail, so that my homeroom and I would be unable to watch the morning announcements. And I never saw it coming when the boy who used to refuse to take off his coat but had been quite cooperative before the winter holidays would return to his former stance: Yeah, I'm just going to have to say no to following that rule, he told me.
"Wow!" I confessed out loud to my homeroom, "This year is something else already!"
But, 18 days off does have some restorative power, and each of those snafus was resolved with patience and a little outside grace. And not all the surprises today were bad. When asked to pick one little word to capture what he wanted more of in his life, a student known for his negativity chose "kindness" because there just isn't enough of it in middle school. And he ended his paragraph with, I can be nicer and so can everyone else.
I never imagined that on the first morning back from break one of the first people I would see was that oppositional student walking down the hallway with a quart of Mountain Dew in his hand, just itching for someone to tell him it wasn't allowed in school. And I certainly didn't anticipate that my cross-century VCR-Smart Board hook-up would fail, so that my homeroom and I would be unable to watch the morning announcements. And I never saw it coming when the boy who used to refuse to take off his coat but had been quite cooperative before the winter holidays would return to his former stance: Yeah, I'm just going to have to say no to following that rule, he told me.
"Wow!" I confessed out loud to my homeroom, "This year is something else already!"
But, 18 days off does have some restorative power, and each of those snafus was resolved with patience and a little outside grace. And not all the surprises today were bad. When asked to pick one little word to capture what he wanted more of in his life, a student known for his negativity chose "kindness" because there just isn't enough of it in middle school. And he ended his paragraph with, I can be nicer and so can everyone else.
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