Anyway, I tutor every Thursday, and this is a common theme of conversation as I help these students from other classes. The kid I helped today was one of my students whose classes got switched at the semester's end, and at least he says that he liked my class way better. Nothing like an after-school self esteem boost, right? The curious thing, though, was that all the worksheets he pulled out of his bag that he needed help on were MY worksheets - my handwriting and all. We counted at least ten handouts that were straight up just photocopies of the handouts I give in my class. I mean it's not like I copyrighted my handouts, and in a way I'm kind of honored, but kind of creeped out too because I have no idea how she gets a hold of my sheets each day. During the drive home I concluded that there must be a mole student that reports to her with the work from the day. It's the only explanation. Anyway, it's weird. I don't know why she doesn't just ask for the materials.
Other highlights from the week: let's see... My best student in first period told me yesterday that I'm turning ghetto. Not knowing whether I should be worried or enthusiastic about the comment, I asked her how she decided that. She said that she can just tell. And then today was a "walk-out" day for all schools in the state of California, to protest the horrible situation of educational funding by the state. I don't know who's idea it was, but we disguised our walk-out by doing a disaster evacuation drill - to symbolize the disaster of the California education system I guess. Whether or not that was the reason, it was a good choice because there were riots at our neighboring high school during their walk-out.
Of course, there always seems to be bad news to share, and this week was pretty bad. A Richmond High senior died this past weekend by getting hit by a train. She was a pretty popular girl, so a lot of students were shaken up about it, especially after stories I heard about the press conference earlier in the week with the parents. According to the parents, the ambulance took two hours to get to her - to which they added that they are sick of the Richmond fire/ambulance/police departments treating the Latino community like second-class citizens. This conference was in front of the school, so of course the victim's closest friends got emotional and started yelling things like "F*** the police and the fire department." Yikes. The funeral is tomorrow, so I'll be missing a ton of students from class.
This whole situation brought about a can of worms when I was talking to our security guards during my prep period. If you want to know who gets affected the most by the traumatic things that happen in the school community, I think it's them. They've lived it for something like fifteen years now, and they're just numb to things now. One of the guys recounted too vividly his experience about nine years ago when a student got shot outside the school during school hours, and the student made it inside to the front office, where he died in the security guard's arms. I guess the medics couldn't get to the student in time because the scene was not clear for entry - they did not know where the shooter was, so they couldn't go inside. Hearing all that kind of freaked me out, so I'm just going to go ahead and assume that things have seriously changed since then.
Just over six weeks until the California State Tests, which really sucks because I'm fully prepared to be completely and utterly judged by the poor scores that the majority of my students will get. I think it's the CST that makes me enjoy hearing how bad other math teachers are, because it gives me hope that my scores will be higher than theirs! Having written that now, I KNOW that's why.
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