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No, You’re Not.

Posted on March 1, 2010
Filed Under Seventh Grade Behavior | 3 Comments

Whereas the kids tend to have their stock three-word phrases, I have more of a four-word phrase arsenal. Here’s a sampling off the top the head.

“No doubt, rainbow trout.” (Yes. Or “Indubitably” as the Lollys say it.)
“No dice, cheese slice.”  (No.)
“Let the King decide.” (When I want to give them the illusion of choice.)
“Glad I’m not you.” (A Nelson Muntz stylie ha ha.)
“Then you woke up.” (A NO! that should be obvious.)
“Don’t penetrate the bubble.”  (“Don’t stand so close to me.”)
“Spit out the gum.” (“How can you spot that so well?” “I just look for the ones that look like cows.”)
“Show me the KBARR.” (Or vocabulary or book or warmup or…)
“Read, Trackword, doodle, nap.” (What they can do if they’re done with the test early.)
“Please pay the Popple.” ( For dropping a clicker or forgetting a book or renting a pencil.)
“Join me at break.” (Detention.)
“Why’re you still talking?” (Ummmm. Shut up. Now.)
“This isn’t a democracy.” (Duh. This one is especially appropriate lately, with us reading Charlotte Doyle. I think Jaggery even uses that line, or words to that effect.)
“While we are young.” (Too late for some of us.)
“You are killing me.” (I think this one speaks for itself.)

But lately, I’ve been busting out a three-word phrase much more often.

“No, you’re not.”

It’s always been a bit of a seventh grade thing to say “I’m sorry” as sort of a reflex reaction. You call them on something, and they blurt, “I’m sorry.”

“Quiet you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Would you PLEASE just stop?”

“Sorry.”

It’s like when the doctor hits your knee, and it jumps. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time or the 100th time, if he hits your knee with the little rubber hammer, it will jump. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time or the 100th time, if you call a kid on jabbering in class or being a pain in the heinie, he will say,

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“What? Yes I am.”

“No, you’re not.” (This is kind of fun.)

“Bbbbut…”

“Prove it.”

“What?”

“Prove you are sorry by changing the behavior.”

D’oh. That’s a whole ‘nother matter. They seem to think the phrase is some sort of  ”get out of jail free card,” sort of like “I was absent.” (Another classic seventh grade three-word phrase.)

I am slowly exterminating the reflexive sorry. Now that the shock of me calling BS on their pat excuse has worn off, I’ve been playing with other responses.

“Now you’re lying. I see how it is. I thought we had a relationship.”

“Bbbbut…”

Some of them are even starting to realize how often they do it without thinking.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“You’re right.”

“Well then…”

The next step is SBD for the insincere sorry.

Scrape that Mucus Off Your Brain. (Also: Now I’m the Straight Man.)

Posted on February 27, 2010
Filed Under Mental Floss, Stories of Seventh Grade, Supplementary Materials | Leave a Comment

Science “lesson” today. It’s Friday, so that means the weekly test, the suspense over whether they will score the 28/40 necessary to avoid the dreaded SSI (when the results were displayed today, one girl who made the cut did about as much dancing as one could do while still remaining seated), and best of all, mental floss.

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Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain — Ween

Every Friday before the test, we scrape the mucous off our brains by mental flossing with some trick questions, math tricks, logic puzzles, Wacky Wordies, and etc. They’re all extra credit, and guessing is encouraged. Some are tricks, and some ain’t, but if it looks like a trick, it probably is.

Today ’s set saw the return of  another here’s-an-example-of-why-it’s-so-hard-to-learn-to-spell-in-English:

What’s so unusual about this sentence? (Be specific.)
A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the
streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.

(Hint: Read it out loud.)

Since I know how most (of my) seventh graders seems to have math issues, I also used one of my old looks-like-math-but-really-isn’t questions. I don’t tell them it isn’t a math question until the two-minute warning.

What property do 1, 2, 6, and 10 all have that no other whole number has?

(Remember, it’s not math.)

We also had some Wacky Wordies:

a)  b) 
c) another one thing d)

(The colors aren’t part of the clue.)

Most of them got this one:

Bob owns a pet store. He has thirty-five birds for sale. If twenty of those birds are parrots, what is the probability that any of the remaining birds are dodo birds?

Although one girl did ask the inevitable (academic word this week) question,

“What’s doodoo bird?” (No lie. And if  you don’t think that brought the house down, then you don’t know from seventh grade.)

But the one that set me up as the straight man this time was this one, which isn’t a trick at all, just a bit of common sense.

If you balanced a broom horizontally on your finger, so that your finger was exactly on the broom’s center of gravity, marked that spot and cut the broom in two, then you would have a long and a short piece; the long piece being most of the handle and the short piece being the bristle end and a small part of the handle. Now, if you weigh both pieces, which will weigh more? Or will they weigh the same?

I used my Quiet Stick as a substitute for a broom to help them visualize, and then,

“Well, you’ve all been on a teeter-totter at the playground before?”

(Before I can follow that up with my analogy, it’s a cacophony of, “I love those,” or “I hate those,” or sharing about the time when…)

“Stop! Anyway, how many of you have been on the opposite end from a “stout” kid?”

(Repeat above cacophony. Rising out of the din: “I was that kid!”)

“Save it for circle time. So…”

Again I’m demoing with my stick tilted down to one side across my finger.

“If that colossal kid is down over here and you’re up here, and you’re trying to balance, what would the kid down here have to do?”

I walked right into this one.

“Lose weight!”

They thought that was just the cleverest line. All. Day. Long.

Lots more mental floss at BrainScramble.com.

SBD…

Posted on February 23, 2010
Filed Under Stories of Seventh Grade | Leave a Comment

Just a shortdog, because it’s getting late.

Best line heard today: The class that’s right before lunch has sort of gotten used to being let out about 30 seconds early, so I can get a jump on the lunchline. Not that I stand in line with the kids, but if the line starts getting long, I don’t want to get in the lunch ladies’ way. The ladies are used to me dropping in, spinning the keypad the kids use to enter their account number, entering my number (of course I have an account – I’ve been eating in the cafeteria for almost 17 years), and getting out of the way. This class gets a bonus, just because they’re next to lunch…

(Although that can work against them if they get a little too frisky. It also means there’s no next class to make them late to. There have been times when I’ve made them sit there while I go get my lunch and come back  - lucky for them my room is one of the closest to the cafeteria – before I let them go. Sometimes I even start in on eating before I “release the hounds…”)

Anyway, today that class assumed we were done with about a minute to go, and started for the clicker bag to put them away on their way out the door.

“Hoooold on there cowpokes. Who done told you that it was ok to git up and leave?”

So I start the old you-can-all-go-when-you’re-all-perfectly-silent-for-X-number-of-minutes thing. You know the one… Lotsa giggles and snorts and clock restarting. Through it all I see Sunny squirming in her desk. Just as we reach the 1 minute of silence mark she breaks the silence yelling,

“Can we hurry this along? I have to PEE!”

On a (sort of) related note… We have a new name for detention, a new euphemism.

SBD…

Yes, I know the common slang meaning of that abbreviation. (Grammar tip: It’s technically not an acronym unless it’s also a word, like scuba.) It’s a timeless classic. So now, instead of saying, “Join me at break,” when I lay a detention on them, I can say something like,

“Bring your gas mask.”

SBD = Supplementary Behaviorial Diagnosis

“We’re going to figure out why you’re having trouble coping… Oh excuse me, that one’s going to hurt…”

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