Wherefore art thou pizza?

I asked my students today to write about something that people don't appreciate or care for as much as they should. Most students listed things like the environment or their health.

One student seemed to ponder this question for quite a while, his face screwed up in heavy concentration. Excited by such effort, I eagerly grabbed his folder after class to see what he wrote.

"I think people should care about pizza. Pizza does so much for you and people don't care. If cars ran on pizza they would run better."

He got a ten out of ten.

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One of my more interesting students (the one that flashed the entire class a few months ago) called out to me in the middle of our period and said, "Hey Ms. Warren, look over here!"

I looked over to his table and screamed in panic, because his hand was on fire. I was super confused because he seemed to be enjoying his spontaneous combustion (it usually ruins my day)

Turns out, he was spraying his hand with opious amounts of cologne, then setting it ablaze with his lighter.

While the pryomaniac in me was super impressed and a little tempted to try it myself, I found myself pulling a responsible adult by taking his lighter away and trying to convince him that setting our classroom on fire would be a bad thing in the long run.

Good times, good times.

Tired, tired and then ... HUZZAH!

Right now, everyone I know is tired. Tired of school. Tired of winter. Tired of the same ol'-ness of everyday life. Tired, tired, tired.

Getting my students motivated to learn when I am so pooped is a bit of a predicament. I was awfully tempted to propose nap time to my 5th period class today and they probably would have been all over it. (I resisted- I hear they frown on "nap time" in the 9th grade)

Thankfully, Someone upstairs loves me and has sent little golden nuggets of enthusiasm to keep me going.

Here are some of my favorites:

"Duty" and Public Indecency

One of my least favorite aspects of my job is "Duty." Just the name inspires spontaneous combustion via boredom. I was just noting that to my fellow "duty" sufferer when a student ran down the hall wearing a penguin outfit, closely followed by two students wearing nothing but neon blue spandex undies and rollerblades. I spent the next five minutes busting up as I watched them evading the police officers on campus. If something like that happened everyday, duty would cease to be so dull and we would also have to rename it to something with more pizzazz, like "cackle to yourself for 30 minutes" or "public indecency 101."

News stories and "Holy cow, he actually did something!"

I ask my students to write a paragraph every day and sometimes the topics are less than inspiring. Today, however, I was amazed at how engaged they were by the topic. I had them watch a Reuters video online about the tsunami situation in Japan. The students asked question after question about the impact of this event. They pondered together about how to help show the people in Japan their support. And one of my students, who is failing for never having completed an assignment, wrote me an extensive response to this video. This experience warmed the cockles of my heart.

Dumbfounded

In my fifth period class the other day, my students started to have a heated argument about how boring my class is compared to other freshman classes ... in front of me. I pointed out to them that this might not be the smartest idea, considering brownie points and that quarter grades due next week. They seemed dumbfounded, like this had never even occurred to them before. My unexpected happy moment came when one of my students defended my class as his absolute favorite. It was unexpected because I am pretty sure he doesn't care for me (considering that he told me , "I hate you and I wanna key your car" only last week). So, my class isn't the most boring for at least one student .... HUZZAH!!!