Classroom Buddies, v2.0

I had a good time last year doing the classroom buddies thing with some 3rd graders at Bishop Elementary in Sunnyvale. My fellow Y!, Yvette, and I signed up again for it this year, except our old teacher wasn’t in the program anymore. So we figured we’d try and follow some of the students into 4th grade, but no 4th grade teachers were in the program. So we’re in for 5th grade.

Today was the kickoff meeting, but Yvette had to do work, so I went by myself. The class is huge – 32 kids. Though each one of them was actually smaller than I had imagined.

The teacher, Mrs. Liegmann, was having her students pack up as I arrived. She figured we’d have a “get to know you” period and then the end of day bell would ring and the students would run out…which pretty much is how things went.

I got to use my line about going to the 22nd grade, bragged about having a 4 and a half month old boy, and explained that I get to watch sports as part of my job. The class has some spunk -? here are some questions they asked:

• What sports do you play?
• What is your favorite sport?
• Have you ever been to an NFL game?
• What langagues do you speak?
• Have you been to Africa?
• Do you like your job?
• Are you a reporter?
• Are you paid to come here?
• How many other Yahoo buddies will we get?
• How come you don’t have a meeting right now?
• Is that a Palm or a phone in your pocket?
• Do you play video games?
• What’s your favorite animal?
• What is your salary?

The guy that asked that last question cracked me up. I think he’ll be trouble. While I was dancing around his question, he first started to pick his nose (he’s in the back of class). Then he started to use his middle finger to pick his nose. Then he just had his middle finger resting against his face. Then he just flat out gave me the bird while I was answering. I laughed and looked away.

Mrs. Liegmann already gave me homework. She’s got a bunch of math games that she wants to use in class, but just doesn’t have enough help supervising to get the games going. Yvette and I can certainly help out there. Smaller groups, more focus on indivdual issues, still helping them get through fractions and decimals…

I’m looking forward to the year, but everytime I go to the classes, I get a serious reminder of how teaching is a tough, tough job.

Oh – and I ran into one of the kids that we worked with last year, while I was leaving class. She’s doing good. She was one of the more interesting students from last year, always in trouble of some sort for being a little too active. Her seat was always off to the side for one reason or anther. She sounds like things are going well – and says she misses us. We’ll catch her next year in 5th grade I’m sure.