Honeymoon over

For the last couple of weeks, I've been feeling good about The Job, despite the lack of benefits and the fact that it's far beneath my talents. Maybe it's because the Negative Coworker was gone for a week, replaced by a more dynamic and pleasant coworker, but she's back now; maybe it was just the particular combination of kids we had recently; anyway, my stress levels had been low and my satisfaction high. Today, though, we had nineteen kids. That may not seem like much compared to the 20- or 30-plus students in a public school classroom, but in our center, with our dearth of space and resources (we didn't even have enough chairs at lunch!), not to mention one extremely LD, speech-impaired, incontinent kid --- believe me, it was more than enough. I went from feeling that I wouldn't mind working in this field for the rest of my life, if only it had retirement and benefit options, to thinking you couldn't pay me enough to be there one more week. Oh well, attitudes flow in cycles.

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In Reading II, Ms. L read to us from a handout about reading groups, and we heard two groups' lesson plans from the "6+1 traits" assignment. One group did a lesson on ideas and based it on the book A Bad Case of Stripes, by David Shannon, which is a great children's book. The other group did organization and based it on a book I never heard of before called When Sophie Gets Angry, which was the most inappropriate book I've ever heard on how to handle feelings. Run away until you can't stop?! Yeah, that's great advice for a kid; don't bother addressing the situation or teaching social skills. (I see from the Amazon link that some readers agree with me, which is something of a comfort.)