La Cucaracha!

This week back from our nine-day holiday has been a killer! With one T. Meaghan back in the states on holiday and the new science teacher being held hostage in Malaysia by the Thai embassy regarding his non-B visa (have I mentioned I hate the Thai visa process?),  the rest of us have been scurrying from class to class to cover PE, Science, Values, and Clubs for the 7^th and 8^th grade. Two days this week, I taught every single period from 7:35 until 3:30 (not complaining, just stating J) including giving up my lunch and break to do detentions (complaining this time).  I loathe being the detention… monitor?... facilitator?... I absolutely loathe it. No one wants to be in that room, and it is miserable. Plus, I am already the most firm/austere/stringent teacher at our school, so adding detention to my repertoire of duties only makes me that much more school-marmish. I’d rather be handing out ice creams at lunch or something to kind of balance my strictness out. Anyhow, on Monday, I was at school from 6:30 until 9:00. THAT is wrong. Needless to say, I have seen some goings on with cockroaches in our building at these late/early hours, and this is why I came home to write my blog instead of staying there in my classroom. I think it’s the weather lately, but these little creatures have been coming out in full force. And by “full-force”, I mean I have seen one in the bottom drawer of my desk, one in the auditorium, and one or two scuttle across the hall every morning when I arrive and at night when I leave. This is more than enough for me. More than enough. I really dislike them. My feelings weren’t this bad when I first got here.  Now, they make my skin crawl and I freak out when I see them. A couple of weeks ago, I came into the auditorium because kids were screaming their heads off, and there was a coffee mug FULL, FULL of cockroaches. Why?!? Why did approximately ten 2-inch long cockroaches all decide to crawl into this coffee mug like it was their own personal Jacuzzi?! I’ve had enough. But they’re all I can think about- I think I see them everywhere.

In detention, sometimes students have to write essays of the detention… we’ll just go with monitor… monitor’s choice. Yesterday, I had the students in detention write essays on cockroaches. A couple of them looked at me with the “Is she kidding?!” face because they’re usually asked to write about changing the world and future goals. But when I said, “Ready, go!” with arched eyebrows and tight lips, they knew I meant business. And I got some pretty good essays from it. One student referred to them as having “bodies like little monsters that are dirty and full of bacteria” (agree!) and another told me if I needed one to be “taken care of” that he would do it (thanks!) Most students expressed the same sentiments as me regarding these beastly little creatures, except their stories are much, much worse. My favorite though, was one student who seemed very concerned about whether or not cockroaches had noses: "I don't know it have a nose or not but I know one thing: I never seen the nose of a cockroach before". He spent a good two paragraphs explaining why he was on the fence about it.

Anyhow, the week is almost over and I am so happy tomorrow is Friday. TGIF.

(And I promise, either tonight or tomorrow- my tonight or tomorrow- a blog entry will be up about my lovely 9-day holiday)