Thursday, November 12, 2009

Dragons and Daily Drags...

Okay, so my day started like any other day... Found a nice turqoise top to go with some cool turqoise jewelry... stopped for a sugar-free, fat-free Vanilla Latte at Mickey D's.... and my kids were ready to work... All but one, that is... He wanted to pick a fight because I had taken about half of his points away for COPYING off the internet... I mean, his essay contained a couple of pages that looked and sounded verbatim like this: Dwarf: "Rigidly bound by caste and tradition, the dwarves have been waging a losing war for generations, trying to protect the last stronghold of their once vast underground empire from the darkspawn. Dwarves are very tough and have a high resistance to all forms of magic, thus preventing them from becoming mages." (Racial Benefits: +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +2 Constitution, 10% chance to resist hostile magic)
Yeah, I've been teaching for 35 years now... plus I can plug in any string of words and find the original in about five seconds... And although as I have aged, I know fewer and fewer things for absolute certain, I do know when a kid copies verbatim off a website that he didn't just "accidentally" write that himself by "chance." A little while and a lot of drama later, he finally wrote me an apology letter for saying he hated my class and possibly me... I had already forgiven him. He's a great kid, but boxed into a corner, a lot of young men will get kinda cranky!

The day went from that to less excitement.. until my freshmen decided to be really a festival of disfunction... One girl's note I confiscated revealed she had the urge to drag me upstairs to her locker and slam me in it 100 times... She also shared a lot of other ideas about her involvement with the class which included numerous epithets and multiple misspelled cuss words... Always a funny reverse fire starter for English teachers.. I sent up a note to her after-school tutor with homework she SHOULD have been doing instead penning the pulitzer epistle I had demanded... And I told her in the note "if she wanted to drag me upstairs to her locker, she better pack a lunch because I outweighed her a couple of times and I wasn't goin' without a fight... " She, too, decided to apologize... and I summarily don't hold grudges with kids, so she, too, is forgiven..

My day, not so much. I hold grudges against the day... haha.. Tomorrow is Friday the 13th.. I would never be so rash as to say, bring it on.. Never. Ever... In fact, I'd love to be home, my family all home safe, and that day safely laid by... Have a good one.. Watch your step... Hugs.

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