europe

so in just a few short hours I will be on a plane to Prague where I will be for the next almost 3 weeks for a little fun european vacation. I will be in Prague for a week and half and then my mom is flying over to Germany and I will meet her there and then we will travel together for the next week to Brussels, Paris, Munich and then back to Prague. I am really excited, I have always wanted to travel more around Europe and can't believe it is actually here.
I'll try to post some updates and stuff while I am gone.

food fight

I finished my 2nd year teaching at the end of may and I can't say I miss school at all right now. 2nd year was much better than 1st year and I hope it only keeps getting better. I really liked the group of kids I had and it was sad to say goodbye. A week before school got out I had morning duty in the 8th grade hallway before school started and as I was watching the students come to school and hangout in the hallways I noticed they were a lot quieter than normal and were all whispering to each other. I did my best to inconspicuously listen in and find out what they were talking about but all i found out was that all the 8th graders received a mass text the night before. I didn't find out what the text said though while I was in the hallway but knew it couldn't be good. During homeroom, one of my students asked me, "Miss Holcombe is it true that every year on the last day of lunch the 8th graders have a massive food fight?" I said it absolutely wasn't true and he better make sure that didn't happen. That day was the last day for them to eat lunch at school. I am not usually one to catch on very quickly but I knew then that the mass text was to have a food fight the next day and to bring sticky food. Sure enough, the same student then said, "yeah well I got this text from about 10 different people all saying the same thing to have a food fight today." Way to keep it a secret 8th graders. Don't apply for any kind of undercover job anytime soon.
Of course I instantly get on my computer and email my principal and the other 8th grade teachers to give them a heads up and find out if we should do anything else to keep this from happening. My principal wrote back that a parent had told him the same thing and that we should tell our classes right away that everyone knows about the plan for the fight and that no one better even think about going through with it. So I tell my 1st period class exactly that. The first thing out of their mouths, "how did yall know?!?" um.....try how did we not know? The next thing out of their mouths, "what will happen to us if we do it anyway? will we not be allowed to come back next year" says the kid who doesn't want to be at the school and is hoping he doesn't have to get kicked out.
Lunchtime rolls around and all the kids are on alert. My principal came to lunch that day and stayed with us the whole time just watching the students. All of the students are quieter than normal and keep looking at the teachers and our principal. A couple of kids keep moving from table to table whispering things and we can tell they are trying to figure out if they should go through with it or not. One boy who is smaller and more devious than all the rest is holding a pudding snack pack the whole lunch and looking at it and you can tell he is just dying to throw it on someone but yet he also would like to just eat it too. My principal told the teachers that the first kid to throw anything for us to just get them and yell real loud that they are going to the head of the school. It comes to the end of lunch and time to clean up before we head out to lunch recess. I start bringing trash cans to each of the tables and tell the kids to throw away all their trash. Then, out of the corner of my eye I see the student with the snack pack dart to another student and before I can do anything the pudding has been dumped all over another student. I immediately do the only thing I can think of and that is grab the student who threw the pudding by the arm and yank him with me while at the same time yelling at all the rest of the students to "sit down right now!"
I drag the student out of the gym doors toward the main office of the school and yell at him to sit on the floor by the door and to not move an inch. It is right at this time too that a class of kindergartners is walking by and all their eyes are huge in terror. I walk back into where the 8th graders are eating lunch and that was the end of the fight.
I felt like I had real power for a few minutes. The best part was later hearing all the 8th graders tell everyone else all the things they had planned to do as if they were really cool for having a plan but then completely deflating them by reminding them that they didn't actually do any of the things they had planned so they really weren't that cool.
Maybe next year's 8th graders will go through with the "annual food fight"

wedding!

It has been awhile and I have a lot to update, so I am doing a bunch of small posts instead of one big one.
My older brother Philip got married back in May in Birmingham, AL and it was just the greatest thing ever. I love my new sister-in-law and it was so fun to have all our family together.

These are a few pictures from the wedding. The one above is just funny to me. The wedding was outside and 30 minutes before people were going to be seated it started pouring rain. Lyndsey was as calm as a person could be though.


This is my younger brother Thomas.



The new Mr. and Mrs. Holcombe



Me and my first sister!

One of my favorite parts of the actual day other than the excitement of my brother getting married was getting to talk to my friend Camille who was one of the photographers for the wedding and in my opinion takes the best pictures ever. She will be my photographer whenever I get married. Don't know how to make things hyperlinks on my blog but visit her blog http://www.scbphotography.blogspot.com/ so see her stuff.

teacher or sister

this is geography johnny.  he is a mini-globe.  some students really love geography johnny, some students just want to terrorize him.  for awhile geography johnny would choose one person to sit in front of and encourage during the class period. he would choose a different person each day.  after awhile though he got tired of choosing.  then he started disappearing.  kids--usually boys thought it was funny to hide him and then leave ransom notes on my desk for me.  i am always able to find him though without too much work. who would have thought a little mini-globe would provide so much entertainment for school?

i also have a little penguin beanie baby named waddles. waddles went missing right before spring break and i am hoping he is not suffocating in some nasty locker somewhere.

I need to figure out how to be more of a teacher sometimes and less of a sister because people don't really listen to their sister as much, they just like to annoy their sister.  Example, it was my birthday back in march and my room mom brought me lunch from Chipotle (my favorite) and two bags of double stuff oreos to give to the students at lunch.  Kids go crazy anytime you give them free food so I waited until we went outside for lunch recess to hand them out.  Each kid got one and then I still had some left so of course the 8th grade boys just attack me, and I really mean attack me. They were grabbing right and left for oreos, but they had already had some so I wasn't giving them any.  They then all grab hands and make a circle around me so I can't escape and are trying to get me to give them oreos.  First of all, what boys just grab hands with eachother and form a circle. Second of all, what makes them think it is ok to terrorize their teacher on her birthday??? One of them even grabs my arm to try and get the oreos. No way. I had a bottle of water in my hand so I throw the water on the kid who grabbed my arm.  It was really funny but also surreal.  They finally back away because they don't all want to get wet.  They couldn't believe I threw water on them, but I couldn't believe they were being so ridiculous.  I take an oreo out of the bag and say, "you really want one? really? here, take this one" and I throw it on the ground to see if anyone will eat it.  Sure enough a boy picks it up and stuffs it in his mouth.  So i take another one and this time throw it in a mud puddle and say "you want that one too?" yep, they ate it too.  Then I take a last one, drag it completely through the mud so it is covered and hold it up and say "who wants it?" immediately a hand shoots out and stuffs it into his mouth.

The things we do for oreos.

I love going to school but I think next year I need to work more on being a teacher.

Teaching idea:

right before spring break we were learning about World War I. I had to do something to grade them or figure out what they had learned or somehow have them put things together so I gave them a choice to take a test I made or they could do something else as long as it showed me what they learned and their grade will be based on how much it looks like they have learned.  A bunch of them made up their own test questions with an answer key. Some of them made really cool posters and one kid made a video of himself as a wwi soldier talking about the war as he walked through the woods and trenches.

I want the students to learn and I want them to be excited to learn so i am trying to figure out what that looks like, maybe this is a start, I don't know.

the secret is out

So today a few of my students found out I had a blog. I tried to deny it, but I don't think they will believe me so I have had to take some precautionary measures. Obviously I don't really want them reading what I write, because even though I change the names, it is still about them. So now only people I approve can read it.

Look for some new stories coming soon...

welcome to 2009

Ok, so here are 2 stories from today, read them and then please don't think I am a bad teacher.

Story 1: 7th period is basically my worst class. It's right after lunch and the last academic class of the day. I think they do like me, but they are just ridiculous. So each day my classes have to come in and answer some daily geography questions using an atlas. 1/3 of the kids in 7th period just sit around and chat while the others do the questions. We always go over the answers so if they just sit there they get the answers but that isn't fair. So today I said whoever wasn't finished had to go sit outside and finish while we went over the answers. At first no one moves, so then I started calling on kids I knew weren't finished to go outside. Then a bunch more start to get up. Then 2/3 of the class goes to sit outside. Inside I started to panick. Now the kids wanted to go outside. They didn't want to stay inside. What to do??? I went over the answers quickly with the 6 kids that were left and prayed nothing bad would happen with the kids outside. I know one of them though starts running around the boardwalk that goes around my class, but I was just hoping it would all turn out ok.
So I get all the kids to come back in, and I hear them saying to eachother to do the same thing again the next day----I don't think so. So after they were all seated I said we would do the same thing again tomorrow but this time whoever has to go outside would get a student reminder (which is a punishment and they have to get it signed by their parents and they hate them).

Moral of story 1: don't make going outside more attractive than staying inside...

Story 2:
School was now out and I had to have a meeting with a student and another teacher in the room next to mine. I left a bunch of boys in my room though to go to my meeting and since school was out I assumed they would just go home---wrong. I could hear lots of movement occurring in my room during my meeting so I figured they were probably still in my room. When I walked back into my room I was overpowered by the unmistakable smell of matches that had been lit and then blown out. So far I haven't found anything that has been burned in my room and no smoke alarms went off but I'm pretty sure they were burning matches or something in here while I was gone. What is it with boys and fire? Actually I kind of like fire too.

Moral of story 2: don't leave boys alone in my room even if it is after school---especially if it is after school

Yet again time has flown by and there is much to say. Cheerleading season has officially started which means less time for the O.C. reruns that come on each day on SoapNet---probably for the best. There really is so much work that goes into cheering for all you skeptics out there. It truly is tough and I am realizing that I have little discipline and fortitude to perfect all the small minute details that go into making good cheers. I am not a detail person at all. But it is so great to be with the girls, it helps me appreciate them more. I like all my students, but sometimes I just like the boys a tad bit more--they are just funnier than the girls, but the girls are nicer.

I think it is the goal of each of my boys to annoy me as much as possible. I always "yell" at boys for throwing things. Over half of the time they say"I didn't throw anything I was just pretending!" Right. Then they think it is funny to pretend to throw invisible things at me to see how long it takes before I get really mad. Little do they know that I have a lifetime of experience ignoring annoying boys and it will take more than throwing invisible things to make me mad.

The other day during lunch recess a group of boys were playing Harry Potter. They were each a different character and were running around casting spells on each other. When the bell rang to go back to class I was walking inside when I walked by the group of boys, they all yelled, "Ah! It's Snape! And ran off to class." I really couldn't help but laugh.

At the beginning of each of my history classes, I always have questions written on the board for the students to do right when they come in the room and I call it the Bellringer. It is usually something that reviews whatever we learned the day before or introduces the new thing we are learning that day. I like them having something to get started on right away, but I didn't really like it just being review questions. I remembered what the class I did for student teaching did for their bellringer and I decided to change my activity. The school I student taught at had a class set of atlases for the students and each week the kids got a geography sheet with 2-3 geography questions they had to answer each day using their atlas. I really liked doing it then and most of my students now just don't ever get a lot of geography so my school ordered a class set of atlases for me to use and I found a geography book with questions for each day. Now the kids pick up an atlas at the start of each class and spend 5 minutes learning about geography. I was really excited about doing this instead of what I was doing, but I had to wait a week for the curriculum and atlases to come in. I was so excited for the new activity I just couldn't wait for it to come in the mail before I told the kids about it. But I didn't want to reveal everything about the new activity that would be coming, so for a week straight I kept talking in all my classes about how the bellringer activity was about to change. The kids got sooo excited too because they could tell how excited I was (I definitely exaggerated my excitement just a wee bit though). I told them each day how amazing the new activity was going to be and how I could not wait for it. Each day the kids would beg me to tell them what it was, but I couldn't give in. I later found out that some of them had even been asking another 8th grade teacher if she knew what the new activity was.
Well, this past Monday the new curriculum and atlases finally arrived. I was able to announce to my afternoon classes that Tuesday the new activity would start. In my 7th period class I built it up so much. One student said he didn't think he would be at school the next day. I replied, "You HAVE to be here! You want to know what the new activity is! Work it out so that you are here!" He said he would work it out.
Finally Tuesday came. In my heart, I knew the actual activity would be such a let down to all the students. At the beginning of the day I saw one of my boy students that I have 5th period and he was so excited. He was counting down his classes until history and he could find out the new activity. Sure enough, by the time he got to history and I explained the new geography stuff, I could see the disappointment all over his face. I think most of them thought I was just going to throw candy at them and show movies at the beginning of each history class.

I think a little disappointment is good for kids though. I admit that part of me enjoyed getting them all excited about something they didn't even know what it was going to be.

Sometimes when students are absent and they come to me the next day and ask what they missed I say things like, "Oh no! You missed the best day ever! I just let everyone eat candy and popcorn and play outside all class." And more often than not they actually believe me for at least 10 seconds.

Conversation with a boy student:
boy student: Miss Holcombe, are we allowed to bring guns to school?
Me: um, no!
boy student: (rolls up the sleeve of his shirt and flexes his muscle) Well, I guess you better send me home then!
Me: (trying not to laugh)

I think my level of humor has stooped to the middle school level. The longer I am around them, the more I find their stupid jokes just hilarious.

Ok, just a couple of pictures to end this post on. Below is a picture of me being blobbed by Mr. Tapp, the 8th grade science teacher on our middle school retreat to Windy Gap back in September. I got some serious air I tell you.
Here's a non-school related picture of a hike up Grandfather Mountain with some dear Charlotte friends. Also some serious air in this photo.

Thanksgiving is less than a week away!!!! Can't wait!