Looping

  Students, like any other people, can get reputations. Sometimes good, but most times not so good. Sometimes students excel in certain enviornments and in others, not so much. Sometimes students that are labeled 'behavior problems' can be seen as exceling or growing...just because administrators aren't getting calls about them. There are many layers to student/teacher relationships and it is extremely hard to judge from the 'outside looking in.' One day I had the door open to get some ventilation in room 304. It is an old, stuffy room that gets too hot and too cold. Add twenty-six 11 year olds, post physical education and you can imagine what the smells could get like. I suddenly heard a loud noise, screaming, cursing, etc. I came into the hallway and saw a shorter student...screaming and swinging his arms wildly, trying to punch the taller student. I immediately came out and raised my voice to try to shock the two students, but when I realized that there were two ...

  A few years ago, I was working one of my side hustles at Rhode Island Comic Con. While deep in the dark corners of Amica Mutual Pavillion (AMP), I started a conversation with an AMP security guard. We started talking about teaching and during the conversation in which he explained that he was formerly an Assistant Principal, who just recently went back to the classroom...he called me a name. He called me a unicorn. The definition that everyone knows of a unicorn is, 'a mythical animal typically represented as a horse with a single straight horn projecting from its forehead.' What he was referring to was the secondary definition, 'something that is highly desirable but difficult to find or obtain.' When I got into teaching, because I had no experience in any sort of teacher preparation course, I needed to get an M.A.T. (Master of Arts in Teaching) degree. Since then, I have attained another degree, M.Ed. in TESOL (Teaching English to Students of Other Languages) and go...