Waiting for another program potluck

It's Friday night, I'm at school, just finished writing my weekly journal about student teaching, for one of my classes. I'm waiting for the potluck for my program to begin. I thought it would be at 6:00, but they sent email today saying that it would be at 7:00. So I have an hour to kill.

One thing that annoys me is that whenever my program has a party, it's a potluck, so I have to bring something. As if we had all the time and money in the world to prepare or buy something for everyone in the program.

I thought about going to the gym; I really should. But I feel like lounging about. It's a Friday, after all, and it's been a hard week of student teaching. I had bad allergies today, while I was observing classes at the school, because I ran out of my allergy meds and I thought, incorrectly, that I'd be OK without them. I had to run out halfway through the day to get the prescription filled!

I'm also excited to sit and read Black Beauty, which I am reading for my class on teaching literacy. The workload for that class is ridiculous; we're supposed to read children's literature -- five picture books and two chapter books per week -- in addition to writing in a writing journal and working on our own personal narratives, reading articles about the reading and writing project used by the city's public schools, and researching a student and his/her writing. The only work that I enjoy for that class is reading children's books.

My other class is interesting; it's all about creating an inclusive classroom community, and we have been discussing how our own biases and assumptions affect what we think about our students and their families and cultures. The professor asks us the really difficult questions about ourselves, which I really enjoy!

A lot of funny things happened in school this week. A girl said to me that I'm going to have a hard time when I teach. I laughed and asked why. She said, "Because you might have some funny students" (I think she meant "mischievious" rather than "funny"). And I said, "What, like you?"

One boy who has a lot of social difficulties in the class, Ralphy, did something hilarious. We were in the library, taking notes on social studies reading. He leaned his chair back precariously. I was happy when the library teacher made him stand up, and she took his chair away. The next time we looked, he was sitting in another chair that was next to him. The teacher told him he could not sit there; he had lost his privilege to sit. When it was his turn to tell a fact he learned from his book, he took his paper and, without saying a word and keeping the same placid, almost smilingly dumbfounded face, placed it on the chair he had just vacated. The teacher said, "OK you don't want to tell us a fact? Then don't," and she moved on to the next student. Nobody laughed, because we are all by this point tired of his clownish antics, and many of the students rolled their eyes at or made fun of him. The fact that he is so ostracized by his classmates (and by the teacher) made this crazy action seem significant to me. For some reason, I thought that was so weird and so great.