Freefallin'--and other stuff

First: A., the kid who a) broke his thumb while taking a test and, more recently, b) the kid of "tournament/tournaquet" fame, showed up today with a cast on his arm. AGAIN. Now as I said previously, this is a kid who, literally, can trip over nothing while walking across the room. This time, he was playing with a friend over the weekend, and they did something really stupid and male-like, and "I could tell I had really hurt my thumb, Miss K, but seriously, we were having so much fun and stuff that we kept going." (Pause.) "Maybe we shouldn't have done that." It was THEN that he actually broke his thumb. AGAIN. (This is ordinarily the kind of situation where you might begin to suspect some kind of abuse at home--if I didn't witness his clumsiness EVERY DAMN DAY.)

(Sigh)

Another hysterical kid story: after school on Mondays, I teach a creative writing class for 3rd-5th graders. Today, we were working on diamante poems. I'm not going to get into all the components of this type of poem, but suffice it to say that to begin with, you either need opposite nouns (like "summer" and "winter") or contrasting nouns like "TV" and "movies", "animals" and "people"); this is the foundation for your whole poem.

So the kids are trying to come up with their own "opposites" (I told them that they needed to run them by me BEFORE they started, to prevent them from getting halfway through and realizing that, shit, their starting nouns were not going to work). "So," I said, "give me two opposite things--2 things you can contrast."

And one kid shouted out, without hesitation:

"Cats and propane!!"

(Insert WTF look here.)

"Cats," I said slowly, "and PROPANE?"

"Yeah!!" he said. "Those are 2 things that don't go together, right?"

What is this kid DOING on the weekends?

And last:

It was made official today: I'm going skydiving on May 15. For work. It's a long story, but basically it was a school-wide incentive to make sure that the students were using their full time during our big FCATs last month; rather than getting done early and just sitting there, that they were taking their time, going back, checking their work, etc. Fifth grade and middle school were the big winners, so Hot Teacher (the middle school rep) and I are jumping. We have an official PR company and shit, so there's a chance this could end up in papers or on the news ("2 teachers skydive to help boost students' performance" or something along those lines. I'll keep you updated. After the winners were announced, Mr. R, our office manager, ran into me in the hallway. "Hey," he said. "Make sure your next of kin and life insurance info is updated before you guys do that jump." We both laughed, and then he stopped laughing and said, "Yeah, but seriously."

And that's all for now!