Momo-Zaza

You really don’t need to know Japanese for this.

In fact, some kids are really quite sweet. Personality wise at least. At my school, we do rotations for 5th and 6th grade. That means that like the middle schools, I only teach certain subjects. I teach my own homeroom class math, writing, and literature. Still a lot, but at least I don’t have to do science, history, music, or PE. In addition to my homeroom class, I teach all 3 fifth grade classes reading (grammar and reading strategies). After wrapping up my second reading class and sending my own class out to lunch, I sat down at my desk to find a sealed note titled:

A Private Letter
To: Miss Chen
From: A thankful student

My first reaction was “Huh?” and “Shoot, what’s wrong now?” (before I saw the “thankful student” part). Upon opening it, I found a neatly typed letter with a colorful computer generated background, entitled “A Spectacular Teacher”. THAT got my attention - “Who’s this person talking about?” In it, it said the following:

In the fifth grade, I met a great teacher who showed me the way to listen and understand. She loved her students and cared about their education. She never gave up, and taught them to stand, as strong as they could, as brave as they were, she kept teaching and teaching and teaching. And today although only almost 2 months have past, we now are silent in class. Thanks to the brave teacher, who knew we could reach her, she now is a legend to me and you. Thank you Miss Chen, i love you too!

- A private letter from,
<insert student name>
Granted, I’m still kind of wondering “Is she talking about me??” All I did was show them a simple game to keep them quiet, but apparently according to her homeroom teacher Susie, she wrote a lovely paragraph about me in her journal too, saying reading class was her favorite part of the day. (^_^) Yay, that’s my teaching moment of the week - and I think it tops the farting.

So I was writing stuff up on the board today in math class, and all of a sudden I smell something bad. REAL BAD. Unfortunately, there was only so much room on the white board - I had already written on the right side of the board far away from the stinky smell and I couldn’t erase that side since the kids needed that info. Which leaves the left side of the board. The stinky side. IT SMELLED SO FRICKIN’ RIDICULOUSLY BAD. FART OF THE CENTURY. SILENT AND SUPER DEADLY. Strangely enough none of the other kids seemed to notice - or maybe they were just being polite. Or maybe the kid in the front row aimed his or her arse towards me only. Let’s just say I tried stalling and rehashing info on the right side of the board to let the left side’s odors dissipate for a bit. Unfortunately it was super long lasting. So I had to go back to the left side while it was still stinky. To save myself, I sniffed my white board marker. A lot. Better to be high on white board marker fumes than gagging on smelly farts I always say. Yeah, that was pretty much the most exciting thing that happened in school today.

Farts aside, kids smell in general. My room seriously needs Febreeze or some sort of air freshener. Glade oil plugins are a bit too strong though. Suggestions? HALP! =P

Oh yeah, in other news - we moved to an awesome big new house (still in Cupertino) with 6 other people. Pain to keep clean, but it’s nice. Come visit! And I switched school districts - to an even richer and better performing one. Yeah, scary - hopefully I don’t get killed by the workload or chewed out by over involved parents this year. But hey, at least they have the small classroom size going for them, woo hoo only 26 kids! (And did I mention brand new MacBooks for the fifth grade and wireless in the classroom? )