Wake Me Up When December Ends

So, I have this song stuck in my head, as it was playing just as I got home today...and it ocurred to me that if I just tweaked

There's a lot of chaos on the school front. Speech Aide A is refusing to work with Bulldozer because he hit her on Tuesday. I got a lovely email from Speech Person DFT when I asked if Speech Aide A was all right -- she'd come into the speech session with guns blazing ("Okay, Bulldozer, it's time for speech...NOW, NO HITTING, OKAY?") and a bad attitude.

The response I got began with something along the lines of, "I'd have to say that no she is not okay" and went on to passively aggressively chastise me for not being at her beck and call at all times ("she came to see you after school and so did I, but you were not available" -- which she knew, because she knew I was translating conferences all afternoon) and then proceeded to explain to me that, OMG, SPEECH AIDE A FILLED OUT AN ACCIDENT REPORT AND IT IS NOW ON PRINCIPAL S's DESK!

(Yeeeah, that's where they all go. Also? They're so not a big deal. My first year of teaching, I did like three a week because I had a fourth grader with some very difficult behavior.)

What bugged me the most is that she assumed his behavior was like that all the time. Long term readers of this blog know that Bulldozer can have his moments, and had many of them at the beginning of the year. However, they will also recall that as the year has gone by, his meltdowns have gotten less frequent and less intense.

(Of course, articulating that to Principal S was the dumbest thing I have ever done, as you would have thought it was a Monday in early September today...it wasn't until 5 minutes before lunch that I got him through a transition from a break back to work without triggering another meltdown.)

In any event, my reply wasn't -- I admit -- a stalwart example of courtesy, though of course you never know how something will appear in email. I won't get into it here, but I pointed out that Bulldozer's behavior has never been wonderful, and that part of the current behavior regarding speech as opposed to just about anything else is that it worked at the beginning of the year when we were fighting battles about just about everything.

Meanwhile, the teachers are up in arms about a mysterious comment or twelve in this week's bulletin that I hope wasn't prompted at least in part by this drama.

The only reasons we survived today is that Student M was out and that it was a Thursday, so Aide Mrs. B came at 11:30, because Aide S left sick at 9:30.

Oh!

Yeah, duh, the reason for the post.

We determined why the existence of November is such a problem for Bulldozer. He wants Christmas, but bad. He wants it now, now, now, now, now, now, NOW.

Now.

So I'd just as soon have it be the end of December, thanks.

Oh, and I finally decided on Swiss Family Robinson for our next book. It's available pre-adapted to a first grade reading level and the version I bought includes a professionally narrated CD for the kids to listen to for the "listening comprehension" day for each chapter, so all I have to do is retype it verbatim with Writing with Symbols and make comprehension questions. Yippee. I'm hoping to have the whole book done before Christmas so that I have a few weeks to breathe before I have to worry about adapting Matilda.