Videos of Simon!

Well here are a few videos of Simon! It's mostly just him laughing. Sorry they're poor quality, this was before we got our lamp. The sound is the important thing anyway. These are a little old already, I'll try to add some newer ones soon.

Memoirs of a Teacher - 3rd Grade Edition

 This was my third grade classroom my second year of teaching. I liked 3rd grade better, but it may be just because I had an AWESOME class! I absolutely loved my 3rd graders. It probably helped that I had a three month break from them when I had Simon. I had some tough situations too. I think the hardest thing about being a teacher is seeing students in tough situations without being able to help. This year I had two little girls in foster care. Both of them stopped coming after a couple of months without warning, so I assume they went to new homes, but the school doesn't give me any details, so it's hard for me.

I didn't have as many drastic success stories this year just because I didn't have as many struggling students, most of my stories are just fun. There was one situation that I really learned from, and I think will really help me as a parent. There was one student who had a really hard time with focusing and one day he was being extra exuberant. Over the course of the day he lost pretty much all of his recess. I had recess duty so I had him stand with me during recess. He sat on the blacktop looking very put out and I finally just sat down next to him and asked him how his day was going. He then told me about his awful day the day before. He had fallen off the tramp, hit his head on a shovel, gone to the hospital for stitches, had to shave his whole head to get them, and now his head hurt. No one had told me any of this. I learned that day that sometimes kids just need to be listened to and sometimes they're going through things that you don't know about.

Once I started hanging my notes and pictures on the wall students I got two or three and day.

Funny Stories

That leads me to my first funny story. One student absolutely loved to draw. One day he told me all about how all his sisters friends - and she's like, 20 years old - love his drawings and they're always begging him to draw them pictures. He said this in such a cocky tone, pretending to complain about it, that it was absolutely hilarious.

This same student was also pretty confident in his athletic abilities on our field day he moved to the quarter final race. I heard him asking the P.E. teacher what would happen if he won. He explained that if he won that race he would move on to the semi finals, then, at the student's prompting, explained that he could go to the semi-finals, finals, regional, state, and nationals. The student then cried out excitedly, "yeah! I'm going to the nationals!" He tended to get a little ahead of himself. Fortunately, he wasn't one to dwell on disappointment, so when he lost the first race he didn't care much. 

 One day when I was reading Romona Forever out loud to my student we came to a part where Romona's aunt has a fight with her fiance. I stopped at the climax of the scene and asked the students if they thought the couple would break up over the fight, like Romona worried. One of my boys responded:
"I hope not, they're such a cute couple!"
Another boy argued, "how do you know? You've never seen them."
Then a girl who was following along in her own copy of the book held to show them the very undetailed cartoon drawing and said, "yes they are, see?"
Finally I got their attention again and finished the scene, which brought the argument neatly to a close and another boy called out:
"Phew! That was intense!" He sounded very relieved.

My kids absolutely loved Simon. They loved the idea of him before they saw him, and he really became popular after Jake brought him in. They sometime's wrote notes for him, or involved him in the pictures they gave me. I had one student who particularly loved babies in general. He was always talking about his baby sister, who he thought hilarious. When Jake brought in Simon he was convinced that he, and he alone, got him to smile, and he brought this up often after that. One day I told the students I would be gone the next day and they would have a sub. One student was very indignant about this and said something like, "but Mrs. Sypher you were already gone too much! You were gone forever when you had your baby. You shouldn't have had a baby, that was mean." To which the baby loving student yelled from across the room, "whatever, babies are awesome!"

I also had a pair of cousins in my class which was fun. One always took a long time packing up and leaving the classroom and the other would always threaten to leave without him. This was a very serious threat. I'm pretty sure they didn't actually ride home together, but they did walk down the hall and out the door together, and apparently it was a very important ritual. One of the cousins had a sister who was in my class the year before and one of his best friends in my class also had a sister who was in my class the year before. These sisters were of course also best friends. It was really cute at the end of the year when we had a lot of school activities with the other grades to watch these boys pestering their older sisters, who were, of course, very annoyed.

Well, if you read all that, I'm impressed. If not, I'm glad I wrote it all down for my own sake. Teaching was a wonderful adventure and I'm really grateful I had that opportunity!