One of those days

Today is "one of those days". It kind of all started last night. I was on this "high" from hearing about EFY. I had friends over for dinner and it was great. Then I decided to sit down to a movie and I invited a friend over. Long story short, he was kind of a jerk and never end up coming. I didn't get to bed on time and therefore slept in this morning. I came to school not wanting to teach really at all. The morning started off by one of my students telling me that another kid got his head slammed in the door. Wonderful. So I got talked to this kid to see what happened and found out that 3 of my boys were trying to close the door to not let him and ended up closing his head in it. They then just left the kid outside crying and came into class as if nothing happened. I pulled these 3 boys out in the hall and they seemed to have no remorse or even act like they did anything wrong. So we had a little chat and I told them that they needed to apologize to this other student. Who knows if it happened. Then...my kids are just being very chatty and off task today. Our counselor has been coming into my class once a week to do an activity and have a chat with them to prepare them for next year. The kids were just being disrespectful and it was bugging me. The counselor was talking about good study habits including: keeping and assignment book, being responsible, turning in work, etc. And I was realizing how many of those things my kids don't do. She also said that there has been a trend in the USA that kids coming out of high school and college don't know how to "work". They are lazy! It is so true! So many of my kids are so stinking lazy! They want me to spoon feed them and get out of doing any of the work themselves. They don't read directions but expect me to explain everything step by step. They are all almost 12!!! You would think by this age they would know how to be more responsible for themselves. The term ends in a few weeks and there are so many of my kids that are missing so many assignments! I don't give a lot of homework! Most of this stuff is work we do in class and either they are so off task that they don't do it, or they do part of it and then never finish it and turn it in, or they do it and don't turn it in and then lose it! A big contributer to this is my 4 ADHD kids. One is on meds that don't work and they don't know what to do with them, one was taken off meds last year, one they took him off meds part way through this year to try a more "natural" method of dealing with it, I guess I only have 3 diagnosed with it, but I have another one that he is a good kid but can't control his mouth! It is like anything that comes to his head he has to say. Then I have another kid that is in his own little world half the time. Every morning they come in and do a sentence correction that is on the board, and every morning I go over to this kid and he is usually reading and when I ask if he did his work he goes something like "oh..." and looks around like he didn't know what he was suppose to be doing! Has he not been in my class for 6 months!? As you can see it's "one of those days". Right now my kids are silently reading and it feels so nice. After this it's spelling test then PE and then they are off to Art and Music where I don't have to deal with them. I get to stay in class and get all the things done that I need to. Oh the joys of being a teacher.