Rainy Day Schedule Sucks!

My kids during happier times.

Rainy Day schedule... on a Friday... when you were supposed to go on a field trip... that got cancelled because it was POURING this morning... third grade sucks! Teaching third graders who are faced with this kind of day sucks even harder! I found out about that stupid field trip cancellation 5 minutes before school started then I had to tell my class, who had been looking forward to this one and only excursion for months. To top it off, half the third grade classes went on the trip yesterday, so they were bragging about having seen all this neat stuff, then we find out we don't get to go. BLEH. It was a miracle they got any work done today.

Lucky thing I've got "The Perfect Class" this year. I don't think I've ever had this great a group ever. They're really bright, funny, super-motivated and for some reason, we all seem to be able to get along. There isn't one person who sticks out as a discipline problem. They're not angels or robots (they still mouth off and are smart-alecky), but they're honest, friendly, really helpful with each other, and original thinkers. It's like I died and went to teacher nirvana. Which makes me very afraid of what will happen next year. This is stuff of teacher urban legend and I think karma's gonna get me back in a few months. Noooooo!

The fun part, meanwhile, is that I get to do lots of extension activities. We learned about hurricanes during the Katrina debacle, so we organized a mini-donation-drive within our classroom for Katrina victims. Then the Iraq war came up, and some of them wanted to learn more about that. So I sent 4 of my top kids to do Internet research, and they came back with a report on the war from 4 different perspectives(!). After their report, all my kids wrote letters to George W. Bush and told him what they thought he should do about Iraq. Very pro-active, this bunch. Now we're learning about habitats, and I'm hoping I can get it together to work on something related to habitat conservation for National Youth Service Day. As long as we don't have any more of these rainy day, field-trip-less Fridays, I think we'll be okay.

P.S. George W. Bush wrote most of them back, and after comparing letters, they were annoyed to find out that all their letters were the same. I think some of them may have written him back about that.