VOILA!

I'm a freakin' magician! Today I made 15 students disappear! Hire me for your next professional development day. The Great Hillmommy will make your students disappear, too. For the right price.

Today was reading day, which so happens to be every Friday, when we set aside 30 minutes out of our day to read a book or magazine or paper of our choice. It is not time to be frittered away talking or doing homework or sleeping. I am blessed with my class of techies, my class of 28, my class of kids who do not like to read. Words are not their friend. They brag, "The last book I read was in second grade." And they're proud of it. Not the whole class. Just about 10 of them. If I'm lucky, two will go by the library and pick up The Guinness Book of World Records. Then they will look at the pictures. If I'm unlucky, two will try to sleep, four will try to copy homework, three will try to text, and two will read the same book that they have had since the first week of school, possibly holding it upside down. I have reached the point that if my room is absolutely quiet, I look the other way. By 'other way', I mean that I read my own book as I am supposed to do. The person who decreed that teachers read their own book on reading day has not spent much time in a classroom lately. Students do not sit quietly and read for 30 minutes while the teacher's nose is in a book. It takes months of indoctrination before that can happen.

So, today I took roll during reading, because that's how it goes, and after 30 minutes, we start 5th hour with the same class. I'm so very lucky. My class has thankfully dwindled to only 24 students, what with two moving away and two entering an alternative program to earn credits quicker and graduate on time. When I took roll, for my class of 24, there were 6 students absent. The technical school was out today, so I suppose they figured they could be absent for three class periods. Lucky for me, 1 student was asked to give a tour at the tech school. Then I dispersed of the remaining students in the following manner:

1 to type his project, since he had been sent to Detentia on the day we did it
2 to print out their info that they had saved
2 to correct their data tables
3 to find paper in the supply room on Mabel's end of the hall

YES! That left me with 9 students in the classroom! They were as tame as 2-week-old kittens. Not that I wanted to put them in a gunny sack and take a walk down by the pond or anything.