The other day the mother of one of my kids emailed me and said "Jacob really looks up to you. The other day he asked me if we win the lottery can we buy you a present."

That day he brought me a golf ball as a present. It was a Titleist that had a "1" on it and he said he was giving it to me because "it says 'number one' on it." Ironically this is the kid who gets in trouble and doesn't have his homework the most. I like him though and I wish we could get him on track with his behavior and work. It's pretty humbling as a teacher to realize that there are kids who look up to you to the extent that some of them do.

At that point you just have to remind yourself that there are others who hate your guts.


Out.

School has been going pretty well and it continues to be a good year. I lose track of any stories I would normally tell here though...I have the worst memory for stuff like that.

The other day though in our morning assembly the principal was giving away reading awards. This one 3rd grade girl gets an award and she's standing up there in front of everyone. I look at her shirt and it's a takeoff of the popular "I ♥ NY" shirts except it's from Kentucky and it says "I ♥ KY." At least I ASSUME it was from Kentucky...could be that she's just a fan of lubricants.

We went to our yearly high school pep rally not too long ago too. It was so freaking disorganized. Just random people standing out there doing random things. There's this one group of kids who are not pep squad and not cheerleaders and not...uh...theater group but they seem to be some sort of spirit based group except they seemed to be focused on expressing their spirit by doing weird things. Two of them came up to pump up the kids. One was walking around with a stickhorse between his legs the entire time. The other had a cane and one blue sock. How wacky! No one really got too pumped up.

At one point this group did some kind of skit out on the floor. Only, no one really thought to use microphones so you couldn't hear anything so people just kept talking. Finally halfway through they got a mic and it turned out that they'd written a song about football based on "The 12 Days of Christmas." Also at that point everyone realized we would have been better off if they had not found the mic.

Before the pep rally some of the high school kids took some of the 4th graders down on the gym floor. They were having them dance. Some of these kids were doing some pretty funny dances. One of them was standing out there doing violent and enthusiastic pelvic pumps. Then I looked over at one point and one of the high school cheerleaders was down there teaching another 4th grader how to do this incredibly inappropriate ghetto booty dance that looked...well...just wrong for anyone to be doing in public, much less a 4th grader. Idiots.

Ah yes...the cheerleaders. I'm told that at some point cheerleaders may have served some purpose. Their only purpose now seems to be to stretch out very seriously on the gym floor for 20 minutes before the pep rally. They must stretch because it's very easy to pull something when you are making the signal for "LOOK AT ME!!" Apparently the Look-at-me signal involves lots of jumping and your hands extended over your head. Occasionally the Look-at-me signal is transformed into a group "LOOK AT HER!!" signal which is performed by several others holding one up in the air while she signals "LOOK AT ME!!" It's all very complicated.

The cheerleaders came to our school and performed in morning assembly the next week. I don't know what the deal is...last year our kids were really pumped up when the cheerleaders came but this year's bunch seems to be some kind of vampire cheerleaders. They came in and sucked the spirit out of the kids in the gym. It was baaaad.

Later.

Ok, so I didn't really get it updated last week...maybe I'll try to get it done THIS week. No really.

I should really update this thing. Maybe I'll try to do that this week.