Adventures in Student-Teaching

For those of you who don't know, I am currently student-teaching in the 8th grade. I have 170 "little darlin's" under my tutelage. What a grand time. There is nothing quite like taking over a classroom half-way into the second semester of a middle-school class when most of the students have checked out for the year. What's more, there is no retention rule. This means, they can all refuse to do their homework, get an "F" in every single class, and there is no consequense. They continue on to highschool, as if middle school never happened. This makes trying to motivate a class full of privelaged 14 year-old students who are accustomed to arguing their way out of everything quite difficult.
What's really fun is when they are given an assignment, or a small project to research and present, and they simply make the information up. Here are a two gems from the most current presentations:
"John Sutter was a famous windmill manufacturer in California. His windmill company was called Sutter's mill. He chose to have all his money transferred into gold bars. Others became jealous of his wealth, and his collection of gold bars, and started doing the same. This is what started the gold rush."

"The Alamo was a church that had been turned into a military fort by the people of Texas. General Santa Anna decided he really like the land in Texas, and so he invaded the state to take it over. As his troops were marching down the road, they noticed the church that had been turned into a military fort, and decided in order to invade, they would need to take out the forts- so they attacked the fort and assasinated everyone inside. Because of the horrible assasinations of all the Texans at the fort, the people of Texas got really mad and attacked Santa Anna's men in revenge for his attempt to invade their state...they yelled "remember the Alamo!" when they killed Santa Anna."

"Jesus and George Washington worked on the Missouri Compromise together." -this was someone trying to be cute. I was less than amused.

Like I said...good times.