Kids will be cats...

Today was not one of my finest days as a teacher. It was the first day back to school for my grade 2s after a week of holidays (not sure why they had a week off... I still had to go to work). This class is rowdy at the best of times, and after a week of freedom they were absolutely out of control. By the end of the class I was totally out of ideas as to how to shut them up, after taking away half of their team points and refusing to let them play any games unless they behaved better.

We were doing a cutting and pasting activity. At the end of the class when I asked the kids to clean up, they sort of did, but brought me one gluestick without a lid. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. I only have 6 gluesticks for my whole class, so to lose one would really be a pain. "Nobody is going for lunch until we find that lid!" I bellowed. About 3 kids started looking for the lid, and the rest of the class dissolved into a game of "cats".

This is what it felt like. In this scene, I am off to the side losing my mind while the kids crawl around on the floor meowing and getting in cat fights. I hate cats at the best of times. At one point, one kid came and rubbed her head on my leg, meowing like some kind of feline demon. All I wanted was a gluestick lid. Why wouldn't they just find the damn gluestick lid? SOMEBODY COME AND MAKE THESE ANIMALS FIND THE GLUESTICK LID! After abandoning the search and ordering the kids back to their desks before lunch, I finally found the lid. One of my students was pretending it was a cat toy and batting it around the classroom. At this point my head blew up. I tried to enthusiastically thank the kid who brought me the lid, but I really wanted to turn into some kind of hulk teacher "YOU WON'T LIKE ME WHEN I'M MAD!!!" and sentence them all to some terrible punishment.

This is how it probably really played out. Teacher was freaking out at the front of the room, but didn't seem to be asking anyone to do anything specific. Cats sounded like a fun game. Hey, cats was a fun game! Let's see if teacher wants to play cats, maybe it will cheer her up and she will stop yelling...