"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them become what they are capable of becoming." -- Goethe

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Warning: Inappropriate content

The title is not a joke. My 7th period today was...inappropriate? haha I want to leave details out of this story, but you need to know exactly what happened to get the best understanding of just how awesome my 7th period was today.

After the Daily Language Review, I passed out a Reading Enrichment packet. The topic is "Did you know" and it includes some fun facts. The BEFORE READING section asks students to write five interesting facts. I googled "Did you know" and pulled up a page for students to copy some interesting facts from. I did this yesterday morning with a great website. When I pulled this website up, I quickly scanned the page, but of course my students found this comment first:

Coffee drinkers have more sex than non-coffee drinkers.  They also enjoy it more.

 Awesome. My students totally lost control and were cracking up over this. I even got a, "Ms. Damron? Do you drink coffee?" Oh my goodness. I scrolled up so that they couldn't see that fact anymore. As I was waiting for my students to write down their facts, a student said, "There's more inappropriate stuff on this page." For the love! As I was reading through, I found this fact:

The tongue is the only body muscle that is attached from one end only.  (Please don't send me corrections to add the penis; the penis is not a muscle).

 Yup. That happened.


At that point, I left the page and found the original website from the day before with the innocent did-you-know facts. You can imagine the uproar when they read this fact:


Did you know armadillos have 4 babies at a time and are all the same sex?


My students wouldn't even listen to the explanation that in this case, "sex" means "gender." The student who spotted the word went up to the board and pointed to the word "sex" and then started shouting, at the top of his lungs, "SEX!!! SEEEEX! SEEEEEEEX!"


Are you joking? ARE YOU JOKING? Did that really happen?
Yes. Yes it did.


By the time all of the students had copied down five facts, three of the students were whispering into each others' ears. Well, you know that if the content so far was not that appropriate, then they certainly were not whispering appropriate things. So at this point I separated the entire class. I had each of them take a chair and go to a random place in the classroom. They couldn't touch or play with anything, and if they said one word or made a sound, they got a lunch detention.
I explained to them that it was pretty sad if I had to physically separate them to different places of the classroom to get them to listen and pay attention to what I was saying. I set a timer for ten minutes and then went around the classroom filling out lunch detention slips and setting them near the student. If a student talked, they would sign the lunch detention slip.
It was DEAD silent. Two of the Aides walked in during the "time out." Lisa said she almost started laughing because it was somewhat comical. After the ten minutes of silence I had them write a Rule Essay and answer the following questions:


1. What do you think you did/did not do wrong?
2. How  you should have acted --
3. What will you do in the future?


They were not happy about the essay. When we came back together as a group they were very respectful though.
All I can say is that I learned my lesson about screening websites before I let students look at them. Wow.


-Ms. Damron-

3 comments:

  1. You are super intense. Ten minutes of quiet time. I couldn't handle that.

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  2. Bahahaha!! This would happen to you. You poor girl! But I feel like you did the right thing, time out really worked.

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  3. Haha, oh my goodness!!! This is simply hilarious!! Audryn, you are awesome! (:

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