25 March, 2010

Girls are more mature: now with wings

Lunch in the library today was a quiet one; only about 65 kids in the place at any one moment. Yet despite the fact that I have a lot of kids in a fairly small library they were behaving quite well today. Seems my methods are working, certainly at the beginning of the year I was having about 50 kids in the place and it seemed like a riot.
However since then I have managed to learn classroom management skills (downside of not being a teacher was that I hadn't done this before. Although doing storytime for 60 pre-school kids in Penrith library had certainly provided me with some skills in crowd control at least.)
I have been trying to be nice to the kids, I know that trying to be everyone's friend is a bad plan. But I have a sense of humour, I don't try to take out my own inadequacies on the kids and I don't feel upset when the girls sit among the shelves and giggle about my hairstyle.

Still, I digress. A post on how I would make a much better teacher than all these actual teachers can wait until later (and is contingent on me not examining my thesis too closely for flaws).

So, today. In my quiet library...
A young boy, amongst a small group of young boys, was teasing a couple of girls. Nothing which would warrant my intervention. Instead I feigned disinterest and watched as these girls maintained the moral high ground. I was very impressed, they did not rise to his bait, continued talking quietly amongst themselves. I thought a bit about my own behaviour at that age and mused somewhat about the difference in maturity between boys and girls of the same age.

Until, with the sounding of the bell, the boy of our story rose from his seat and walked towards the door; with a feminine hygiene product stuck lovingly between his shoulder blades. Like some sort of tampax brand angel wings.

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