Yodeling Pickle...

Every teacher seems to have his or her own way of getting the classroom focus back to the subject at hand. Sometimes they revert to the kindergarten clapping cadence, (clap, clap, pause, clap, clap, clap).

 Some use gentle soothing musical chimes, musical instruments, sing and repeat cues. A few can be found here on YouTube:



All of these work pretty much for the classroom teacher and sometimes work for me.

If that doesn't work, my backup attention grabber is to walk toward the "homework box" on the board with the dry-erase marker in hand to add letters to the word "HOMEWORK". It works MOST of the time to get the class back under control.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine gave me a joke gift of the "Yodeling Pickle" also works pretty good as an attention grabber.

Brain Farts...

One of the hardest things to do in the classroom is to recover after committing an unintentional brain fart (...look it up). The older I get, the more frequently I find myself susceptible to occasional lapses. I sub in so many schools and grade levels that, while I recognize most teachers by sight, I sometimes blank on hard to remember names.

I have been in Mr. White's class several times these last couple of years. You would think that a name like 'White' would be easy enough to remember right?

I mean it's even printed on the bottom of THE LESSON PLAN!

So while dictating the instructions for the next lesson...

Me:  "Ok class, listen up! Mr. Brown would like you to take out your notebooks and turn to page ...."

Kid1: Who?

Me: Who what?

Kid1: Who is Mr. Brown?

Me: Mr. Brown, your teacher.

Kid1: You mean Mr. White?

Now forgetting the teacher's name once and being reminded isn't total devastation. I'm pretty sure associating a name to a color has contributed to similar lapses so we had a little laugh about it and went on with our day until....

I DID IT AGAIN!

Later in the day, I referred to Mr. White as Mr. Brown a second time!  That set off a chorus of laughter at my lapse, deservedly so.

Me: Ok, for the rest of the day your teacher's name is now "Mr. Brown or Mr. White", whichever one I screw up. Now let's get to work.....)

For the rest of the day, I intentionally continued to use 'Mr. Brown'.

Several days later, I ran into Mr. White on the playground and he said he had a good laugh about his new "name change"