Question: Is an exam ever funny?

Answer: Yes. An exam is very funny to a 13 year old boy when it's preceded by the word "oral". That's right, this week my kiddos experienced their first oral exams in Spanish 1. Don't worry. I only accidentally called it that once before switching over to "speaking test", the safer, middle-school friendly expression.

My kids actually did really well, for the most part. It was kind of hilarious at times how completely clueless some of them were. Apparently the TWO days we spent preparing for it completely eluded some of these students, who literally forget things I say to them directly two seconds after I have said them. It honestly is one of the most baffling phenomenons. It would be very interesting/depressing to know how often middle school students are literally tuning out every word you are saying. I'm sure the numbers are close to 99.99%.

We went over the questions that were going to be on the test multiple times for two days, and still there were students that, when asked the question "What do you like to do?" looked completely baffled/clueless. "I don't know what that means," they whispered to me. As if I couldn't tell by the bewildered look in their eyes. Oh my.

In other news, one of my students reminded me this week that I am indeed working in a school with true needs.

Jeremy and I went outside to go to work Tuesday morning, only to find that both of our cars had been broken into, with electronics/stereos stolen.

I honestly wasn't super upset about it - mostly it's just the inconvenience of vacuuming out the cars and getting them into the shop that bugged me - but I decided to tell my kids about it just because it was an interesting tidbit. I said to them, "The thing I can't believe is that we didn't hear them break into either of the cars." The response I got from one of my kids was a very confident "Oh, breaking car windows doesn't have to be loud if you don't want it to be."

Good. So while many of my students have no idea what's going on in class, they are indeed learning lots of real-world helpful hints, like how to break into cars. Awesome. At least they have a possible career path if Spanish doesn't work out for them. So there's that.