No More Hating

Today was a lesson in flexibility for me.  I got a call at around 9 for a job with a start time of 9.  So I had to race around to get ready and leave.  And it never fails that when you are in a hurry you drop things and forget things and generally annoy yourself by being slow.

So I got there as quickly as I could to find the class already started.  The teacher isn't there anymore, but the school counselor is filling in while they waited for the sub.  The kids were doing stations, so that helped to have them already busy.  We spend the next 30 minutes (me, the counselor and the classroom assistant) trying to figure out what the teacher's plan was for the day.  She'd left in a hurry and had left virtually no plans.  We eventually figured out something to do for the day.

The class was really pretty good. However, come the afternoon they were fighting with each other a lot.  I found a note that one kid had written saying "I Hate so-and-so".  So we had a long discussion about respect, politeness, treating each other they way we'd want to be treated, and how hating is a bad thing to feel.  As I was in the middle of my "hating only makes everything worse" speech, one of the boys raised his hand and chimed in, "Well it's like in God's eyes we're all brothers and sisters and so we should be nice to each others."  However, soon after, another child contributed, "Well, some people believe we evolved from Orangutans and I believe that too, and maybe the Orangutans got alone but when we evolved to humans people started fighting."  She had quite the well thought-out story with dialog and everything! Yeah.  Then we had to end the discussion.

Oh, and the picture above is one drawn for me by one of the kids (named blurred out) - notice his spelling. :)