Drama Club - 3/12/08

I finally realized today why, in some ways, the boys are actually easier to deal with than the girls. Boys like to get into a lot of conflicts. And the conflicts are the major reasons why the boys get distracted. "He hit me, tell him to leave me alone," type of stuff. The advantage with the boys is that once I neutralize the conflict, I can move on. Well, briefly anyway. Unfortunately, there are a lot of conflicts so I waste a lot of time neutralizing. Now the girls have their fair share of conflicts, but that's not the main issue. The biggest obstacle that I deal with for the girls is that they feel that anything that they are doing is more interesting than anything that I plan. And that is really freakin' annoying. They are constantly having their own little chats and playing their own little games. So I'm actually in competition for their attention. With them. And today, I just wasn't feeling up to that. For one thing, there were additional students brought into the club. Which took it up to 16. Which is a pretty high number considering that I was used to 6 or 7. Some of the new girls are just the class clown types who are just grabbing the spotlight and making it about them. And with the bigger number of kids, there's a bigger number of eyes to pay attention to them. Plus, the club is a combination of boys and girls. Mostly girls and about 4 boys. So I have to spend time negotiating that tension. Anyway, the girls just weren't into anything I had to say. At one point, one of them lost an earring and every single kid decided that they wanted to help look for it. I tried to settle the kids down by doing a relaxation exercise. I had them just lie down while I described a serene scene of lying on the beach. That actually worked for about 15 minutes. But then they just went right back to acting silly. Dancing around, spinning in circles, whatever. Quite frankly, I just gave up. I let them do whatever the hell they wanted to do. I got tired of yelling at them. I got tired of putting them in time outs. I was just tired of whole damn thing. So as long as they didn't kill each other, I was fine with it. But since I am still the master of punishments, I did let them all know that they forfeited their lollipops based on their behavior. I ended the club by grabbing a few of the kids at a time to start auditioning them for the end of the year show. Yes, after all of the stress of the Black History show, I can now start stressing about the End of the Year show. When it was time for the club to end, I simply told them to gather their things. And those were pretty much the last words I said to any of them. I honestly couldn't even look at them at that point. They're just wearing me down. Tomorrow's a half day so no after school. I really like the sound of that right now.