Babysitting

Why do some days just feel like I'm a glorified baby sitter?  It's hard for me to fathom how similar 7th graders can act to 4 year olds.

They have toys that they play with, that distract and demand attention from other students.  So I take it from them, and they cry.

They throw paper at each other, pencils, crayons, they EAT the crayons, candy, and whatever other garbage they can find, including but not limited to hot chips, hot fries, and the bottles that are stuck in their mouths, filled with all varieties of sugared beverages.  They cry for attention, they scream when they don't get their way, they enter a classroom, and completely forget their reasons for being there.  These kids are 13?  Not from everything I've seen.

I can't stand days like today.  5 referrals before lunch.  A bunch of babysitting in every single class, as I go from squabble to squabble, taking toys, putting out fires, telling kids to keep all their chair's feet on the floor, and not to turn around to talk to their neighbor behind them.  No responses from the office because everyone who could come to my classroom is already out on call.  So what can I do?  Because no matter what I do, I can't get Jakia and Amari to SHUT UP about who's smarter - it's a discussion that just HAS to take place in the middle of class, that just HAS to be disruptive and HAS to demand the attention of every single student in the classroom, and then every single student HAS to give their two cents on the discussion.  The way I see it, they both have F's right now, so it seems like they should be discussing who has the higher F (Jakia, at 24%, btw).

You know that analogy about the crabs in a pot?  How if you put a bunch of crabs in the pot, and set it to boil, even though any crab on their own could climb out of the pot, none of them will actually get out because as soon as one of the crabs starts to get a good way up the side of the pot, the rest of the crabs will pull them back down in.  I don't know if it's true or not, but that's sure what class feels like some days.  It's so hard for me to help these kids try to succeed, because it seems that any time any single one of them starts to get a handle on things, they're attacked by the rest of the students and pulled down to maintain the status quo of failure.

In reality, things really aren't that bad.  But on days like today... man - I just wanna see that pot freaking boil.