Flow Charts and Puberty

Everyone's day at Carrington starts with START. START stands for Students and Teachers Are Reading Together. The day begins with 15-20 minutes of silent sustained reading with a written reflection and then the last half of the period is either used for a literacy lesson or a read aloud. And, when I'm really lazy, we just read the whole 40 minutes. It is great! Most of the students and all of the teachers love it! Everyone gets to pick their own book and begin the day reading for fun. I have a great START class and there is rarely a battle to get them to read and participate.

Well, one day this week, we had finished our reading and reflecting and were going through our literacy lesson for the day. Our academic coach plans these lessons for us so there is no preparation on the teacher's part, which makes this class that much more enjoyable. So, our topic this past week was on graphic organizers, specifically flow charts and timelines.

We looked at a few examples of each and then we were having a conversation about different situations we could use these graphic organizers. We went over the usual: life cycles, war time lines, etc. When I asked for another example of where we could use a flow chart, a young man in my class raised his hand. When I called on him, he proudly answered, "Menstrual cycles!" This caught me completely off guard; it was the last thing I was expecting to hear, especially from a boy. My fiance who is 22 is still freaked out by any discussion about a menstrual cycle so I just assumed all 7th grade boys would be too and would avoid this topic. My surprised response, with a quick double take was, "WHAT?" He began to respond, "You know..." Before he could go any farther I said, "Yes, I know. Thank you." And, we moved on. Talk about an interesting start to the day...

Every Friday we have a quiz in my class on topics we've learned earlier in the week. Seventh grade is the year of major change for middle school students. Some are well into puberty, some are right in the middle of it, and others still look like they are in third grade. This makes for an interesting mix of students with hormones and emotions going crazy! Any man who teaches 7th grade should be well prepared to deal with a pregnant lady. This past Friday, one of my "third" grade boys, in the middle of his quiz, exclaims partially excited and partially confused, "Ms. Hemric, I have hair growing on my fingers!" One boy behind him advised him to shave it off before it got out of control. Then my "third" grader looks at me with concern in his eyes and says, "I don't want to become as hairy as a gorilla." I assured him he wouldn't and that hair on his fingers was normal. However, he had completely lost his train of thought and spent the rest of his quiz examining his fingers and playing with the peach fuzz that was beginning to grow there. Now, if only his voice would change so that when he yells across the room for me, it wouldn't pierce my ears as high as it currently is.

I am thankful that this is the extent of the sex education that takes place in my seventh grade math classroom!