May 1, 2006

Chairs of the Kids Who Didn't Show Up today!

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Today, the class turnout was SO different than what I expected it would be. I arrived at school about 20 minutes before the first bell rang. I did my usual morning routines of running errands, making copies etc before class started. As I walked down the hallway back to my class, I realized that it was quiet. I poked my head in the cafeteria and it was pretty empty. I got a twinge of excitement at this point. I really didn't think that too many people would participate today at my school. I was so wrong.

When I arrived at my door, only 3 kids were waiting for me. Usually, there are at least 10 waiting for me trying to be first in the classroom. When the tardy bell rang, I still had only 3 kids. Within 5 more minutes, 3 more came and then 5 minutes after that, the last student arrived. I had a total of 7 students present out of 19. WOW! My entire grade level had a total of 48 present out of 119. That was just amazing to me. I do realize that a handful of kids who were absent took the day off just because. I also know though that there were kids absent today who either went to the march in Modesto with their families or stayed at home and discussed this with their families.

One of the mom's who droppped off her son told me that she really supports the protest but she left the decision on coming to school up to her son. He told her that he wanted to come to school because the BIG TEST is coming up in 2 weeks and he has to be at school to learn and can't miss any days. Later on in the day, this very same boy told the rest of his classmates that the reason we are boycotting is because "The Americans don't like the Mexicans because they think we aren't important. Today, people aren't going to go to work or to school to show the Americans that we are important if we aren't at work. We should have the same rights." He then said that is was like MLK Jr and Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. "They wanted equal rights back then too!" That boy doesn't miss a beat!

Another mom came in to drop off her daughter and also let me know that she was in support of the protests. She said that she brought her daughter to school though because she felt that it would be much safer for her daughter to be in school than at a protest.

Since I only had 7 show up, I decided to not move forward with our lessons but to rather go deep with some of the skills we have learned previously. I asked them what they wanted to work on for the day and this is what we did: Plural endings, compound words, reference materials, A.R., Using a Table of Contents, 3 digit subtraction with regrouping, and LOTS of multiplication. For science, we stayed with our butterfly theme but went in a different direction. Today, I had them come up with questions that they had about butterflies and we looked up the answers online. It was a fun day.

After school, I picked Sabi up from her school and we went to Modesto to a rally at the Modesto Junior College.

There were probably around 300 people there.

It wasn't a huge turnout but it was a good number of people. I heard that earlier in the day around 3,000-5,000 people marched downtown.

All accounts of both the march and the rally were the same, peaceful and positive.