Is there such thing as a Tuesday Slump?

Today didn’t quite start with the same high as the day before… We started the day with a meeting about a girl in our class who had been bullying girls in another class… Funny how differently this was handled than it was “back in the day” when I was in 5th grade… Oh memories… Anyways, the girls involved were split between my class and the other 5th grade intern’s class. Your basic “she said- she said” drama with someone in between stirring the drama pot. When the kids headed off to Art, the other intern and I stayed behind while our mentors sorted through the girl drama. Then came Crew time… At Tollgate we have a philosophy that the kids, the faculty, and the community are all “crew” and not “passengers” in the journey of education. So everyday we have “crew” instead of homeroom and during that time we, as a crew, complete an initiative. Not a game, an initiative because there is some kind of goal we are attempting to accomplish or something that is driving our initiative. This week the kids are working on collaboration… Not the easiest thing to accomplish at any age by any means. So today the kids were attempting to “flip the tarp”. An initiative that require ALL of the class, yes all 22 of them, to stand on a tarp and flip it so that the bottom is on top and the top is on bottom…. Pretty easy right? OH, that’s because I forgot to mention that if one person touches the ground they start over… So imagine 22 5th graders all screaming at each other with the “best way to do the task… It was so incredibly hard to sit and just watch them in the words of Scott “flounder”. The number of times they tried and failed to flip that tarp…. It was getting painful to watch when we suddenly realized more classes were coming outside… FIRE ALARM… oooooops… somehow we had missed that memo or announcement … We lined the kids up, counted and just waited… When all this was over and done we returned to Crew as the kids had not yet accomplished the task. 20 minutes later Scott and I decide to split the kids by boys and girls… The girls flipped it in under 3 minutes… Then it was the boys turn… Now there isn’t much a difference in terms of size 12 boys and 10 girls so it was pretty even however, the girls did the one thing the boys didn’t seem to really get… Listening. On their last try the boys flipped the tarp… though the girls say they didn’t quite make it… We returned to the classroom to have a group discussion of the initiative and it was so interesting to hear what they had to say… Things I would never have expected to come out of 5th graders mouths…. “Collaborating and listening go hand in hand”, “collaboration helps you work with someone you may not always like”. Makes you wonder if you 5th graders could solve the world…. As the day continued it was just a day with a lull... Math was much harder today, the kids struggled and it was difficult to watch them... One of those days were you can't give them the answers and you just have to watch them struggle through. When the day was over we were informed of another bullying incident... One of our boys bullying a boy in another class... Seems like I need to brush up on my conflict resolution notes....