What a day.

Not too terribly busy today, but I taught what has to be the worst class I will see this year. Its a group of 4th graders who are consistently off the freaking wall. Most of these kids were really good last year, but they seem to have been mixed together with the right combination of intelligence, rambunctiousness, and irreverence that a good teacher can harness and channel into a really crackerjack bunch...unfortunately the teacher they got has chosen to let her class run her, as opposed to running her own class. The result is absolute chaos...the wilder ones mill about the classroom actively ignoring any attempts to impart knowledge to them, they fight in the aisles...and that class also has one of the two socially retarded kids who wander in and out of the classroom screaming and kicking and crying and generally disrupting everything.
We were trying to play a game similar to musical chairs today, and so the kids were sitting in a circle, I was in the middle, explaining the rules, when one of the little bastards decided to "kancho" me, which means jamming his index finders into my rear end. The Kancho is great sport amongst the elementary school kids, boys especially...but is clearly out of bounds for perfoming on the teacher....except for these kids apparently. Their teacher did NOTHING, so I decided to mask my rage by playfully pretending to sit down on the little bastards lap. He squirmed, the chair collapsed, and we spilled into the floor. I felt like an ass for having lost my temper, but the little bastard was more subdued for the rest of the class, and the kids geehawed and did a good job with the game, so I guess I won a round. I guess.