Insults and Ignorance

Insults
After lunch, my students are incredibly squirrely. I am convinced it has to do with the preservatives, high fructose corn syrup and trans fats that are in the school lunch. Every day it is a battle when I pick them up from the cafeteria. On this particular day, one of my students could not get himself together: spinning in circles, hopping up and down, throwing his sweatshirt around, you get the idea. So, at the classroom door, I stop the class and tell this student for the billionth time to calm down, get in line and get ready to go back to class. He responds, "Aarrgh! Woman!" You know, with the lip pop and all. I almost lost my mind. Luckily I filled up on patience that day (the previous day I broke a clipboard by slamming it down on a desk-low on patience) and just stared at him with giant eyes for about 45 seconds while the rest of the class just stood and watched. At first he said, "What?" But when I didn't budge, he eventually realized that what he had said was not OK with me and apologized.
When I told my fellow teachers what had happened, they all said, "At least he didn't cuss at you." I am not so sure.
The sad part is that he hears this type of thing at home and thinks it is OK.

Ignorance
We have been practicing our state standard testing since we all get tested in March. The pressure is really intense as I am judged as a teacher on how well my students do on this test. One of the things that is tested is ability to respond in writing to a given text. So, we are reading a non-fiction story about elephants and how smart they are. The writing prompt says something like, "The author of this article thinks elephants are smart. Use examples from the text to support this idea." Well, it was written better than that, but you get the point. So, I am circling the room to see what my students are writing. The response should be at least two paragraphs in length and I notice one student has written four words-all of which I can't read. So I say to him, "Go back in the story and find a part that says something about elephants being smart." He responds, "But it doesn't say anything about that." I say, "Yes it does, go back and circle the sections that explain how elephants are smart." He says, "But in this story the elephants aren't talking." I then realize that he thinks elephants can talk. So, of course the elephants in this story aren't smart because they aren't talking. Remember, I teach fourth grade, not pre-K. I wanted to yell "Elephants can't talk!" But I didn't. I just walked away and watched my test scores go down the drain.
The kid watches way too much of the cartoon channel. And needs to visit the zoo.