LaShandra

I've got a girl in my homeroom this year named LaShandra, and she is an absolute delight.  She and I butt heads once a week or so over some of the silliest things.  I like the way she's never afraid to speak up, even if she's wrong and you can PROVE it to her.  (She's actually quite smart and quick-witted, and even when she's wrong she can still present a reasonable, persuasive case for her point of view.)  Arguing with her can be exasperating as hell, and I can see already that she's going to be one of my favorite students ever.  And I will miss her when she's gone.

I teach four classes of seventh-grade math, and also teach spelling and reading to my homeroom.  I'm a pretty good math teacher, I think.  Last year, my classes improved so much (21%) that the state examining board made us retake the math EOC (End of Course) tests because they thought we might have "mis-administered" the tests.  (That's a polite way of saying that they think we cheated.  It's happened in other school systems in the state, so you have to understand their skepticism.)  The Georgia Department of Education sent two proctors to re-administer the test under their supervision, and this time around our math score showed a 22% improvement.  So I went from being suspected by my principal...she's a nice lady, and I don't blame her for wondering...to being considered the hot-shot teacher at the moment.  (To be fair, the reason our scores improved so much is that we had a really smart group of kids, who had an AWFUL teacher the year before...and by the end of that school the year a lot of them had just quit trying.  Thank goodness that man is not teaching anymore!)  

But though I try hard, I'm only a so-so spelling and reading teacher, I'm afraid.  Spelling, of course, is mostly just memorization.  We have a different set of 20 words each week, and a test on Friday.  On Monday, we read over each word...talk about it...discuss its etymology and any other root combinations that might be similar.  The words always have something in common.  We've got a Halloween grouping coming up soon, and we're working on transportation words this week.  I require the kids to either write a grammatically-correct sentence using each word, or else write a story using any 15 of them.  Some of the kids enjoy writing the story, which requires more thinking but less work...while others prefer just writing a sentence with each word, requiring more work but less thinking. 

A couple of weeks ago, one of our words was magic.  The kids enjoyed that group.  Most of them are Harry Potter fans, and we had other similar words with it:  wizard, wand, occult, etc.  When we talked about the word magic, I asked the kids how stage magicians did their tricks.  Most of them knew there was trickery involved.  Several of them mentioned watching that "Secrets of Magic Revealed" TV show that demonstrates how magicians do some of the more famous tricks.  And I showed them a couple of card tricks a friend taught me.  They're rather impressive, until you know how they're actually done...then anyone can do 'em.  (I had to promise my homeroom that I wouldn't reveal any of the card trick secrets to any of the other seventh-grade classes.) 

And then LaShandra piped up:  "You know, Mr. Gardner, not all magic tricks are fake now.  My great uncle does this trick where you give him a dollar...he'll put it in this magic wallet he got...and when he gives it back to you, he's done turned that dollar into a five dollar bill!"

I chuckled, imagining how much fun he must have "amazing" his nieces and nephews like that, and told her, "Now, LaShandra, you know exactly what he's got to be doing.  His 'magic wallet' probably has a little secret pocket somewhere, and he's just inserting your dollar in there and pulling out a five dollar bill that he had hidden in there earlier to give to you." 

"Oh, no, Mr. Gardner!" LaShandra insisted.  "He's doing magic!  He'll do it all day long for you!"

"Aw, come on, LaShandra, you're smarter than that!" I tried to explain.  "Just think about it for a minute.  If he could really do magic like that, then he would just sit down one weekend turning dollar bills into fives and be just as rich as he could be."

"Oh, he's already rich, Mr. Gardner," she insisted.  "He used to work for the railroad, and he's got plenty of money.  He eats out every day and buys a new car every three years."

"Well, LaShandra" I said (beginning to realize I wasn't going to win this argument), "Even if he's got a good retirement pension, he could still be a multimillionaire.  All he'd have to do is take a dollar bill, turn it into a five dollar bill, take that five to the bank and get five ones..."

LaShandra stopped me right there.  "Oh, they won't let him come in the bank no more, Mr. Gardner.  He try to go in the bank, they just meet him right there at door.  Tell him to go on home and not come back."

I just let it drop.  What else could I do?