Any disruption from the routine stirs them up: a minimum day, an assembly, a fight between classes, rain, whatever. They are so distracted by shiny objects, it'd be amusing, except that I have to teach them little unimportant things like critical thinking and literary analysis, and how to express ideas clearly in their speaking and writing.
The other occurrence that fights against my lesson plan is absences. Any school activity, such as an assembly, necessitates the absence of any kid who is part of the ASB (student government); Clubs Day (which has morphed from information disemination and membership drive into a fund-raising opportunity) means club officers are out of class either preparing or cleaning up after the event. I estimate a full third of my absences aren't illnesses or truancies, but are generated by the life of the school itself.
Today was the Red Cross blood drive. A worthy event which teaches generosity to the community and compassion for the needy. I'm all for it. And though they organize the thing as well as can be done, it inevitably causes absences in my middle-of-the-day periods, as the appointment schedule they use falls behind and causes waiting lines. That's fine: you want to give blood, you civic-minded kid, I encourage you, and you can make up whatever work you missed the next day. In the meantime, I'm going to teach my regular lesson, because I have these other kids, and we can't just pull over to a siding and wait until you get back.
If it were only that easy. Because it's the blood drive, and only because it's the blood drive, the kids who do show up (and this is the vast majority of the class) have been infected by the "different" day, and it creates a class of highly-distracted, talkative, energized students.
Well, since they're mostly talking about the blood drive, and asking other kids who have their forearms bandaged if it hurt, and if they feel faint, and for a full report on how fast the blood came out and if the orange juice was tart, instead of forcing them to pay attention to the short story, which I can't make any more interesting than I already do, I sabotaged their conversation by asking them if they knew what the four blood types are.
This has nothing to do with my lesson, but I have them, so I'm going to play the fish I hook. In the next ten minutes, they learn of the four blood types, what the Rh factor is, how before we had blood typing transfusion often resulted in the death of the recipient, that the Rh comes from the Rhesus monkeys who were used to discover this, that they donate a pint, which is how much a regular water bottle holds, that O- is the universal donor because anyone can receive that type, that what the promotion meant when it said "you can save up to three lives" is that we can separate the blood components now into three groups: plasma (for general blood volume), red cells (carry oxygen, yes, Henry, you remembered from sixth grade, good) and platelets (needed for blood clotting). Then a little bit about heart transplants and the differences between Christian Barnard's first baboon transplant in South Africa in the 60s and artificial hearts that extended life a handful of days, and today's amazing heart-lung transplants that give their recipients years and year of added life. Oh, sure: the donor hearts and other organs come from people who just died and who had given permission beforehand, usually by marking their driver licenses, or whose relatives give permission for their organs to be used for transplants upon their death. There is always a waiting list, so when someone dies who has the right organs that match what the recipient needs, the recipients are called into the hospital to have the operation in a matter of hours from the time their home phones ring.
Well, they were amazed, and four periods of kids were listening to every word I said, something that doesn't happen every day, let me tell you. Once the topic was exhausted, I was able to turn their attention back to our literature book again, and the rest of our time was pretty productive, by literary measures.
I wonder if they'll stand for my putting any of that on their test?
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