Tax Invasion

After two days and five class periods of showing my students how to fill out the federal tax form and grading 100 of them, I am so ready to be done with taxes, but I have two more days and 100 more to grade after that.... The good thing about teaching this, was that I did find out about the Stimulus Rebate. If you haven't heard about it, check it out. I'm pretty stoked for the $1,200 come May when I graduate! Woohoo!

Hmm, let's see if I've had any interesting teaching stories today..... I do believe I do.

I don't know what the deal is with kids showing me their drivers license. I've had three kids in the last two days show me. Two of the three are brothers and I didn't believe them so they showed them to me to prove it. Another kid showed me his pre-haircut picture. It was pretty drastic. It was hanging into his eyes before, and now it is cut to about one inch.

Because today was my first day teaching two classes, the students haven't really picked up my name yet, so they just call me Ms. or Teacher. I'll take either over "hey, girl"!! The one name that made my day is "Hey, Ms., uh, something that starts with an M or J." I was a little confused to where he got that information and asked him, "where did you get that from?" "I don't know. I just saw them on a paper and thought they were yours." I couldn't think of what paper he was talking about since my binder of lesson plans and other information doesn't have my name on it anymore. After helping him with the tax forms, I realized what paper he was talking about. Every day the students pick up their Participation Log and answer the question of the day. At the end of the day or class, I total their participation points for the day and initial the log with my initials: MJ. I was surprised he remembered that because I hadn't signed that class's logs in about two weeks when I "subbed" for my teacher.

For the five classes of Financial Literacy that I'm teaching, we are playing a simplified and individualized "Game of Life" at the beginning of each class period. It absolutely amazes me how spoiled these kids are!!! Yesterday and today they picked their career, annual salary, housing, and family. The comments were hilarious! One kid was bummed because he was a teacher (thanks, buddy!) , a girl was saying how she couldn't live off of anything less than $80,000 per year which was the maximum salary. Another kid drew a nurse as a career and he wasn't too thrilled about it, so I let him redraw; he picked a chef. He just looked at it and said, "I'm gay." When it was his turn to pick his housing, he was shuffling the papers and saying, "If I get a condo, I'm so gay." He ended up getting a mansion but the class didn't let his chef career die. While I was passing out the family situations I decided to change the order of the rows I was going and said, "I'm going to spice things up and start over here." Some kids turned to the chef and asked what spice I was using to spice things up. Maybe you had to be there, but it was dang funny. The most unwanted career was a utilities worker. There was a $30,000 per year doctor and a $55,000 per year teacher. (If only!) Some people have $4,000 extra per month, others only $50. The game is pretty fun. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds throughout the next few weeks!

All in all, I really missed teaching, but it sure is tiring! After talking so much today, my throat is dry, and I have a headache. I am so going to bed early!