Avenues Level C Class

Avenues Level C is my second smallest class. It started off with four girls: Dorothy, Ruby, Melanie, and Michelle. They are in first and second grade. The first day of class, I told Dorothy that that is my grandmother's name, and the other girls started calling her "grandmother" after that. Dorothy stopped coming to my class in February, though, so I was down to three. I will lose Ruby in March, too, so that's another two-kid class for me.

Ruby is the dominant one in the class. I think she gets it from her mother. A couple times Ruby handed in her homework with a message from her mom that I should correct it immediately so she could take it home that day. I told her her mom could wait one day. Jeez.

Ruby is extremely smart, and has a really good grasp of English for her age. Apparently her mother paid our Canadian teacher about a thousand dollars (a million won) a month to tutor her privately for a few months. I wish some parent would do that for me. That's fifty percent of my income.

Ruby is really stubborn and overbearing frequently, though. She interrupts other students, tries to sit in my chair while I'm writing on the board, and often refuses to do things she doesn't like. A couple times she's told me she wasn't going to do the homework, but I think her mother

interfered when she looked at her assignment, and forced her to do it.

Michelle and Melanie are both smart, too, but get overpowered by Ruby a lot. Michelle likes to participate and Melanie doesn't as much. I think they'll both do much better without Ruby in the class. Update: I just found out that Melanie is also moving to another class next week. So it will be Michelle and a boy whose name I don't know yet, but who Heather says is a troublemaker. I hope it works out okay.

Michelle and Melanie

These girls do this funny thing where they number their turns in advance. If I say we're going to read a story out loud, Ruby will say "Me first!" and then Michelle and Melanie will both say "Me second!" and I give the second turn to whoever said it first. Or sometimes one of them will want to go third, so she'll say "Me third!" When there were four of them, they had to do a few rock, paper, scissors games to determine the order. When I took their pictures, they refused to get together, then argued over the order. Michelle got first, but the other two wanted to go last, and neither would back down. So I just snapped candids. Kids are jerks.

These are my best students in terms of entertaining writing assignments. I have them write stories a lot (which they recently got tired of), and they come up with some funny things. This week I had to give them a writing test, the prompt being "Write a story about something that chases you." Michelle wrote that a lion chased her, but she went to her family and then they went to the police and told everyone in the world, and they killed on lion, but the others just went to the father lion, but then he died, and the other lions cried for hundreds of years, and then they turned into sand, which we can play in now. But wait, there's a lion!