Meet Mr. Backpack

Oops!

I regretted saying it about 5 minutes after it was out of my mouth. By that time, Tammy had had plenty of time to do her best to make the backpack feel like a vital member of our working community.

At Sylvan, the kids are grouped at tables of three students to one teacher. Each student is working on his individual assignments, and the teacher monitors the progress of all three, making sure that the lessons are completed with the maximum success. Today, I had John working on 4th grade math, Abigail working on 1st grade math, and Tammy working on beginning reading. Tammy's a pretty friendly person, and it wasn't long before she was striking up a conversation with Abigail while I was trying to get John started on his work. I could tell that Abigail was going to have a very hard time concentrating on her work, so I instructed her to move one chair closer to John and to put her backpack in the seat she had been occupying so that her backpack wouldn't cause the chair to tip over (it had previously been on the back of the chair) and so that her backpack could "do his work while you do yours." Just a simple, silly sentence--we all knew it was silly!--but Mr. Backpack breathed his first breath in that moment and began disrupting my table as only a child with nothing better to do can disrupt things.

Tammy tried to get him to do some work. She handed him my stack of papers and a pencil (when my back was turned) a couple of times. I managed to put a stop to that by convincing her that Backpack couldn't earn tokens for her, so she should do her own work. I suspect her of trying to have conversations with him, too, when my attention was not with her at the moment. Finally, I threatened to move Backpack to a different table altogether and met with much more success (in fact, Abigail at one point nearly left her eraser in front of him, thought better of it, and moved it to her space on the table--I watched that whole exchange out of the corner of my eye).

One little comment--so simple, so silly, so fateful--changed the course of a table today. Ironically enough, today Tammy was learning about characters in stories: perhaps she already knows more than enough about them. =)