Disaster struck today in class. One of my kids' grandfather brought in cake/cookies/chips/coke/fruit punch for a birthday party. Party was great, but I had to teach math immediatley afterward. I tried to get them calmed down by doing a little stretching, then a 10 to 1 countdown with their heads down and quiet. This was made difficult by their refusal to sit quietly, and the cries of "blastoff!" at the conclusion of my countdown. Things got no better when I launched into the lesson, which involved kids moving around to kinesthetically grasp adding and subtracting fractions (ok, the whole class is 16/16, if 3 people leave you subtract 3/16, what fraction is left?). So I had kids moving around class which was difficult enough. Then the phone rang, and my FA was not there to get it. I picked up the phone, and it seemed to be some sort of social call for him, so I'm trying to take down the phone number in case it was a parent, but the phone kept cutting out, and the cord wouldn't stretch to the blackboard. In the meantime, some random girl had entered the class and poured herself a glass of fruit punch that was left over from the party. I finally got the phonecall over and struggled to get back control of the class, but every time I turned around, somebody was on the floor, or taking his shirt off, or something. And this was a lesson that required the kids to do some independent work while I moved around to help the kids who didn't get it. On top of this, half the class didn't have pencils, and the rest of the pencils kept breaking and seemed to not want to sharpen correctly. All told, massive disaster, and all while my CMA was observing... wonderful.