Meghan은 간다, Meghan ya no esta aqui

Bonus Points

At subbing yesterday I learned a whole new way to cut out snowflakes. Bonus points. Add that to my list of lifeskills. I should put it on my resume.

posted by Meghan @ 5:05 PM 0 comments

Boooooks

You know you really are a teacher when you get yourself up early on a Saturday and spend 5 hours walking around and shelving items in exchange for free children's books. I did just that last Saturday, deciding it was worth the opportunity to work at the Scholastic Book Fair Warehouse Sale in order to get free books. I mean, I can't afford to buy them, so I might as work for them, right?

I walked away with $50 worth of books, which was actually more than $100 worth of books considering all the books in the warehouse were at least half off. Grand total of 22 chapter books, and 2 picture books. Awesome!

Now I just need a classroom. It's weird to buy books for a classroom and students you don't have. My mom says that taking pictures of my bounty and telling people all about it qualifies me as a nerd. No, Mom, I think that might have been the old accordion music you bought for me yesterday at the thrift store :)

Monday my patience was pushed to the limit by a sweet looking boy who colored his nose red ("I'm Rudolph!") with a marker during morning free time. He was stepped on later in the day because he was trying to get through the crowd at the paper station and decided lying on the floor, crawling through legs was the quickest route. He got in trouble at recess for spitting.

It's amazing to me, but when he asked me if he could go to the bathroom toward the end of the day, and I replied with, "I don't know, with everything that's gone on today I'm not sure I can trust you to go to the bathroom", he looked at me with his big innocent eyes as if he had no idea what I was talking about.

Unfortunately, this was not a kindergartener. He was in fourth grade. OH SIGH.

posted by Meghan @ 12:16 PM 0 comments

Some Good, Some Bad

It has to happen sometime, I guess. Most days I happen to sub, I leave at the end of the day thinking that it was all pretty good and that I'm really getting a hang of this subbing business. Then there are days like yesterday. Maybe it all just has to even out somehow. The law of averages? Sure.

Wednesday I had a full day sub job for a teacher who had been gone the two previous days. Her poor kids had already had two different subs, and I was the third to come along. They missed their teacher, and they weren't afraid to say so. They didn't proclaim this in a mean way toward me, but as a general statement that they missed their teacher. They were a great class, and I had no big problems with them. A good day.

I was called back to the same school yesterday, except in a third grade classroom. I only did the afternoon, so I met the teacher midday, who gave me instructions, introduced me to the class, and the led the kids to the lunchroom. When they had come in from their PE class, they had done so orderly, quietly, and very respectfully. I thought it was going to be a good afternoon. Wrong.

I don't know how it moved so quickly into chaos, but it did. We did a brainstorming session on winter/Christmas themes and words, and I could not get them to stop chatting. It was just utter disrespect and although I was using the reward/consequence system that the teacher had in place, the kids were not responding to it.

The most difficult thing for me was that I had an older teacher (an assistant of some sort) who was in the classroom during this time. It is just about the most embarrassing thing that can happen to me, in or out of the classroom, to have another, older teacher watch me completely fumble and lose a class's attention.

Needless to say, I was happy when the kids left. I probably just have to have one of these days every once in a while to remind me to be thankful for the good ones.

posted by Meghan @ 10:00 AM 0 comments