"Christ"

August 24-26

Current Place of "Residence" The Belden Stratford.
Subbed? No.
Worked? Absolutely.

While the bulk of this blog has been dedicated to my experience as a substitute teacher (as it should be), there is another huge part of this experience.  It's huge enough that it is actually the noun in the title and not the adjective. Currently and all summer I am a nomad. In order to maintain some semblance of an income over this summer I worked at a bar. I decided that my best interests would include continued employment at this bar.

In addition to all of the days that I have described working at the school, I have also peppered in a few days working at the bar. I worked all day Saturday and when I clocked out I received a printout of the hours that I worked from Sunday through Saturday at the bar. I then used mental math to add those hours to the hours that I worked in school. I repeated said math because it seemed like I had made an error. After double checking the entire thing I grabbed my phone and sent a text to my friend.

"I worked sixty hours this week. Christ."

There really isn't much to tell about my non-teaching side except that I'm living off of generous friends and promises.  I worked all weekend at the bar.  I ended up kicking drunk people out or asking them to move or just merely speaking to them while using my "pissed teacher" voice. It made me realize that there are a surprising amount of similarities between drunk people and elementary school students.

Both elementary students and drunk people don't give a fuck what you have to say unless you say it with the proper inflection.  A nice threat sprinkled in doesn't hurt either.
While elementary students for some reason want nothing more than to stand up and run around, drunk people want to stand up and dance.  Neither accomplishes anything.
Elementary students and drunk people flirt the same way. I'm going to give drunk people the edge here, but it's more of an experience thing. The one caveat though is that drunk guys hitting on sober girls and elementary boys have about the same success rate.
When dealing with both drunk people and elementary students it often seems like you are the only one who has any common sense. I'm actually going to give elementary kids the edge in this one.  Not because drunk people should know better, but I see more potential in getting through to a seven-year-old throwing a temper tantrum than a drunk girl crying.
Trying to get a large group of either drunk people or elementary students to do anything essentially comes down to herding cattle.  It's about establishing the edges, guiding from the back of the group, and just making sure that you have minimal losses.

I'm sure there's more but that's my brief list.

Lesson 6: It's all about figuring out transferable skills.