August 27
Current Place of "Residence" The Belden Stratford.
Subbed? Yes.
Grades Taught 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 7th
Subject(s) Taught I had the "computer" schedule, meaning I sat in the lab and had people come to me. EXCEPT, the lab was occupied so I found myself forced into classrooms with nothing prepared. Again.
How many times did I want to say "fuck" Overall the day flew by without problem but then my last period with seventh graders happened.
Was I asked why my ears were red? Yes. Actually to be more specific one of the students told me that they heard my whole face got red when I got mad. While this is likely the case and also likely why every class I've ever had has seen this face, I told him it's simply because of the heat. I always include this information because I find it a very interesting difference that would never come up in education classes. We talk about the problems of cultural differences when a white teacher is in front of an all-black classroom, but what happens when you have to start discussing genetic differences? My ears/face/forehead is red because I'm hot or mad and white. That's what happens when those things happen to a white person. Just some food for thought.
How good of a teacher was I? For most of the day I found myself operating at a solid 7, but then the last period had me down again.
I'd like to start out by saying that I had never known that House starred in Stuart Little. Hugh Laurie is sitting there with a clean shaven face speaking all prim and proper in his American accent and I don't know how to respond. I point this out here because one of my periods involved watching Stuart Little with my class and I kept telling them to be quiet because, of course, it's my job, but I found myself completely entranced by House as a house-dad. The one thing that I came up with from that class to pass on is to never let all the students sit up front. They're never close enough and always in the way.
The rest of my day went by fairly uneventfully. If I thought getting 24 first graders into a computer lab and on the proper websites and working quietly brought with it a certain degree of difficulty, then getting 24 first graders their own laptops, signing them into those laptops, getting them on the proper pages, and then teaching each student how to actually use a laptop brought with it the requirement for some sort of magical powers. Needless to say I conducted a huge shit show that period.
My next period involved worksheets and a misguided game of Heads Up 4-Up. The students got worksheets and halfway through the period I decided that they might be a little quieter if they played a game that centered around being quiet and as I didn't think they'd fall for the Quiet Game, Heads Up 7-Up became my best option. I told them we wouldn't exactly be playing Heads Up 7-Up and they responded about as well as to be expected. They screamed and yelled and threw miniature hissy fits. Lovely. When I quieted them down and explained we just were going to use four students instead of seven they were initially okay with it. But I forgot the most important thing when playing games with students. They're all mean to each other and they have to bitch to someone about how much of a little shit the other person is being. In a game wrought with peeking, preferential thumb pressing and arguments over who picked who the only clear winner was the teacher who left the room and missed it all.
Luckily I came from that game to my viewing of Stuart Little and that brought my spirits up and made me want to watch Back to the Future, just like anything featuring Michael J. Fox as an adorable outcast does. After that, my fifth graders got to play on their iPads quietly for the period. They did. It made me happy.
Then I made the long walk up the stairs to seventh grade. They did not quiet down, yelled at each other, told on each other, hit each other, and basically kept doing their best first grader impression the entire time I shared a room with the mob. It's amazing how well they all stayed in character. But something happened in this particular period that sent me into my introspective spiral. While two girls were yelling at each other I slowly got up and started towards them to break them up. I arrived too late and one of the girls had taken a few swings. A few students tried to pull them apart and I took a few shots to the side and one or two to the face while trying to break them up. I took them both to security while they still tried to rip the other one apart. None of it made a lot of sense and when I sat next to their actual teacher to fill out the incident report she confirmed that by informing me what started it.
"The funny thing is they friends. They like each other a lot and will hang all over each other. I guess the girl just got mad the other girl be talking to someone else. Then they just get all on each other and have to be separated."
The thing that made me think about how well I handled the situation came from the fact that the room was filled with so much noise and maintain such a high level of disorganization that some students barely noticed it. Not only had I fostered an environment that led to a fight, but one where a fight barely registered a couple notches off of the norm.
I came up with a solution. These students needed something to do. It was the second time I had entered that class and been handed the same crossword for students to do for an hour. That's not education. I'm sorry to say that so harsh. One of the students told me that he was only talking because he didn't have anything else to do. Amen sir. Amen.
Lesson 7: You can't teach an old crossword puzzle new tricks.
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