Queen of Rambles

What a day. What a long, stressful, annoyingly bad day. It ended with me rushing out the door after purposefully NOT divulging my sub request number to anyone.

I was doing middle school PE, which is usually a breeze. I used to love doing PE when I was working in my home town. Of course, all those middle school teachers were crusty old grey-beards who didn’t take any slack off anyone. Not so with the teacher I was working for today. I always look for clues at the beginning of a job, and at first I assumed I was working for someone older and experienced. She had pictures of her kids all over the desk, and they were older–probably high school.

But then I noticed a major clue. A 2004 graduation tassel. The high school aged daughter was not the daughter. She was the teacher. I was sharing an office with another lady (my age) and she confirmed. I was working for a first year teacher who was all of 21 years old. Not that there’s anything wrong with young, new teachers. I’ve been there before. But this particular teacher had some serious problems.

I knew there was a problem the second I read the lesson plans. “Do warm-up, run pacer, ask other teacher for help.” Really helpful, eh?

Then I walked out and saw my group of lovelies sitting in chaos on the gym floor. The other groups were all lined up nice and neat. My group was a big amoeba in constant motion. I know that kids are often worse for subs, but they also generally start out with the same behavior that their regular teacher expects of them. I tried all my tricks with these classes and did not have much luck at all throughout the day. I was called mean several times, though. And I did get a lot of exercise since I had to make up a warm-up as I went along. Since she didn’t leave a specific routine and I couldn’t remember the names of many things, I just had to model. It was very embarrassing because I know my boobs were bouncing out of control. And it was very clear that the boys noticed.

By the second class I was starting to hit my stride so things improved quite a bit. I was called mean at least 47,837 times, which made me proud. Don’t they realize that’s a compliment?

My last class kind of scared me. There was a boy who was acting really weird and just would NOT listen until I walked up to him, touched his shoulder and looked him right in the eyes. That’s when I noticed that his eyes weren’t quite right. It suddenly dawned on me that he must be mentally disabled, so I kept a close eye on him and confirmed my initial suspicions. He had zero impulse control and I actually had to physically restrain him from hitting another student. Fun fun fun. The kid was strong as an ox! I’ve restrained students before, and it’s usually enough to just step between them or put your hand on them. They know it’s over. This kid didn’t take that clue. It all turned out ok in the end, but it was a pretty tense moment. Afterwards I asked the other PE teacher about the boy’s mental status and her totally PC response was “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but he’s just not right in the head.” Imagine that in a very thick southern accent.

It’s interesting that I’ve been to four schools–two wealthy and two low-income. The low-income schools were sooooo much better than the wealthy schools. At the low-income schools the students are expected to behave respectfully at all times. The teachers and administrators rule with an iron fist. Not so at the wealthy schools. Things are a lot looser and the experience is more what I am used to. I’m sure there must be some kind of big social commentary that can be made from all this, but I’m not yet sure what it is or what the causes are. It will be interesting to see how things progress.

And now I have to go see if I can find a VCR tape. There was a satellite emergency at Mike’s job today so he is still at work at 8:30 pm. I’m going to have to pick him up from the metro right in middle of Everwood, so I want to record it.

I think I’ve figured out why I am fat and Mike is skinny. When he called to tell me he wouldn’t be home until at least 8 my first response was a panicked “but what will you eat for dinner????” He seemed perplexed and informed me that he’d eaten a banana. Now, to me a banana is a nice snack but it’s just not dinner. I would be totally grouchy-hungry in his situation. I really need to stop eating.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2004 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.