Queen of Rambles

I’m not the fittest person in the world, so I don’t think I have a hope in hell of surviving the rest of the week. Day one in the first grade was horrible horrible horrible. I’ve subbed this class many times and have never had a major problem, but they have a new student and he is a jackass. I guess that’s not nice to say about a little first grader, but if I put you alone in a room with him you’d probably be saying the same thing. I hate know-it-all-bossy-boss types and this kid is the epitome of that. There is an extremely bad kid in the class and most of the students just ignore his antics. They have to. This kid won’t let it go. He argues with the bad boy across the room, making the situation ten times worse than it needs to be. It’s days like today that I long for corporal punishment to be reinstated. I don’t honestly believe that a beating will do anything positive for a child, but I was willing to give it a shot today.

I think I’d be quickly defeated by the screams of 20 students. You know, if 20 students attack, even if they are short little things, I think they could do some serious damage. I can just see myself being stampeded by an army of seven-year olds. What a way to go.

It didn’t help that the kids had to attend a 45 minute flute and harp concert right before lunch. The music really was beautiful. The duo was in town playing the Kennedy Center and has also played Carnegie Hall and other fancy-schmancy places that I’ll probably never visit. The overheated auditorium of an elementary school seems like a major step down, but apparently some big performing arts committee brings quality productions to the local schools. The kids were not impressed. They prefer puppets and jugglers to flutes and harps.

The day was also not helped by mandatory indoor recess. We had a heat advisory today and there was no way anyone wanted to take a bunch of kids out in this weather. They would have been dropping like flies. That meant they didn’t get to work out any of their energy, so they were even more wild in the afternoon.

Did I ever say that I might consider teaching elementary school? I was premature. I can’t imagine dealing with little tattle-tales day in and day out.

Three more days with them. Three. I need all the patience I can muster, and I don’t think I can muster much.

And I really can’t muster patience for cockroach saving. There are cockroaches all over the school and several of the kids try to save them and put them outside, while the other try to stop on them. Personally, I just try not to gag when I see one. I want to be the type of person who promotes a respect for all life forms, and I want to make heroes of the bug savers but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Cockroaches. Shudder.

On a completely unrelated note, I have decided that it would be extremely cool if humans were marsupials instead of mammals. I’d really like to look in my pouch and see my little bean of a baby. I suppose it would be rather dangerous to have a set-up like that since I probably couldn’t keep my hands out of my pouch and away from my baby and that would probably be deadly, but wouldn’t it be cool? I wonder why no sentient marsupial ever evolved. I want to see what that would have looked like.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 at 7:10 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.