Subbing

After reading Alisyn's blog latest blog entry, I decided to share my exciting adventures from the last two days.

I decided to substitute at my mother's school both Thursday and Friday for a second grade class. I arrived early Thursday morning prepared to take a beating, but was surprised to see a young woman already in the classroom. I stopped in my tracks, thinking that I had mistakenly entered the wrong room. It turns out, however, that she was the student teacher! No one had told me about this! So the deal was that I got to sit and do absolutely nothing the entire day while she taught and handled the class. AWKWARD! However, it turned out to be okay. She was very nice and told me to read a book or something and that I didn't need to worry about a thing. So I did what she said. I felt VERY guilty getting paid for a full day's work (2 days actually) when all I did was read. However, that's the way it goes. District rules.

The kids got used to me just sitting and reading but most were too shy to say anything to me, they just smiled and did a little wave. One child though came over to where I was to use the stapler.
"What are you doing?"
"Just reading"
"Are you really reading that?!" (the book is pretty big)
"Yup"
"Why?"
"Cause I wanted to"
"Huh..."
The child, with confused face and freshly stapled paper, then walked to his desk and sat down to ponder the wonders of the world and why someone would want to read a book that big.

The last half hour of Thursday the secretary "borrowed" me to go and teach the music class. It happened to be a sixth grade class and the lesson plan that day was to be an animator and while listening to Beethoven's 5th draw a picture of what the music reminded them of. When they had finished they got to watch and see what the animators of Fantasia had thought of for the same music. Cool idea. The kids were a riot! I had some of them share their ideas and pictures with the class. I hadn't told the kids the name of the piece of music beforehand, but one boy drew a picture of Beethoven pounding on the piano cause he said the music reminded him of Beethoven, even though he didn't know who composed the song. Another boy drew a picture of a unicorn whose droppings were rainbows. He said the music didn't remind him of unicorns but Fantasia did. I thought that the world would be a much better place if the cats and dogs of my neighborhood had droppings that were rainbows. At least my garden area would be colorful (lousy cats!!).

Today was just as delightful and I had fun spending time with my mom. I got to eat lunch with her and spend recess in her classroom! By the way, I think it's cool that if you are the teacher at an elementary school you get recess too! I definitely need a job that offers recess at least twice a day.