Hi, Low, Adorable

I've been subbing all week for a bunch of teachers who have student teachers.  Tuesday I was in a science class and the student teacher was fabulous.  It seemed like he had been teaching for years.  He was teaching about genomes and alleles and genetics, and kept saying "Let's say your parents mate and blahblahblah" as an example for how the offspring would turn out with blue eyes or red hair or whatever.  I LOVED how every single kid flinched every time the guy said the words "your parents mate."  I mentioned that after the first class and he was totally aware of it and was doing it on purpose.  Brilliant.  Despite their squeamishness, the kids loved him.  All I had to do all day was sit in the room and play Angry Birds.

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Monday was a tough day because I was in one of my favorite third grade rooms and their student teacher was horrendous.  One example:   She said she wanted to teach math because it is her specialty. (At this point she should be teaching everything all day, but her cooperating teacher won't let her.) It was a lesson on multiplying and dividing 5s.

The first thing they were supposed to do was copy down these words: division, divider, divisor and quotient.  This was written up on the smart board and she told them to copy it.  She didn't tell them where to copy it (on a blank sheet of paper? in their math journals?) but to give her the benefit of the doubt, I'm guessing they copy vocab on a regular basis and knew where to put it.  But they didn't do it.  Nobody copied it because she barreled ahead with the lesson.  They didn't even have time to get out paper to write the stuff down.

She rushed through a few boring word problems, never once using the words division, divisor, divider or quotient; only stopping long enough to occasionally bitch at someone for not paying attention.  She wouldn't listen to them if they had questions, and she said things like, "Don't come ask me how to do this later because I won't tell you."  You won't?!  Nice TEACHER.

The kids were DONE with math after the first lesson.  The scheduled time for math was up and it was clearly time to move on.  She tried to forge ahead with another lesson but the kids simply couldn't do it.  The first lesson was too torturous to even think of starting a new one.  The teacher sat up at the front of the class and pouted and said, "Oh great, now I'M going to get yelled at because we didn't do this lesson.  Thanks a lot, guys."

Who does that?!

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The highlight of the day was when the kids were doing a phonics worksheet on homophones.  They were supposed to choose the right word to put in the blank in a sentence.  One girl called me over because she was having trouble with one of the problems.  The homophones were "hare/hair" and the sentence was "Gladys washes her __________ every day."  The little girl said, "I don't know what to put." and I thought she wasn't sure what a hare was so I told her it was a wild bunny.  She said, "I know what a hare is, I don't know which one to put in the space because they both make sense."  I almost collapsed from the cuteness.  I can't express how much I love the image of a little girl bathing a jackrabbit every single day.  I said, "Well, I suppose you could wash a hare every day but I bet you'd have a lot of scratches!"

("What? I always walk like this.")

Prison is all the rage

I had my first sub job of the year this week.  I worked in a third grade room for three days.  The teacher had a death in the family early Tuesday morning so she called in to the automated system which called a different sub for Tuesday.  That sub apparently didn't want to come back because I was offered the rest of the week.  I like multiple-day jobs and I even like when I have to do all the plans.  It's kind of crazy the first day, but after that it is smooth sailing.  And I love third graders.

Today they had Friday Fun Time in the afternoon so a group of boys got out the geometric blocks and built a large and intricate prison.  They were very proud of it.  They had me come over and they showed me where the cells were located in the sturdily built section with no windows, and then there was a corridor going to the fenced-in yard that had a basketball court and a track.  I asked why they decided that it was a prison and they all just looked at me and shrugged like, "why not?"  Hear that, Playmobil? Oh, nevermind, I see you already know:

The kids are dying to play prison!  I told them that I used to work at the jail.  They wanted to know all about it so I told them some prison vocabulary words like "shiv," "shank," "keister" and "celly;" I also told them how to start a fire with pilfered paperclip and an electrical outlet; and they loved learning about toilet wine! (Just kidding. I didn't tell them what keister means.)

We also learned about our solar system this week.  I told them the mnemonic for remembering the planets, My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.  I had kids coming up to me all week screaming that sentence at me because I told them I'd give them a thank-you slip if they could remember it.  It was a very fun three days.  I'm sad it's over.  I'm going to miss those crazy little nutjobs.

Working

I haven't been subbing nearly as much as I would like this year so I am taking jobs that last year I would have turned down.  For instance, gym.  I'm not a gym teacher.  I don't like noise and I don't like to try to yell over loud echoing noise in humongous gyms because my voice isn't very loud.  But I do have my very own whistle for just such occasions!  I taught middle school gym last week and they were swimming in the pool.  They are very cute in a pool because some of them are soooooo skinny that they can barely float.  Fat is like a life vest.  My fat is my life vest.  I'm only tubby in case I ever find myself stranded in the ocean for days at a time.  I could do it.  I could tread water for days.  In fact, I couldn't NOT tread water.  I could never drown because I'm too buoyant. So if you ever hear that I drowned, I have been murdered.  I pop up like a cork.  Even when I try to be stealthy and swim under water, my butt pops up.  Oh well.  I'm not chunky, I'm buoyant.  Like a bubble.

I taught third grade last week which is my favorite grade, but this particular class is about 1/3 behavior problems so it was a challenge.  You know what I've noticed about kids since I've been teaching?  Little boys who have mohawks or earrings are little assholes.  And I've seen the same boys without the mohawk and they are NOT assholes when they don't have that strip of long hair running across the top of their otherwise bald head.  Moms, don't let your little boys get a mohawk.  It's not cute and it turns them into little dicks.

More third graders

I had another good day with the third graders.  One of the things they did today that made me laugh was during a vocabulary quiz.  They were supposed to match the word to the definition.  One of the words was "decent" and the definition that was supposed to match it was, "what you might call a good and fair person,"  and another w was "inherit"  and the definition that matched it was "receiving a gift of money or property from a family member."  About two thirds of the kids said that they thought getting a gift of money or property from a family member was decent.  I don't know.  It made me laugh.

And then later we were reading about San Francisco and we got to the end of the chapter and there were some questions and one of them was, "Do you have any stories about your community?" and whenever they are asked to tell a story, every hand shoots up in the air.  I chose five kids to share their stories with us.  My favorite was from a kid who said the following:

"One time at my house we got a big box delivered to us and I asked my dad what was in it and he told me to look, and he threw me his pocket knife.  I cut the tape on the box open really fast and accidentally cut my hand right here (pointing to his hand).  Boy did it ever bleed!  My mom saw it and said, "What the H did you give him a knife for?" and my dad said that he didn't think I'd cut my hand open.  Then I had to go to the hospital."

Third graders

Kira tells me that her school is haunted. Many many years ago, in the olden days (the seventies) a kid died in the boy's bathroom and now he haunts it. He bit her friend Austin in the arm one day. No kidding! There are two janitors at Kira's school. They are both old (in Kira's eyes) but Randy is nice because he has a horn on his trashcan, and Bob is not so nice because he never talks and he is the one who always gets called to clean up puke. Apparently Bob IS the ghost. He died in the bathroom when he was a kid. This story went through school for a few days and then some brave kid actually asked Bob if it was true. Bob told them that he is not the ghost, Randy is. Randy was once Bob's baby and he died when Bob brought him to work one day, and now he came back as an old man ghost and he helps Bob, his dad, with his work. (morbid) I don't know if this is all true, seeing that this version of the story is coming to me through about 15 third graders, but it is interesting, isn't it?