DAY 54 of subbing

DAY 54 of subbing: not so great. 4th grade at the same charter school in Detroit. Now that I’ve returned home, hugged my husband, had a good cry and climbed under the covers to recuperate, I’ll take a look at the positives first.

It was Antonyo’s first day, and he was so scared, he didn’t want to come into the room. I shook his hand, welcomed him, suggested to his mother that she could leave. I asked all the boys in the room to come up and shake his hand and welcome him. Per office, I assigned someone to be his buddy for the day. I made sure that he got what he needed for classes. By recess, his face showed happiness and he was very happy that I taught them how to make paper airplanes and joined them in flying them around the room. “Now I can show my brother how to make one!” he said. His plane was awesome. By the end of the day – it looked like he fit in. I did a high five with him and asked how he felt and it was a good response. I had a part in that.

Problems: 1. having to teach 4A sometimes and 4B sometimes, and opportunity for extra nonsense every time there was a switch. Administration decided to combine us since only 10 kids showed up today for each class, but it was chaos so I asked if we could go back to our room – easier to handle 10 than 20 – even with another teacher there (whom I don’t know and who doesn’t do things the same way). The other teacher would send the kids back and have them trickle in, causing a disturbance, during the last 5-10 minutes of every class and that was really, really annoying – just when I had all their attention and compliance – boom – distraction city!

2. Several non-stop incessant talkers, some of whom had defiant looks and disrespectful attitudes. I removed three girls from a class and called the office – they came and lectured them and threatened them with dire consequences if there were further problems. Within 10 minutes I called the office again. The guy came and talked with them – then sent them BACK into the classroom, with them saying, “We gave him our side of the story and so he sent us back to class.” *fume* By this time about 25 minutes of class time had been wasted with these girls. So – I called the kids who were cooperative and had them all sit in one area of the room, and sat down and proceeded to conduct a lesson with them. I left the other (there were 4 then) on the other side and ignored them. One did the lesson, the other three didn’t and I left the teacher a note about what happened. I just didn’t think that the whole class should lose out on learning.

3. NO lesson plans! I scrounged around on the desk and found some papers to work on and asked the kids for info about Social Studies and Accelerated Reading.

The rest of the classes went okay, though there continued to be disruption which meant that I placed a couple of the girls out in the hallway for the whole class. Ahhhhhh.

Will I go back there? Not sure. It’s a tough bunch, and not really being supported by the Student Management office didn’t help.