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Computer Lab #1 – your mission, should you decide to accept it (and you would be crazy not to), is to supervise 25 5th graders (in Livonia) at a time as they work on fun projects on the computers. They are allowed to talk, to get excited, to show friends what they are doing – just no video games. No problemo!

If that’s not enticement enough, you are also allowed to use one of the computers, and you get two planning periods and a 55 minute lunch during your 8 hour work day.

Sigh. I might miss this job. 🙂

Keegan sat next to me on the steps in the gym. “I saw you when  you came into the office today,” he said. “There were 2 kids sitting at the table in the office playing cards – I was the one with the blond hair.” 🙂 I tried not to chuckle – and asked him if I could give him a hug instead.

Keegan was my special helper during P.E. today because he has a broken wrist and is not allowed to play. I asked him to count how many balls were on each side of the gym after a brief contest of “Cleaning Your Backyard” where each team throws them on the other side. I noted with amusement that he had to go and touch each ball in order to be able to count them. Such a “five-year-old” thing to do. 🙂

During the class after lunch, the maintenance man needed more time to mop the gym, and outdoors someone was mowing the lawn of the big field. Debating where to take the gym class, the teacher mentioned that her kindergartners had never played on the playground equipment next to the gym, as it was reserved for the older children, and her kids’ playground was around the other side of the school. She suggested that they would probably like the opportunity. And they did! They were SO happy – the slide is taller, the monkey bars are different – they swarmed here and there and thrilled to be able to be on the “big kids'” playground. Nothing was beyond their abilities – it’s just that the kids are kept separate during recess for safety’s sake (older kids are 5th grade).

Then a small special ed class came out and needed the equipment, so I took the kindergartners out into the now-finished field. It is such a delight to behold 5 and 6 year olds. It was a big soccer field with baseball diamonds in one corner, and they were just so very happy to have the opportunity to run and play as they wished. No equipment, not even a ball. They climbed on bleachers, picked flowers from next to-but not inside of-the woods, ran, cartwheeled, laid down, played tag, and just reveled in the chance to enjoy a gorgeous, gorgeous day in a whole big field. An adult such as myself might look at it and think, “I don’t want to walk all the way to the other side,” but to a Kindergartner – it was, “Let’s go to the other side!” How full of joy they were!

The next class, we went to the field but took along some balls for them to play with. It was a pretty easy day for me – sitting and watching them all, settling a few arguments, thanking God for the beautiful sky and weather.

From the first class I took out, it was only about 5 minutes before at least 5 of the wanted to go use the bathroom. So I called the office on the walkie-talkie and asked for advice, since I couldn’t take 5 in and leave 21 behind. One of the very nice secretaries came outside and ushered inside all who had such a need, after much going back and forth and changing of minds by about 4 others.

Last of all, the 5th graders played a rousing game of kickball, which I only needed to umpire. Their knowledge and ability and for the most part – cooperation – was also a joy to witness, as they were quite capable of taking all the matters into their own hands – as long as their was one adult to settle the minor disputes along the way.

Leaving the school (in Canton) today, I saw a couple who must be in their mid-70s – working as crossing guards – him on one side of the street, and her on the other. Perhaps they are a married couple doing this job together?

And as I shared the Keegan story with the office secretaries, one of them shared that last week one of the wee ones was heard to muse, “All my birthdays are in the summer.”

“There are two Kindergarten teachers in our school with the last name Macheski,” the kindergartner told me. “But one of them has the first name M.R.S. and OUR teacher has the first name M.S.”

🙂 It was a sweet day with sweet kids – a few overly chatty ones got on my nerves (S. didn’t want to listen and seemed to think she was the teacher occasionally), but it was a good day. I love how this age of child is so very responsible. They know their routine – where their orange folder goes, what to do next, who is the line leader or teacher’s assistant. It’s sometimes hard for me to stick to their exact routine, but I love how they take it all so seriously – making sure they have their crayons, and their sharpened pencils. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s mostly when a few of the kids do NOT follow the rules that Kindergartners get upset. Cutting in line (a federal offense), not sitting in your right seat (they have the district attorney on speed dial), or touching something/going somewhere that they wouldn’t try if the “real” teacher was there – really sets off the majority who want to do everything right. I need to remember to take these things seriously, because honestly, all I want to do is have everybody sit SOMEwhere, read them a book, or walk them 30 feet away to Art class without having to take 5 minutes to discuss the walking order!  Hopefully it is useful for them to hear that these should NOT be big matters.

This teacher has all the kids put their school-to-home orange folder into a bin at the beginning and she told me to have the kids count out loud with me because if there weren’t 22 in there, it would serve as a reminder for a couple of them to go get theirs out of their lockers. Which – it did. 🙂

They also take the Pledge of Allegiance very seriously – I think that’s true up through the first couple of grades. After that, it’s a reluctant duty, still done by most, but by high school, it melts away to a half-hearted, slumping, sotto voce grunt, if anything is said at all.

Yesterday was wonderful. I taught PE to about 5 classes at two schools. The kids had a blast playing games that used soccer skills and playing kickball and I had a good time watching them. Half inside, half outdoors in the gorgeous weather! Also, due to one class being on a field trip and a teacher prep being next to lunch time, I had a break from 11:20 until 1:55 so – I went home and relaxed! First time this ever happened, and probably the last.

One negative comment: a boy in either 3rd or 4th grade asked me, “What letter of the alphabet comes after M?” They were shooting some goals and giving themselves a letter every time they scored and he didn’t remember his alphabet. 😦

Then there was today…..

One girl told me right off, “I have a talking disorder.” I said, “Not in this class.”
Fortunately I only had her in there for an hour and a half. Not sure who came out ahead.

I have canceled all the 6th grade classes at a particular Livonia school – of the classes I had been in and had a rough time. But I decided to take a class I hadn’t encountered except for a short time in Music class. As soon as I walked in, I said, “I had you for music, didn’t I?”
A student – D – said, “Yeah, you kicked me out of music class.”

I said, “No, you kicked yourself out. I never kick anyone out – but sometimes your behavior leads to you choosing to kick yourself out because you won’t cooperate.”

(This reminds me that yesterday a little girl asked me, “Are you nice?” I responded,
“Are YOU nice? How I act will depend on how you act.”)

Back to today. Sigh. Another 6th grade class off of my list. I find it intriguing that the 5th grade classes are all easy to work with, but the 6th grade classes are a pain in the butt.
The school only has 5th and 6th graders. I mentioned this to another 6th grade teacher, saying, “Next year – those kids are going to come in just fine – so get them settled right from the start.”

Talking. Ignoring direction. Talking during a test. Disrespectful language (one boy yelled, “Screw you!” because he was angry about missing ten minutes of recess because of his earlier disruptive behavior. Sigh. It just didn’t go well, although I must admit that it was mostly 3-5 students causing the trouble. I need to learn – if I stay with this job, which is unlikely because I’m looking for work as an editor/writer/graphic designer now – I need to learn how to proceed with class even while a student is cutting up, talking, messing around, talking to everybody.

I had two great days with 5th graders in Livonia after that awful day with the 2nd grade in Redford. Sigh. My own township.

As I sat comparing notes with 3 other subs (two black ladies, one white lady) on Friday at the Montessori school, we discovered that all of us had subbed at the Int’l Prep Academy in Detroit – and ALL of us had vowed that we would never sub there again. It’s really too bad. They have an awesome old building and I’m sure that the staff is trying  – it’s a charter school. But – it’s just not worth it for us to put ourselves thru a whole day of dealing with rebellious kids (even the younger ones!) who won’t listen, won’t obey, and just constantly disrupt. Sometimes I wonder if there just needs to be a military school for all the kids who won’t cooperate. But then I remember that there are many teachers who lovingly know how to deal with these rambunctious rebels – but I find, at least right now, that I’m not one of us – at least not as a sub.

Overheard in the teachers’ lounge at an elementary in Livonia: there was a big to-do involving a number of 6th grade students. Apparently it involved a certain hand signal that some girls were giving to each other – seemed to be a dare – and one of the girls grabbed and squeezed the private parts of one of the boys! The boy was pretty upset.
A couple of teachers/counselors were involved in dealing with them. One teacher’s remark was, “this is why we put Human Growth class at the end of the year.It’s a sort of sexual education class, taught separately to the boys and the girls, which gives them the basics about their body parts and menstruation (apparently that was more recently added to the boys’ curriculum, but it has always been part of the girls’) and what the parts do – but they do NOT get into how to have sex, exactly.

I think everybody is ready for summer vacation. Except me, because I haven’t found another job yet.

Good: the past two days at a Livonia elementary school – wonderful kids. It’s not that nobody ever talks out of turn, but they respond in a good way when spoken to about it.
I was in the Media Center, and then in a couple of 5th grade classes.

I have a friend named Carolyn whose mother used to tell her, “I’m going to love you no matter what you act like, but I want you to have the kind of actions so that other people will love you too.” Well, I think those 5th grade students have parents who think that way. However, the second graders I endured today in Redford – not so much.

Bad: half the second graders ignored me regularly. Some were loud, some skipped out of class, several were kicked out but the office sent them back later. Most said they didn’t care if their parents were called. Getting ANYthing done was very difficult.

Ugly: me. I got very angry and I yelled at quite a few of them (I apologized to one girl). If spanking were allowed, I would have been willing to do it. I considered not going back for the second half of the day. Instead, I went back, but I figured that if we didn’t get much done – oh, well. I got to the point where I really didn’t care much anymore. A couple of staff members dropped by to calm them down and threaten them some, but it didn’t last long. At the end of the day, two of the boys with the worst behavior (although there was great competition for that rank) were very upset with me because they have behavior forms that I was supposed to fill out 4 times a day and they got very low scores. Have to admit I don’t feel one bit bad about that. I was very glad to see that day end, and no, I won’t go back to that school. I already had written them off my list for the older grades due to back experiences, but I thought maybe the 7 year olds wouldn’t be so bad. I feel very sorry for the 50% of the kids who have to put up with all that CRAP every day. Honestly, I could vote for a system where all the compliant kids get put in one class and all the rough kids in another. They’d probably need somebody as big as Hagrid or Shaq to teach them.
Or maybe send them all to military school? But then again – I’m still feeling pretty ugly about today.

I forgot to mention last week that the Montessori school has a big guy named Mr. D who deals with the hyperactive/non-compliant boys. I saw him going down the hall with his arms around the necks of two of them – in a half-jovial way – saying, “I oughtta ring your neck….” – and the look on the boys’ faces – they were loving Mr. D and his attention.

It was just TOO nice out to stay in the gym to finish up the jumping rope module as specified, so I asked the principal if I could take the kids outside and we agreed on a good area of blacktop to use. This meant that I hauled about 50 rubber jump ropes and a chair half way through the school, cutting through the lunch room, around a couple of bends, and out the “first and second grade door.” Unfortunately the ropes that the kids carried somehow got quite tangled. 😦 And – I really only needed about 30. At lunch/recess time, excited “other” kids walked off with several of them while I was (still) trying to make a neat arrangement of them to take inside so that the rest of them wouldn’t walk off. What I learned: 1. have the kids lay them out “like snakes” on the sidewalk and then I can grab 10 ends and 2. loop-tie them together in bunches.

With the older kids (3rd-4th) they jumped rope individually for awhile – doing laps around the lot, and then having a contest of sorts to see who could jump the most without messing up. One 4th grader in particular was a regular robot-jumping machine – it was a delight to watch him and apparently he got up to 180 and probably only stopped then because he had already done a couple hundred before that. Then we split into groups to use the longer ropes to twirl and jump. I switched from group to group encouraging and explaining and stopping enthusiastic would-be-twirlers (mostly boys) from doing it crazily.”Your job,” I told them, “is to help the jumpers have success.”

I took the 4th graders out in front of the school to avoid being near the recess time in back (per principal’s suggestion) and at one point I encouraged a few kids to try “jumping in” and encouraged some of the better jumpers to jump two or three at a time. It’s funny how you remember things from long ago – I taught them (with a slight change of wording) a jump rope song from my youth – “Changing classes, number 1, changing classes, number 2, etc.” Two jumpers face each other and then switch places and then again and again. About 5 of the kids really enjoyed trying this.*

The last group was the Kindergartners. Some had never jumped to a twirled rope before. Fortunately for me, there was a parapro out there, so – with another adult – we twirled for about a half hour. Each child got a couple of chances with each turn and some did quite well, to the delight of their classmates who were very supportive.  One girl was so afraid the rope would hit her in the head (it cleared about at least a foot…..) that she ducked and jumped away every time. She never quite got the hang of it. We matched our twirling to the speed and jumping style of the child if possible. For instance, some jumpers (mostly girls) jump and have a little hop afterwards, necessitating a slower motion for us to allow for the time. But many – and especially a lot of the boys – just jump – two feet together. Jump. Jump. Jump – trying hard to figure out when to do so.

I remember that feeling of excitement and, well, fear, that I used to feel. It was risky business for those of us who were only so-so jumpers. I wish I could have jumped today, actually, but I’m too out of shape to manage it.

The funniest part was Emma. With each jump she moved forward about a foot, so we kept moving over with her, little by little. So the last time she took a turn, we started about six feet further away. She jumped and jumped and jumped, and we moved, and moved and moved, and pretty soon she was almost to the line of kids and some of them yelled, (as you can imagine dramatic 5-year-olds doing) “Look out!” and they all scattered as we moved along with Emma until finally we got to the building. We laughed. She grinned. I gave her a hug.

I just noticed that I have a couple more days of P.E. scheduled already. Good.

*When one of the girls faltered, the boy who was the best jumper in our group suggested, “Or I could do it.” I find it intriguing that a child who is good at something will often treat it as a job that needs to be done and he is the best one qualified for it – rather than understanding that it is the “doing” of it by each person – the “learning” that is important, not the accomplishment of the task. I wonder if we as parents foster this when we take over a task at home because we can do it faster or better ourselves. I remember times when I asked my kids to get out of the way so I could rush down or up the stairs for some urgent reason (rather than following them slowly on that occasion) and I even said, “Let me go first because I’m faster.” Ouch. What I was teaching them was that those who can do it better should go first, although I sure didn’t think about it that minute.
At school, this same thinking often leads a good reader to blurt out the answer rather than waiting for a classmate to sound it out himself. I tell them they are not helping – rather, they are taking the other person’s turn away. I say, “How about if I have you run around the parking lot to help me get into shape – will that work?” They get the point – giving a classmate the answer is like doing the other kid’s exercise for him. “Let him use his own brain!” I say.

It’s very challenging to correct math pages and give them back to students, work with students who aren’t “getting it” and still keep an eye on everyone in the room and keep after them all to be quiet. Felt like quite an intense workout, but I felt good about helping them understand how to add and subtract their mixed fractions – even if, apparently, I was showing them a “different” way to do it than their teacher had demonstrated.

The problem with supervising the Montessori system is that the kids have a packet of materials to finish by the end of the week – one for math and one for language arts, usually. Unfortunately, they look at me with those big, innocent eyes and tell me that they have finished everything, and there is no way for me to verify this since I’m not their teacher and don’t know exactly what should be done. So, the teacher was doing testing down the hall and she checked in a couple of times and was NOT happy that kids were telling me this and she really got on their cases about it.

Best moment was: after having to remove a disruptive student from the classroom – after viewing his anger at me – I ended  up tutoring him with his math page and we got along just fine – once I identified the error he was making, he readily went thru and corrected all of his other problems.

6 hours of sunshine and laughter.
Today I was the PE teacher for grades K-4 at a Livonia elementary school. K-2 practiced “batting and running around the bases” and 3-4 played kickball. With some trial and error with the littl’uns, I found the best pattern for learning:
1-have the kids practice running around the bases about four times prior to actually having them come up to bat; that way they are far more likely to remember where they are supposed to go when I say, “Run!” Of course, there were still about 20% of them who just stood there or who ran after the ball that they had just hit. 🙂
2-choose 4 “fielders” and give them the task of retrieving all the balls, re-setting the T’s (in this case a cone inside a crate).
3-have 2 T’s set up so that more kids get to bat more often, leaving fewer of them in the long line of kids that are A. doing cartwheels B. picking fuzzy dandelions C. singing happy slappy dancey rhymey songs D. whining about who’s taking cuts or bumping them or saying something mean. There was no score anyway, as everyone got a turn or two and made a home run.

They are so amusing.

Kickball with the 3-4 grade was even better. These kids had more knowledge and I just had to umpire and manage the whole thing. 4th wanted boys vs. girls and after getting about 9 runs on their turn (we play everybody gets an at-bat and then we switch) they were pretty excited that they successfully prevented the girls from getting even one single for about the first ten of them. Yessiree, they thought they were all that and a bag of chips as one girl said. But eventually apathy (witness boys doing cartwheels in the outfield) and human nature (arguing over who’s going to field the ball) led to the girls getting some runs as well.

They are so amusing. We were having so much fun that I forgot to check the watch I had borrowed from the office and they were nearly late getting to their buses at the end of the day.

And did I mention that the weather was AWESOME? What a blessing to be outside ALL the day. After every class, I brought the kids back in with  5 minutes to spare so I could “water” them – holding the fountain and counting 1-2-3-GO for each one so everyone could get a quick turn. 25-30 kids in each class takes a while! Then I counted “uno, dos, tres, andalez!” and later it was “einz zwei drei, schnell!” and then “un, deu, troi, vite!”
I suspect my spelling is a bit off on some of those, but the kids enjoyed it.

I’m so amusing.

This is the first time that a Music teacher opportunity went badly. Apparently this particular 6th grade class is a pain to deal with. From the very start, it was mutiny – 6-8 people consistently disrupting and refusing to participate. Once I kicked a couple of guys out and we actually got down to the business of listening to music (ironically, one of them was “If You’re Out There” by John Legend) and singing along with it, the kids who did sing along were heckled by the ones who didn’t. Then the office sent back the kid who was the biggest disruption (what good does THAT do?)

Fortunately, the next two classes went a lot better, and I’m sure it helped that by the time I had heard the songs a few times I was able to sing along also.

Then came the afternoon. I’m pretty sure that the kids wrote a letter to their teacher and all signed it, explaining how mean I was. Imagine that I refused to let them continuously wander around the classroom and kept insisting that they work on their three assignments. Unfortunately, the teacher made these assignments due on Friday and next Tuesday so the kids stated outright that they did not intend to spend much time on them today. Yet – we had an hour and a half to fill up. I did not allow them to sit on the carpet to read – because I couldn’t see all of them when they did so. How do I explain to them, when they confront me with “Why are you treating us like Kindergartners?” – how do I explain that 1 – they get the treatment they earned, and 2 – the Kindergartners don’t dare act that silly, rebellious, lazy and disrespectful. I did try the first part – the second comment would have just been gasoline on the flame.

So – as their teacher wished, I insisted on quiet. As was necessary to keep them from messing around, I made them stay in their seats. And some of them actually did some work.

I’ve canceled my next three times in the sixth grade classrooms at that elementary school.
It’s likely enough that other opportunities will arise (e.g. I had my choice of five places yesterday afternoon).