But let me start with Thursday. I substituted yesterday for a 2nd grade class at a nearby school. I walked in and the teacher said, "It's your lucky day. I have my student teacher here so your job is to make eyebrows at the naughty kids and let her take the lead."
Um...yes. Let me write your name down. I will be taking all your teaching absences from now on.
I had 2 "challenges" that day. The first was that the student teacher asked me to deal with the kid who just showed his butt to the class. Done. I like the tough ones and this kid just needed more supervision.
The second "challenge" was the realization that it is time to retire one of my old shirts. You see, at the end of the day, a girl said to me "Do you have a baby in your tummy?" And this is not denial...the shirt is the problem. It's not that I don't have some residual baby leftovers, but I am nowhere near the justification for being asked that question. I have decided that my cute, Old Navy, polka dotted shirt needs to find another to love. Goodbye old friend.
This second grade class was great. I had kids writing papers about me. One child handed me a picture they drew for me. The birds were singing and it was all rainbows and sunshine.
However...
I was just made aware of Substitute Karma. It's a rule in the stars where "A substitute is not allowed to have an amazing day. If said substitute does have a well-behaved class then the following substituting experience has to be equally opposite of said 'amazing day'." This is an actual rule.
Today I branched out a little farther from home - straight to the inner city schools. Ironically, it was still 2nd grade. Because of my experience yesterday I let my guard down. I believed for a moment that all children are wonderful and that I get to be the loving mother to 25 amazing children for 3 hours. Here is what happened:
I arrived 10 minutes before lunch (I like to do half days and usually work in the afternoon). I get the run-down from the teacher, who says that it should be pretty easy for the rest of the day. I get to take them to lunch and be the lunch duty, read them a story, teach them math, have them quietly read and then send them home. These are all my favorite things. It was looking so good....
And then she left.
I lined the kids up for lunch and a girl, whom I will call Naughty, tells me that I need to pick 2 VIP's and she asks if she can be one.
Me, the unsuspecting victim, says "sure" and she runs to get 2 badges that I was not aware existed.
At the same time there is another boy, whom I will call Anger Management (AM for short), asking if he can be the other VIP.
Now, the teacher had warned me about both of these children but she only said to "keep an eye on them and if AM causes you problems then call the office." I have had warnings about many kids before and I usually seek the trouble makers out and befriend them right at the beginning. So far, this method has prevented many problems...until today.
So when AM is asking me for the VIP, I can tell that something doesn't feel right.
If I needed to know what would start an outright cry for an injustice, it was handing Naughty and AM the VIP pass. Twenty other children declare that there is no way that those two are VIP's.
Seeing as how I don't know what the qualifications are for what a VIP is, or even what any of these kids' names or regular behaviors are, I decide that for today there are no VIP's.
EVERY KID HATED ME after that. Both AM and Naughty went to the corners of the room and cried, yelled, and AM started banging his head against the wall.
Luckily another administrator walked in and sat there with them while I took the rest of the class to lunch.
When I got to the lunchroom (keep in mind, I have been at this school for 15 minutes) another teacher was dropping her class off and she said, "You are so and so's sub? I heard you don't have VIP's today."
Oh, I see my reputation precedes me.
I've explained that I love lunch duty but today they stole that joy from me. First of all, I am the only "teacher" or even adult in the lunchroom and I don't know anything about the lunchroom standards at this school. I swear that every kid is sitting near someone who is insulting them. "Teacher, he just said that I am dumb." "Teacher, she... she just said that...um, that she doesn't want to sit by me." "Teacher, he just said that he hates my teacher." I admit that this one I was curious about. I asked the boy if he said that he hates the girl's teacher and he said, "Yeah, she is mean." I can't argue with that. Carry on.
Eventually, AM and Naughty made it to lunch. The biggest concern for my lunch duty was Naughty. I walked by her table and she flashes me a gang sign with her fingers and says, "You want this?"
This is second grade, people.
After lunch it was just bad. B.A.D. The highlights consist of me telling AM "No" and he picked up a chair to throw it at someone. (He didn't end up doing it.)
Another kid, (I'll call him Rebel without a cause, but Rebel for short) NEVER. SAT. DOWN. EVER. Rebel and AM talked and sang and made noises through the one page that I actually got to read during story time. They did this on purpose because they didn't want to hear the book. Rebel kept threatening the other kids if they looked at him or tried to talk to him. He tried to act like he was a gangster. "You got somethin' to say to me?"
Other teachers came in and yelled at my kids to sit down and listen at least 7 times but it didn't help. I had so many kids ask if I was going to leave a good report or if they were being good. I always said, "What do you think?"
One kid, I'll call him Slugger, needed to go to the principal early on for misbehavior but I couldn't even deal with him because the other kids were so bad. I couldn't leave the class to take him. Finally after Slugger hit another girl, a teacher walked in and I was like, "You gotta take him with you."
There were so many needs to deal with. At one point, I was consoling one girl because the other girls told her she was a bully. I had kids who wanted to whisper things in my ear because they didn't want the other kids to hear. One kid even offered to go get his dad, who works at the school, to come and deal with Rebel. I had kids who wanted to tell me stories about their lives but if I stopped to listen to them then Rebel would be starting a fist fight in the back of the classroom. And one kid smelled like pee. It was unreal.
Oddly enough, by the end of the day Naughty, AM, and Rebel were sent to apologize to me for their bad behavior. I may have even gotten a hug from Naughty. I'm sure the other teachers sent them in because they knew I was going to have permanent emotional trauma from this experience.
So I am now rethinking my "challenges" from the 2nd grade class from the day before. If there is a Sub Karma somewhere out there I wonder if I can negotiate a deal where I can have a great experience if I just let them ask if I'm pregnant. I think I can deal with the personal insult if I can just leave a school without worrying that a second grader is going to strip the tires off my car...or worse. And what's the harm in getting mooned?
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