Last weekend I picked up a job in hometown district for first grade. In fact, it was the school nearest my home. Later, a job in supersized district appears for a resource teacher (they call it by a different name, but that’s what the job is- for those students who need the extra boost). It was of course much further so why would I want to change over to this one? Yet, for some reason I did. Probably because I hadn’t worked in that district for a month thanks to them canceling most of the jobs I’ve taken in recent days. Yes, the expected one included. That actually lasted an entire week believe it or not. I guess no one bothered to check and see that a mere 90-day (noncertified) sub had their three-week assignment. We’re the ones who get the unwanted/last minute scraps at the table. Did you know 120-day (certified) subs in this state can work more than 120 days? They have to get a waiver from the state to do it, but for some reason they get it. There was one year the state said no, but with some finagling they managed to get it back for the next year. For the end of that one year, jobs were easier for me to come by. So back to the story, I did change the job. 1st grade is a little below my comfort zone anyway, as I have mentioned. So Monday I arrived and guess what? They told me I was needed in first grade at the start of the day because another sub was going to be late! Sigh. It happened to take away my only break that day outside of a 45-minute lunch (the teacher didn’t have any students for nearly the first hour, after that it was one group of students to the next. Actually, they offered to let me stay in first grade and bump the other sub to my assignment. After having worked in this class for the last hour I thanked them for the offer but moved on. And, the other teacher worked with older kids.
The first grade irony continued on Wednesday. I subbed for elementary PE where we played hockey tag all day, a combination of the two games in the name. The “it” players are armed with hockey sticks and they try to hit other players with yarn balls. Depending on the rules the players hit could be out or become “it” as the stick is handed over. The morning was all 4th-6th grades, most of whom knew what they were doing. The afternoon had four groups, one 4th grade, one 2nd grade, and two 1st grade. So, back to first grade for another hour 😉 Not only that, but one of the classes, probably the roughest group all day, was a class I had subbed in for a couple of days last year. Several older students had asked if they could help me during their lunch, and this was the class they would have helped with had I said yes. I should have said yes. Oh, well.
In case you’re wondering, Tuesday was pretty much a repeat of IT in hometown district, same school as last week. The 6th graders were working on house floor plans instead of enlarging cartoons, and the 7th and 8th graders were still doing modules like last time. Nothing much to say.
House floor plans? I used to draw those in class when I got bored – we never got to do them as assignments though, that would have been fun. And have I told you how much I like the school codes you made? It’s much more fun to be able to know where you’re talking about!
And for those readers who don’t know, at least they can separate one from the other. One of these days I’ll have another story to share about next-door district, but sadly I still see extremely few jobs for them. I think they have an abundance of subs there though as the last job I saw was gone about two seconds after I saw it.
You probably wouldn’t think these plans were fun. They had to use drawing tools only to draw their plans- no freehand (not that that rule actually stopped anyone from using freehand in places). But they were allowed to be creative, from sports courts to movie theaters to the entire second floor being a swimming pool (they had no actual concept of just how heavy water is of course).
Of course they didn’t. My floor plans would always have a ‘maze room’. I guess it never occurred to me that if it were actually built in my house, I would learn how to do the maze, taking out all the fun of the maze room. Oh well – make it into a laser tag room instead!
I think someone had a laser tag room. No maze rooms though.