I’m just looking to see what sort of age groups you might be interested in teaching if you ever decided to teach.  Feel free to choose more than one.  You will note that there is some overlap in grades since not everyone defines the categories the same way.  For example, in some places middle school is 6-8, other places 7-8, and still others 7-9.  I am told there are even places where 5th is considered middle school, but I am yet to be convinced that is actually middle school or combining disparate grades in a building due to space or some other special reason (sorry, L).  I do know a district that has a school for just 5th and 6th grades due to a gang problem.  This district considers 6th to be middle school, so the 5th grade were on an elementary program while the 6th grade switched classes as they would in a regular middle school.  I am almost certain that 5th grade will always be on an elementary program even if inside a middle school, but please comment if I am wrong about this (please, even if you don’t normally comment on my blog 🙂 ).  So anyway, vote away!  Later, I’ll ask about favorite subjects to teach, whatever the age group.

[poll id=”3″]

I have said in other posts that 5th grade is probably my favorite grade followed by 4th and then 6th.  Well, yesterday I had a late call to sub for 5th and 6th grade.  I knew I would be late and I wasn’t disappointed in this regard when I ended up 15 minutes late mostly due to the snowy roads as we got another couple of inches overnight.  This district by the way is famous for its schools closing their parking lots when the buses arrive.  I thought I was safe from this at this school since the buses don’t go into the parking lot area.  I was wrong, but didn’t realize it right away so I turned into a drive that had cones only halfway across.  This is a common tactic when they only allow one-way traffic so I thought nothing of it until a teacher started blowing her whistle behind me.  Well, I will now add this school to the list of the district’s schools I can never be late for if I actually want to park my car.  Since I was already in the lot, she let me park.  This time.

So, once I got in, there was the teacher, still in the room.  She was still getting things ready and hadn’t left yet.  She would come back in the afternoon too to test some of the kids one on one.  She got the kids started while I looked over the plans.  There were only two things: math in the morning and language arts after lunch.  Oh, there was a special in the morning so I had a half hour off to continue to look at the plans.  Besides the special, I had math all morning because I taught two classes.  First was 5th grade, then they went into another room and 6th grade came in for their turn.  Following lunch, I continued with 6th grade for writing before swapping back for reading with the 5th graders.

All in all the day wasn’t too bad, but these kids were talkers.  Whenever they had a chance they would chat it up.  By the end of the day this really wore me down.  The last three short nights for me probably added to this too.  I was glad when it was over.

Today I was set to do 7th grade science.  Then every sub’s favorite “you are no longer needed” call came in first thing in the morning.  Apparently the districts didn’t wan’t kids coming to school in -8ishºF weather as all of them around me called a day off.  Unfortunately, tomorrow looks like another non-payday for me too with a forecast of even colder morning temperatures.  What a day today for a plane to end up in a freezing river.  I pray that all involved fare much better than the bird the plane apparently hit.

School Picture Guy- a recurring guest star in Lincoln Peirce’s comic strip Big Nate, a strip nearly as old as the Simpsons.  He doesn’t appear much these days in his primary role meaning I had to go back to 2007 to find this one, skipping past roles as a deejay and a news photographer.  But weren’t school pictures in the fall you ask?  You are correct.  However, graduation pictures are apparently the currently happening thing.  Armed with equipment photographers never had when I was in school- a digital camera and color printer for instant samples to be exact, the photographers (there were two) invaded the gym space at the school I subbed in today.  Ordinarily this would be a sidebar, but since I was subbing for a gym teacher this became quite important.  In fact, two of the three gym teachers were out.  If you would be guessing by now that I was at a middle school you would again be correct.  Due to the pictures, an otherwise ordinary day became a lot more interesting.  Think of a middle school gym with room for a basketball court and pull-out bleachers.  Reduce this image by half, the amount of the gym in use by the photographers.  Now cram three classes of 30 plus each into this one side.  Now add two dozen dodgeballs into the mix and you can see what made this day interesting.  The sixth and seventh grade kids got to play backboard bombardment (AKA basketball dodgeball) on this special day where only one of the teachers was their real teacher and half the gym was otherwise occupied.  The rules had to be slightly modified though due to an abnormal playing field- one side was deeper than the other to keep the baskets/backboards equidistant from the “center” line (remember the space for the bleachers when pulled out?)- and the number of kids playing- 45+ per team.  Hence, the catch rule was discarded so no getting out by having your ball caught because we couldn’t keep our six eyes on the backboards, students getting hit, and the throwers of caught balls so something had to give.  Everyone had fun though.

How about eighth grade?  Well, for some reason the school designated gym time as picture taking time, though students came in other periods as well during their tutorial periods if they had them since there were far too many eighth-graders to get them all done in their two gym periods.  So, no dodge-ball for them.  Instead they just sat and chatted, and so did we.  The one real gym teacher took care of sending the kids to the photographers as needed.

Gym aside, I had a similar experience today as I did last week.  Last week, two Sundays ago, I had told a boy that one day he might see me in his classroom.  Three days later, there I was, in his classroom. 🙂  This last Sunday, I ran into a former student of mine and mentioned that I had seen no sign of him last time I was at his school and subbed for sixth-grade math, meaning he must have had the other math teacher.  So naturally two days later I had him in gym right at the start of the day!  I should keep doing this, but of course now that I realize the connection it won’t work anymore. 😉

So what will tomorrow bring?  Who knows- I’m still trying to find a job.  That’s how it goes in a sub’s life…

Well, it’s been awhile since my last work-related post.  I finally got season 4 of The Office from my library and have been watching it.  For those who don’t remember back that far 😛 , Ryan, who was the temp at the Scranton, PA office is now Michael’s boss, and is trying to make many changes to the company to bring it more up to date with the times.  Oh, and he is making Michael’s life miserable.  I watched the first five episodes so far, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the first few were 40+ minutes.  I thought at first these were two-part episodes combined into one, but apparently they are actually extended versions of the original episodes.  There are supposed to be five of them out of the fourteen episodes on the DVD set and I saw four of them.  The fifth episode was the normal 20+ minute length.  I am guessing the season finale will be the fifth extended episode.

Anyway, on to work.  Today was a difficult day with a pleasant ending.  I substituted for 3rd-grade ELL at the school that made the local paper a few months ago for its supersized 3rd grade classes with 30+ students per class.  As far as that went, I prepared myself for it.  It turned out to have 24 students- 23 after today as it was one student’s last day.  For some reason that student is transferring to another school in the same district.  To any who didn’t catch it, this was an ELL class, which I’m guessing is why the class was a normal size.  I bring up ELL because while I prepared myself for a supersized class, I forgot to prepare myself for ELL kids.  Fortunately most of them understood English to a point, and there was an assistant who spent most of the day in the class to translate when there were difficulties in understanding.  However, the behavior in a few of the kids was just off the wall.  As I have mentioned in the past, ELL kids can be challenging when it comes to behavior, and these kids were no exception.  Again, I think this is due to us being to soft in this country as compared to other countries like Mexico.  And I especially am more easygoing than other teachers.  I would like to think I have gained better management habits, but I know I am still kind of a soft teacher, at least when I am in a good mood.

In the end, I did make sure to point out the kids I had a problem with in the note to the teacher, so something will happen I’m sure.  So what was the pleasant end?  Well, a 4th-grader from my church is apparently a student at that school.  As I was lining up the kids for dismissal, he spotted me.  A few years ago I had a student who showed some major excitement when he recognized me when I subbed in his class, with a very excited, “Hey! I know you!!”  Well, that boy’s record for excitement was just broken today by this other boy.   He shouted to everyone who could hear, “Hey, you go to my church!!” which was repeated a few times, once to his teacher.  When I failed to come up with his name right away, he happily offered it, not disappointed at all like a few others I have run into.  I should remind you that I am not that great with names at all and this year I lead a fifth-grade small group so he isn’t in it.  Tomorrow night I will make sure to give him some extra attention.

This week I was was in middle school only one, which was just an okay day in Spanish, with two 8th grade, two 7th grade, one 6th grade, and a 7th/8th combined class (which I thought kind of strange for a Spanish class).  The other days were strictly elementary.  The music class was a highlight of my week.  Normally these can be difficult classes behaviorally, but it was a rather pleasant day.  The teacher left plans that were clearly meant for the Friday before break with some of the classes having a Christmas-y theme, but since that turned into a snow day she apparently thought it would be just fine for the day after break.  Three of the classes watched part of the Nutcracker while coloring Nutcracker pictures.  It was in one of these classes I ran into a rare occurance- an Albino.  Okay, that term was politically incorrect.  I guess I should say he was albinistic.  I joked with him having hair blonder than mine was at his age (I had very light blond hair once- it has since become almost gray.  Yes I have some grey hairs now, but most of it is still blond when looked at closely.  It was pointed out to me that he had a vision problem which is often an effect of the condition and when I looked at his eyes a certain way I noticed some red which I think may also be common, though seeing red in pupils apparently is not.

Well, time to head back to Scranton, PA- I only have a week on this DVD set.  Later!

EDIT: Whoops, forgot the title!

Hey, I recognize him.  Hmm, a bit younger, wearing pink, and in a wheelchair- I guess I didn’t recognize her after all.  No, I’m not on any sort of drug, illegal, prescription, or otherwise.  The class I was in today, a mentally impaired class, had a dead ringer for a boy who was in my cabin last summer and comes to church from time to time.  No, he didn’t look like a girl, but rather with the short haircut and the familiar face I thought the girl was a boy.  Then I saw the pink jacket and shoes, so I actually asked if the student was a boy or girl.  I didn’t realize at first why the face, not just the haircut but the face, cried “boy” to me, but once I looked closer at her I was like, “Wait a minute, I know that face…”  Well, if not the boy I know, then was she his sister?  Nope.  Completely different last name, and a foreign first name to boot, Preet, unlike his very English name of Danny.

To get on with things, this day was extremely easy for me.  It seemed like whatever I tried to do I felt like I was just getting in the way more often than not, so the usual best thing to do was in fact nothing at all and let the teaching assistants (there were three of them for the six students, usually eight though two were absent) do their thing.  These were primary kids (K-2), so that coupled with their impairments meant they needed the consistency anyway.  Their schedule for the day looked something like this: calendar time, which included singing; writing, which was either cutting and pasting words and pictures or inconsistent script for the higher-level students; an assembly which was a band concert by the area junior high; language lab where they put toppings on cookies (one refused to eat his too, saying the icing on it tasted “yucky”); making ziti for the party in the afternoon; lunch; self-selected reading; party with another class- they had made the dessert to go with the ziti- delicious!; more writing.

Well, I’m about to fall asleep so I will let the post end here.  If you see any errors, it’s because I couldn’t be bothered to fix them.  Tomorrow.  Until then.  Maybe I’ll add a picture to the top then too… 😉

Well, I have been on the early shift for the last couple of days and I just have to say that that, coupled with my tendency to not sleep through the night, makes for one tired teacher.  Yesterday I had it easy.  I left to a temperature outside over 40º colder than it was the night before, and on icy roads thanks to the rain the day and night before, on a slow trip all the way to middle school science.  The teacher did not expect to be out again and so another teacher set me up with a couple of videos.  One was a left-leaning news special titled Who Killed the Electric Car? True, it is a really good question as we could use them these days as I would expect the gas prices to go up significantly again.  Well, unleaded prices anyway as diesel hasn’t actually dropped all that much since the summer in comparison.  I say left-leaning as when it got to talking about government as a suspect (battery technology, consumers, oil companies, car companies, and others were also suspects) it pretty much painted Republican presidents like Reagan and Bush Jr. as evil, signing environmentally unfriendly bills into law, and praises Democratic presidents Carter and Clinton on their policies.  Again, this doesn’t erase the question about electric cars though- we really should be seeing more of them than we are.  A lot more actually since according to the video GM’s EV-1 cars were all destroyed back in 2004.  The closest thing we have at the moment I believe are hybrids like the Toyota Prius.  The entire video was 90 minutes so I only got to see a portion of it, four times of course…  Two classes saw a Bill Nye video on the atmosphere.  Oddly enough, this teacher teaches both 7th and 8th grades, a bit unusual for middle school.

Today I went to the other side of the brain to language arts.  It was an even easier day.  Two of the classes (four periods) were team taught, so I was reduced to helper status for these periods.  The other two periods were really small groups- one with six students and one with three.  The one with three was the most challenging as one of the students was in a very goofy mood.  Where the title of this post comes into play is in the book a teacher read aloud in one of the classes.  As the class started she was reading about Marley so I thought this was going to be about another story, play actually, the classes had also been working on fitting for this time of year.  Of course I mean Charles Dicken’s classic A Christmas Carol.  However I soon realized this was another story entirely- the middle school version of the book Marley & Me.  This movie is coming out Christmas Day and after today’s excerpt I can confidently say I will be skipping it.  The chapter started out talking about John taking Marley to Dog Beach (I think that was the name), but no dog ever messed on the beach so Marley would have to take care of business beforehand, which he did in a colorful description depicting the act.  While at the beach, Marley was playing in the water and drinking quantities of the salty liquid while running around, refusing the offered fresh water.  As a result, the dog upchucked and there was another lovely description of this event.  Naturally it didn’t stop there as the salt water also caused loose bowels.  Thankfully the teacher stopped before describing this event.  Now I realize this will likely take up only seconds on the screen, and knowing Hollywood those scenes will be there, but I have to ask myself if the author was willing to gross readers out by going into detail on these scenes, then what else is in this book?  I think I do not wish to find out.  Thanks for saving me $10 plus refreshments.

I have been doing a lot of catching up on TV shows lately.  This has eaten into my available time to write in this blog.  That, and my interest is sort of lagging right now.  I now have several DVDs I checked out of the library in addition to several hours of TV shows I still haven’t watched.  I also checked out Mario Kart DD for my Gamecube.  With all of this expect my posting to continue to be like this for a while.

As for work, my week had some interesting moments.  I subbed for 7th grade science on Monday.  Not a lot going on there.  Six classes of handing out books then letting them do an assignment out of them.  Mostly good classes.  Tuesday I subbed for 6th grade math, staying on the analytical/logical side of the brain.  This teacher had math classes at three different levels, two classes of each.  All were similar in going over homework, my answering questions, and the starting the next section.  Some actual teaching!  I will have two days of 6th grade math at another school at the end of next week.  I saw a former student from 4th/5th grade ministry on Monday at science, and I hope to see one next week who just started this year at the school I will be at.

Wednesday I found myself in the elementary school right next to the middle school I will be doing math at next week.  The level was third grade.  The day started out with the smell of electrical fire near the classroom, though there was no fire as far as I could tell.  This turned out to be sort of an interesting day.  This is the only school I know to have a vocabulary special- a teacher comes in to teach vocabulary- and they had that in the morning.  Now, music, gym, and art are standards, and I’ve also subbed for an elementary social studies teacher.  There was a Japanese special at another school, but this is the first school where I’ve encountered a vocabulary special, though not the first classroom I subbed in where they had this special.  A couple of months ago I had five days in second grade at this school, and some of those classes had vocabulary as well.  Moving on, they had MAP testing, so that killed another 45 minutes or so.  It ended early so we played Sparkle using their spelling lists before finishing the morning with a language arts lesson.  After lunch they had a “holiday store.”  This is similar to a book fair, but instead of books the students could buy cheap gifts.  The rest of the day was typical with reading groups, math, and science.  Nothing interesting like labs, just book-work for the most part.

Thursday and Friday were both music days.  Friday I subbed for an elementary music teacher.  These are always potluck days as to which grades I will get.  It turned out I would get two classes each of kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and 5th grades.  Almost all with different lessons of course.  1st and 2nd played music insrument bingo, 5th did a science tie-in lesson about bones using an old black spiritual song about Ezekiel and the dry bones, which turned out to be a review lesson since they had already done it before.  Oops?  We just made a little competition of it.  Kindergarten had the only real new lesson.  They learned about the difference between a lullaby and a march- fast vs. slow, loud vs. soft.

My other music day, Thursday, was actually a very odd class for middle school.  There are schools that have divided up the year for certain classes into quarters, fifths, and sixths.  This school has the year divided for a set of classes into, get this, eighths.  That’s right- each class is just four weeks long, and for 7th grade at least (8th grade actually has this class for a full quarter) this was one of those classes.  That’s not the most unusual aspect of this class.  That would go to the focus of the class- African drumming.  I have not heard before of this sort of specialization in middle school.  College, maybe high school, but not middle school.  Anyway, the classroom of course was filled with drums, mostly more modern renditions of African drums, but also a few more traditional models.  Also, bells and rattles.  These three instruments make up African music (at least Ghana, the country in Africa the video focused on) I learned from the video.  Yes, with this sort of specialization comes the usually correct assumption that the sub will have no idea how to teach it, so the video is the standard staple of the sub for this sort of class.  Unfortunately the video was only 20 minutes, leaving me to fill in the rest of the time.  So, we went of the sheet they filled out and then I let them play silent ball for the rest of the time.

Well, that’s my week in review.  We will see what the future of this blog holds.  I am toying with the idea of starting another blog at some point where I will attempt to write a story a little bit at a time.  Maybe write a choose-your-own-adventure like I brought up in Taylhis’s blog 🙂 .  For now, just an idea.  We’ll see if it goes anywhere.

Well, it looks like I was somehow able to get a day of work in this week.  Apparently the teacher was gone yesterday too, and they didn’t use the same sub which left the door open for yours truly.  I am writing this post with a headache, so don’t be too surprised if it turns out shorter than normal.

I was able to pick up this day early yesterday afternoon meaning that had I worked yesterday I may not have secured a job for today.  Who knows?  Only one opening slipped past my radar for yesterday (locked when I tried to select it) so I imagine today would have been no better with the selection still being only one district.  The job?  Mentally impaired kids at the school furthest from me at about 13 miles.  I hoped to run into one of my church students here who graced my cabin at summer camp a year ago, and even found myself in the classroom across the hall from his, but as it turned out our paths never crossed.

So what is this sort of classroom like?  Think kids who can barely talk even though some are ten or eleven years old, two of which are wheelchair bound and can’t even feed themselves.  There were seven kids, three aides, and one teacher.  Yes, a ratio of less than two students per teacher; it takes that much energy to work with these kids.  Now these kids were very low-functioning, but that doesn’t mean non-functioning, so there is room for teaching them.  Mostly this is very basic math and simple writing (not all can write though), and a lot of coloring, cutting, and pasting.  Naturally the theme for the reading and writing lesson was- drum roll please- Thanksgiving.  I read them a book parodying The Night Before Christmas, replacing Christmas with Thanksgiving.  Then the kids did a sequencing activity on the book.  The ones who were able to write not only sequenced things from the book, they also had to write about it, a challenge for me to get them to do this.

Mostly the aides ran the class.  This was pretty much my only lesson.  I acted as an aide myself for much of the day which is standard practice as the aides know the routine and what to expect out of their students.  In the afternoon the day ended with an actual Thanksgiving feast.  There was corn, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pumpkin pie, and turkey- erm, cookies.  No actual turkey- several kids don’t eat meat anyway- but cookies decorated to look like turkeys.  I actually didn’t eat much of anything, and since this was less than two hours after lunch not much was given to the kids, but for them it was supposed to be a learning experience.  A lot of what these kids do is life skills, including cooking.  Last year I subbed in a class like this where the kids folded laundry (gym loaner uniforms).  I did force myself to eat a small slice of pumpkin pie.  There was only once slice left and I didn’t want to start any arguments 😉 .    I also took a cookie home since they were homemade and I didn’t want to offend.  You got me, I have a sweet tooth anyway so I didn’t mind.  One thing that the meal was missing was the thanksgiving part.  I didn’t expect prayer, this being the 21st century in a public school, but the aides didn’t ask what the kids were thankful for.  Maybe that’s too high a level for them, I don’t know.

Well, it looks like my post isn’t short after all, though I do still haved my headache even after taking an allergy pill and a 600mg Tylenol.  Come to think of it, I seem to remember that you don’t take Tylenol for headaches.  Waste of a pill- now where’s my Aleve?

To butcher a line from a Weird Al song about Yoda (which parodied a song called Lola), but if it fits…  This was my fate Thursday when I accepted a PE job at a middle school.  This was every bit as unexciting as it sounds.  There was a yoga instructor two double-classes of eighth grade with myself and at least one other teacher standing bored while the kids went through a yoga routine.  When I first found out about the yoga my spiritual sensors perked up as yoga can be taught from a spiritual point of view.  Hey, if Christianity isn’t allowed in the public schools neither is Eastern Pantheism; i.e. new age religion.  Fortunately they left this part out, and I did pay close attention to make sure of it.  I have read too many stories of kids being taught the experience of other religions, and not just about them to just sit back.  In any event, as I said, all was well.  They mostly did relaxation exercises and positions, with no explanation of those positions, at least on that day.

You might have noticed I mentioned eighth grade with the yoga.  What about 6th and 7th grades?  After all this is PE we’re talking about.  Well, those grades did yoga too, or fitness, depending on the class.  However, the teacher I was subbing for had four periods of health and just two of PE.  6th grade had a video to watch.  It was a video that was shown on prime time TV around 1990.  It was a “test” about how much we know about handling emergencies, and was hosted by the late John Ritter.  It also had several other stars of the day including Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Landon, Julia Child, and the one that played the geeky character in The Wonder Years.  I tried to look up this video on IMDB but it never got entered in as none of the actors I looked up had any reference to it listed.  Essentially it was a 45-minute multiple choice/true-false test (with at least one other type of question thrown in).  Of course we didn’t finish it, but a couple students asked if they would finish it tomorrow which means it interested them.

The 7th grade classes also involved videos.  They were making videos with iMovie, using the built-in webcams on their iBooks.  This got interesting watching them finish them, playing the parts of police officers, drunks, homeless people, announcers, and whatnot.  Many were editing though so I didn’t get to see everyone act.

Wednesday was really nothing special, just an easy day with 3rd grade.  Easy particularly because they had a half-hour of gym in the morning, an hour of art in the afternoon, and twenty minutes of filling out a “wish list” for the book fairs.  These Scholastic book fairs are really for the benefit of Scholastic and the schools, which receive commissions in books for the books sold.  As for the consumer, the parent, it’s just an opportunity to pay full cover price for some books and software.  I guess since it does benefit the schools I really can’t complain.

This brings us to today.  I was in the rival school to the one I was at Thursday.  The subject: one of the five foreign languages taught at this school.  In fact, for 6th graders they have to take every one of them during the year.  They all have one period divided into quarters for the year and one period in sixths.  These “hex-mesters” are a short six weeks, so needless to say they don’t learn the languages as much as explore them.  7th and 8th graders are treated to a full year in one language for the learning purpose.  I would suppose they get to choose which language they want to take.  Which one did I sub for (don’t even think I taught this class…)?  Just call me Herr Teacher instead of Mr. Teacher.  Actually, don’t because I don’t like the sound of it. 🙂  These kids just made word searches all day with a particular set of deutsch (German) words each grade had been learning.  Well, they can’t all be fun days. 😐

From Tuesday to Thursday, I guess it could be said that I went from 8th to 8 and back again… 😀  Eighth grade to 8 years old, like C & L’s eldest, back to 8th.  Well 6th and 7th grades were involved too, but still…  8)

Monday: 5th grade.  Location: my hometown, same school as last week’s PE assignment.  This wasn’t my favorite fifth grade assignment, but it was still a good day.  The day started with specials.  As I subbed for PE last week, I knew a little bit of the schedule so I expected this.  It’s always nice to have extra time to go over the lesson plans, particularly in elementary school when there are so many different things going on.  Spelling pretest went well, but I thought there were some challenging words on that list.  It didn’t stop three students from making the challenge list though with three or less incorrect, to the disappointment of one of them.  They tell me the challenge list is much harder so they don’t like to do it.  One student mentioned purposely spelling some wrong to avoid this list.  I hope he wasn’t serious.  Note to self: make challenge list more fun too so students actually want to succeed.  Math was next, and being the advanced group I started out with my usual routine of putting up some high school or college problems on the board and asking them to solve them, saying, “This is the advanced class, right?”  Yes, ha ha.  So the real lesson was kind of a review for them I’m told, so the teaching part was kind of short.  Toward the end a student came back it asking for his homework for the rest of the day.  I asked him to wait a minute while I addressed a problem with the math group, but he just left.  I found out later he had a migrane so I can excuse his impatience.  I ended up sending his work home with another student.

The afternoon was reading and writing, followed by social studies.  There was a whole group and small group lesson.  Then we went over the reading test they took last week, the one the teacher still had with him.  Oops.  He asked me to make fresh copies for the kids, but since they were only going to look at them and nothing else, the teaching assistant gave me an alternative by making transparencies instead and saving a tree.  The social studies was finishing up a packet, and studying for their quiz on Tuesday.  I wish I had seen the packet ahead of time.  There were so many questions on the first page it would have been easier to go over a whole class example before they started.

So that was Monday in a nutshell.  Today I was at another school for the first time, another one close to home.  I picked up on it right away though.  It was a low-level reading program.  In fact, I subbed in a class like this just last week.  It was another district, but it seems they use the same program, just as many districts use the same U of I math program.  It was mostly small group work with 7th and 8th grade classes.  There was some whole group instruction, but it was just introducing the small group lesson.  It wasn’t a bad day, though I’ve had far worse.  Some of the students were ELL, and regular readers know about some of my experiences with ELL students.  Speaking of ELL, I had an opportunity to sub for 1st grade ELL today but I decided to take a pass.  One thing worse than those bad experiences in middle school ELL was in the primary ELL department, where there are many students who know very little English and are therefore that much more difficult to teach.

So, tomorrow I will be in yet another school I’ve never been in.  3rd grade.  Until then.