I guess it’s time to return to the topic of kids- subbing and at church.  The past week I was back to two days of subbing after my big half-day Thanksgiving week.  I was lucky to get even that as only one district I am signed up with had classes at all that week, and only Monday and Tuesday.  Monday of course is a photo day for me which left only Tuesday for work.  So this past week I did middle school for two days in two different districts.  What happened in both cases was the teachers were taking a second sick day in a row, but fortunately this did not spell disaster like in that one BD/ED classroom in near-urban district.  The first class was a Spanish class, and half of a husband-wife team.  They even had classrooms right next to each other.  This is the second time I have ever encountered this, the first being in hometown district where a husband and wife both teach the same grade of science- one on each of the two teams for that grade.  Incidentally at that school there is also another married couple, but in their case they teach two different things.  So back to Spanish, it was a very easy day- for all classes I showed a video.  Now, she teaches both 7th and 8th grades, but everyone still got the same video- the celebration of Christmas in Mexico.  What was it?  Oh, yes- Piñatas, Posadas, and Pastorelas was the title.  I’m sure you’re familiar with the first- a seeming staple of Mexican celebrations.  The other two mean a party and a Christmas play, respectively.

Wednesday I filled in for an 8th grade resource teacher, though she had one 7th grade reading group.  This was a bit more interactive than the Spanish class, at least for some of the periods.  As mentioned, I worked with a reading group for one period, led an interesting homeroom activity where the kids picked sides with questions about what is more important to them and then some explained their choices, acted as an assistant in a language arts block, watched over a tutorial period, and led another block period with reading a story together and then watching over the kids as they defined words from the story.  A varied day for sure, unlike typical middle school classes.

Next post: the kids at church this week- I’m already tired of writing…

Construction- gotta love it.  Construction on the roads, construction of buildings, and so on.  Just yesteday when I went to vote- nice short lines by the way, a far cry from the two-hour wait I expected- one of the volunteers there noticed where I live and mentioned she lives down the street in a two-story house.  Of course I was thinking, “This is a ranch neighborhood, except for…”  Then she completed my thought by adding that they had just added a second story.  Construction.  Just a few years ago it seemed like every fifth house was being made into a McMansion, a topic proudly taken on and condemned by the King of the HIll crew just last weekend by the way.  If there can be one good thing said about this economic downturn it means less of these teardowns.

Today I can add construction in classrooms to the list of construction to deal with.  I subbed in music today and the music room was under construction, so I had to hold class elsewhere.  The other music/drama teacher gave up her space to me and decided to hold her classes in the regular classrooms so it didn’t bother me.  We didn’t do much.  It was a last-minute illness so the teacher just set me up with videos for lesson plans.  For the morning she left two alternatives- a Beethoven movie titled “Beethoven Lives Upstairs” and a movie titled “Bach to Rock.”  Well, Beethoven wasn’t in the building let alone upstairs, so we watched the other one.  Ironically when I went to the library after work the Beethoven movie was on the rack with recently returned movies.

There was one more class before noon where I read a book to the kids and then in the afternoon I travelled to another school.  Fortunately the road construction that had been going on a couple of weeks before in front of that school was finished.  I had stupidly left the lesson plans at the other school so I upset the secretary at the afternoon school by having the morning school fax it over.  Apparently the fax machine was in a room where only the secretary could retrieve it and she was very busy.  That drama over, the afternoon classes were, well, drama so naturally we watched sing-a-long videos. 😛

Well, that was my day today.  Monday as I previously mentioned was 8th grade math.  No teaching, just worksheets.  And a practice ISAT extended response problem for the Algebra classes.  The only interesting thing to write about was homeroom at the end of the day.  I may have blogged about a boy recently from Italy a couple of weeks ago when I did ELL.  Well, that boy was in my homeroom.  Actually, the homerooms in this district have two teachers and here is where it gets interesting.  The other teacher is the Italian teacher.  That’s right, this school has an Italian class.  I subbed for her last year incidentally.  I wonder why they chose to put this boy in this particular homeroom… 😛