Waffles Radio

This was the last day I subbed where I was working at the Montessori school at the same time.  I was pretty happy that I wouldn’t have to restrict myself to schools that were close enough and got out early enough so that I could get downtown in time, although going from $95 a day to $65^[1] didn’t make me too happy.

When I got to the school the teacher was there getting some stuff set up and made sure I had everything I would need for the day.  It was a bit weird to see her there, but it did mean she got to tell me things instead of just writing them down.

Most of the day was busy work.  I wish it wasn’t, but I can understand that the teacher might not want to leave someone that they don’t know with actual things to teach.

The thing I remember most about this one was that when the kids came in I started picking out who would be the bad ones and who would be the good ones based on their behavior in the first 5 or 10 minutes of class.  Turns out I had those groups totally backwards.

I also learned that eating and helping kids isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.  Granted, they were 4th graders so it’s not like I had to help them open every single thing they had to eat.

1. $10 an hour for 3 hours at the after school program [↩]

This was possibly the best first subbing job I could have gotten.  There were little kids, which I’m more used to^[1], and I didn’t have to see the same ones every day.  Not that I really would have minded that.  It’s just nice that for my first job I could start over if I did something that didn’t work too well.

To make things even better it was on a day where she didn’t have all of the grades.  I missed out on 4th if I remember right, but either way I got there about 7:15 and didn’t have a class come in until around 9.  So I had plenty of time to figure out the room.  Best of all, no figuring out how to eat and watch kids at the same time.  How much better could it get?

Every class was the same.  I set out some tubs with an activity on each table  and the kids at that table did the activity.  There were some complaints about how they wanted to do something different, but that was about the only problem all day.  Well, that and some kids that broke crayons and the things you’d expect elementary schoolers to get in trouble for in an art class.

OK, kindergarten was different.  I read them a Robert Munsch book and then gave everyone paper and crayons.

It was a great day.

1. I was still doing the after school program at the Montessori school downtown at the time [↩]