Waffles Radio Because if you don’t let off steam you’ll explode

Days 43, 44, and 45 – 7th Grade Math

I was sitting around the day before school started back up when I decided it would be a good idea to check and see if there were any jobs available.  I’m glad I did.

This was originally a one day assignment.  The first day was rather boring actually.  Every class got the book for the state’s standardized test and did work out of that.  Since I think that part of practicing for the test is putting them in as close to the same environment as I can, I had each student work individually and didn’t help anyone.  And for the most part, everyone behaved pretty well.  Not perfectly, I still had to remind people to stop talking and work by themselves.   But they’re in 7th grade, if I didn’t have to do that at all I’d be a bit worried.

The next day was a little worse as far as behavior went.  Three people got lunch detention for talking when they weren’t supposed to and one kid got a referral for arguing with me when I told him to move to a different seat and then later arguing again when I wouldn’t let him move back after the work had been turned in.

The only other issue that day was with one class’ homework.  I let the class work together, and the didn’t do as good of a job budgeting their time as they should have.  So there were some kids with lots of homework.  I told them that the teacher would want to see it when she got back, but that I was going to be there again the next day and I wasn’t going to look at it¹ so they’d have more than the one night to finish it.

Apparently that wasn’t enough to keep them from freaking out in the next class, where that teacher talked to the one I subbed for and together somehow came up with the idea that they didn’t need to worry about doing that for homework.  Some of the kids got that message, some didn’t.  Oh well, the extra work won’t hurt anyway.

The third day was the best as far as I’m concerned.  It was another day of just giving the kids work out of the book.  Like the second day, I helped out when I could because this wasn’t supposed to be practicing for the state standardized test.  I did have one student who got a referral for arguing with me and rolling her eyes at me when I told her to be quiet after the class had lost the privilege working together and one kid who “forgot” that he had lunch detention for an inappropriate joke.  He got off lucky and one of the other teachers on lunch duty just made him finish that day and do whatever time he’d missed the next day.

This was really a great group of kids and hopefully I’ll get the chance to go back.  The other teachers and a few of the principals were impressed with the fact that I was able to keep them under control as well as I did and that I kept coming back.  Hopefully that will turn into more work for me at that school.

1. The teacher sent new lessons plan for each day and didn’t say anything about checking homework. [↩]