The academy kids complained just as much about having to write an entire page^[1].  But everyone actually had work to turn in this time.  I considered that a huge improvement.

This time the 7th and 8th graders just had to finish something they hadn’t finished yet.  For almost all of them that meant finishing a project based around texture.  I’m still thinking that Home Ec is code for Art, but I’m not complaining at all.  These kinds of classes are fun.

6th graders essentially had the same assignment, but they were sewing some words.  I couldn’t help them with it at all.

The only thing close to a problem all day was that two new students came into the class.  1 was in 8th grade, and I had extra sheets for people who weren’t in class the day before so she got to do the work just like everyone else.  The other new kid was in 6th grade.  He’d lived here before and had moved back so he knew some people in the class.  He spent the entire time catching up with them since I didn’t know where the supplies were to get him started.

At the end of the day I thanked the teacher for letting the kids do real work.  I’ve seen them with another sub this year, they were doing work out of the book.  That’s bad enough in a regular academic class.  But electives should be fun and doing book work just ruins it in my mind.

1. This falls on deaf ears when it’s aimed at someone who wrote 3 page papers in the 2 hours before the class they were due in college.

So there was some adjusting on both of our parts.  It worked out pretty well.

It wasn’t a notable day at all except that I made a girl cry.  I thought I heard her cuss, and when I tried to talk to her about it she got an attitude with me.  I was about to send her out of the room when she started crying.

Since she’s a 6th grader I decided to cut her some slack and tell her that teachers can be wrong too, and that it’s perfectly fine to tell a teacher they’re wrong if you do it respectfully.

7th and 8th graders finished a color wheel they started yesterday.  That might seem a little low for them^[1], but the teacher was sneaky.  She made them use paint to get the colors and took out everything that wasn’t red, blue, or yellow.

There were actually some kids who asked how to make certain colors.  I can understand yellow-orange to an extent even though I think it should be pretty obvious how to make it.  But they really asked how to make orange and what would happen if they mixed red and blue^[2].

The only two issues with them were that they all wanted to talk to me about stuff since they’d had me before and 40 minutes is a really short class.  It feels like they have just enough time to really get into the work, then they have to pack up.

6th graders were a different story.  The second group of them was great, acted just like the kids in the other grades except they talked amongst themselves more than they did to me.

The first group is probably going to drive this teacher insane.  6th graders had to design a quilt.  Way too many people in the first group just rushed through that.  They were loud.  Not talking a lot loud, physically loud.  They didn’t know how to use a compass^[3].

I like the school though, and I get to go back to this class next week.  One of the other teachers also said that with her 6th graders they’re skipping sending the kids to another teacher or somewhere else in the room if they misbehave and going straight to their principal.  I might need to do that with them.

1. I know it seemed that way for me.
2. To be fair, I always had trouble making purple and usually ended up with something between black and poop brown.
3. I would have forgiven them and just thought it was because they’d never used one before, but the second group knew how to use them.

It really wasn’t that bad though.  The kids watched a movie and took notes.  The movie pretty much filled in the class time.  No extra time means no downtime for the kids to get in trouble in.  Can’t complain about that.

The worst part of the day was that we watched it on a VCR so I had to rewind the tape.  I’d forgotten how long that can actually take.

The best part was that one of the teachers came over to make sure everything was set out right and said they weren’t worried about how I’d do because they heard I was awesome.

6th graders were getting their PE uniforms so my job was to make sure they fit well enough now that they’d stay on but were big enough for them to grow into^[1], and hopefully keep them from needing to buy another one next year.  They all wanted to use the bathroom stalls to change in.  It makes sense, they haven’t really needed to change in front of people before.  But there were 3 stalls and a lot more boys than that.  It was kind of funny seeing them all wait around to change into the gym uniform for about 3 seconds, then wait around again to change back so they could take it out to the gym and have their name written on it.

7th and 8th grade would have been a lot better.  They’re doing something based on Survivor where they’re divided into tribes and compete with everyone else for points.  Yesterday they had to use PVC pipes cut in half longways as a path to roll a golf ball across the gym and back.  That was a great idea, forced them to use teamwork since the pipes were only a few feet long each.

The thing that kept those classes from being better though was that they also have PE assistants.  That worked out really well for the teacher, she had instant people to help demonstrate the game.  And it was great for me in the locker room, they took care of reminding people of their locker combination and stuff like that.  It also meant that there wasn’t much that I needed to do.

I’m sure that will be made up for later.

1. Boys only since I’m a boy.  They had parent volunteers helping but I’m pretty sure the other teacher handled the girls.

The next best thing, and not by much, is that the kids don’t know if what they’re doing is something that would have been done anyway or it it’s only being used because I’m there.

This was a pretty easy day.  There were 2 worksheets that I passed out with a total of 3 sides of work.  Basic stuff revolving around discovering information about our state.  Well, maybe more than basic since they really did need to look the stuff up, but you get the idea.

The amazing thing for me is that I haven’t had to send anyone out of the room yet.  One kid got close, he wouldn’t stop talking and the people in the desks around him continually asked him to stop.  It’s amazing how much quieter the room got when he was off by himself.

The only other real point of interest is that I think something in the school hates me.  This is the only school where the schedule has been played with and I wasn’t told about it at the front desk when I signed in.  Thankfully the teacher next door came and told me about the assembly that day and what the new schedule would be.

I think I just need to remember to ask one of the other teachers if there’s going to be anything weird going on when I get there.

Update: I almost forgot something.  The entire day I felt like I’d been in the room before.  Being in the same room isn’t a big deal.  I’ve repeated class before.  Since this is my second year subbing I haven’t really had a chance to repeate a room with a different teacher yet.

So it sort of bothered me a bit all day about why I felt like this room was important somehow.  Then it hit me.  Remember the day a kid threatened to shoot someone first thing in the morning?  This was the room that happened in.  Thankfully nothing like that happened again or I would never go back to that room again because it obviously would be haunted or cursed or something.

1. Not that that one has every happened.

The first two classes were exactly the same.  They came in, they did the work (which the teacher wrote on the board before I got there) and there wasn’t really any talking.  Just a bit of asking other people for materials.  A teacher’s dream.  Not that great for me since I really don’t like silence, but it worked.

After a lunch break I had the other two classes.  The first one after lunch was a mess.  Only 7 people turned in their work.  People played around.

Thankfully the last class was better.  Granted, they were more talkative than the first two classes.  But they worked while they talked, and the talking wasn’t anywhere close to excessive.  I loved it.

1. Things I’m assuming are in at least one of those books since I haven’t read either one.

1. Three kids for yelling out “nigger.”  Actually, two for definitely yelling it out and one for maybe yelling it out because people in the class said he did but he swears he didn’t but he was close to being kicked out anyway^[1].
2. One girl who had getting kicked out left over from the day before.  Her crime was at 3:36, they get out at 3:45.
3. One boy who decided to joke around about the pope.  Which I didn’t have any problems with on a disciplinary level^[2] until he decided to say that the pop makes the world safe for child molesters.  Not cool at all.

Throw in one kid who decided to announce that he was in a gang with some other people in the class while I was taking roll for good measure.  This kid was too white to be a redneck.  I probably should have sent him down too.

Then there were the good kids.  But I think you can fill in the blanks on that one.

1. I’ve been hanging around middle school kids too much.  My sentence structure is proof.
2. I did have a problem on a humor level.  None of the jokes were remotely funny.

Also, I’d gladly take project work over the normal English work.  The teacher requested me and gave me a choice.  It was really a no brainer.  The only issue was the many ways the kids found to be, well, stupid isn’t the right word but it’s the first word that comes to mind.

After their extra class (vocab work out of the book) and electives (where I read my book) the fun commenced.  We kicked things off with a kid saying he was going to shank someone.  I sent him up to the office (which is conveniently right across the hall) to have a conversation about that.  Ended up with kids getting pulled out of the room to tell the principal what was said and hearing kids say at lunch that he’s suspended.

Next, we had two people who did part of the project that wasn’t supposed to happen until today.  One person covered it with whiteout, the other left it hoping it could be incorporated.

Finally, we had two girls who couldn’t understand the concept of only getting one paper to do the project on.  One just got another one, the other crumpled up the first one and threw it away.   I made them get their first ones again since the teacher made a big deal to me about their only getting one paper.

Everyone else made up for them, and except for the first kid even they weren’t a problem.  The project actually looked like fun, I just hope I get a chance to go back and see them.

Once they left, let’s just say it was about the easiest day ever.  Something along the lines of the SPED day.  The school has 7 periods.  She doesn’t have a 1st, and periods 2-5 were either with her or went to another room to watch a movie with that class.  I didn’t have anybody staying in my room until about 2:00.

So there’s 2 classes that I actually saw.  The first one watched a movie that I’d watched in that class with a different group of kids before.  The second one watched The Sound of Music, or at least as much of it as they could fit in.  Except for taking some toys, there were no problems at all.

Oh yeah, except maybe the boredom.  I’m not going to complain about it, especially after hearing the teacher say that she realized later that she could have just gotten a half day and been fine.