Subbing

Hello again, everyone! I've been away for a bit because I couldn't access our blog site. Very frustrating!
While I've been gone, I've been subbing a ton at school. Including me, there are only 2 subs for the whole K-12 school. So, needless to say, I have a lot of work! This is good, but it makes it hard to plan my schedule. Often I don't know what my week will hold. Sometimes I don't find out I'm subbing until the morning of. Last Monday I was still in my pajamas when the school secretary called to see if I could come in. After I hurriedly got dressed, slapped on some make-up, so as not to frighten the students, I learned my lesson and now I get up with Tim and get ready, just in case. It's good for me, either way, to have a schedule.
Subbing has been kind of a love/hate thing for me lately. It's very strange to teach and have your own classroom for 10 years, and then become a sub. When you walk in a teacher's room, you don't really know their expectations, their subjects (I told the Spanish class last week that I only knew 2 Spanish words: hola and Speedy Gonzales), or the students. I find myself frustrated because I often feel like a babysitter and don't feel like I do as good of a job as I would like. The high schoolers are a whole new world to me. I'm an elementary teacher through and through. I understand little kids, I feel comfortable with them, I know how to teach them. With the high school classes, it's hard to quickly gauge a class and figure out who is telling the truth and who is making up "Mr. Such and Such let's us do open book tests." Well, that's a pretty easy one to figure out, but sometimes it's a fine line between being too strict and too nice. You don't want to be unreasonable, but you don't want to be a sucker either.
As with any kind of teaching, there are always funny things the kids say. I used to keep a book of my favorite quotes, but in the last couple years I've stopped doing that. I think I should start again. Here are a couple gems from this last week...

-from a high school student in the cooking class: "Mrs. Redden, this recipe calls for evaporated milk. If it's evaporated, what's the point?"

-from a kindergartner: "You know, I really just don't want to go to school."

-another from a kindergartener who really missed his mom: "I hope the angels don't remind me about my mom while I'm at lunch." My response: "I think the angels will leave you alone while you eat"

-another kindergartner: The teacher was passing out pretzel sticks for snack and this particular child said, "Are these vegetarian?"

-from AP European History: Student 1-"When they talk about how the "Christian Church" was effected in the Reformation, do they mean the Catholic Church? Student 2- "Yeah, the Catholic Church. Isn't that the whole point of the Reformation?"

-an answer from a biology student: The worksheet was fill-in-the blank and said, "When humans sweat, heat causes _______________. The answer was evaporation, but the student wrote sweating.

-one from Tim's class: Tim asked one 6th grader which name he preferred to be called, his official name or his nickname. He said, "Just call me Mr. A." Needless to say, that didn't fly with Mr. Redden.

-a general comment I get: "Oh! You're Mr. Redden's wife." This in itself isn't that funny, but I always want to say, "Haven't you seen the gigantic picture of me that Mr. Redden blew up and put at the front of his room?? You can't miss it!"

Well, I certainly am learning a lot, though. In the past week and a half, I've "taught" Spanish, Biology, Chemistry, Study Skills, kindergarten, art, cooking, and AP European History. I heard today the cooking classes took whole chickens and cut them up, apparently with lots of guts and gore. I'm really thankful I did not have to sub for that class because as I have stated before, I'm already pretty close to becoming a vegetarian, with the exception of cheeseburgers. Who knows what my subbing future holds? I will definitely keep you posted on my adventures (which I'm hoping will take place more in the elementary classroom.)