oh well, it's the spice of life

As my long-term subbing job, the best one I ever could have asked for, began winding down, I started to look forward to having a plan book filled with different things every day. I would miss the stability and the children and preschool, but it would be replaced with adventure and the unknown. The other day's adventure was subbing in a school I knew nothing about for what turned out to be third grade.

The room was pretty bare - no color, no student work displayed, instructional posters at all the wrong angles on the chalkboard. The plans left for me were minimal and grammatically repulsive. They also included 10 practice pages of math work for the students to do in an hour and fifteen minute period. You can guess how well that went over. I like to think I don't judge people I've never met, but I feel safe in saying that this woman is a bad teacher. She didn't even seem to have set up the most basic of routines. There was some sort of drastic pencil shortage going on. Every few minutes, another third grader would approach me with a broken pencil, their ONLY pencil, and ask me if they could sharpen it. Pencil sharpening is one of the most obnoxious distractions that can go on in a classroom.

The first most obnoxious distraction, I learned, is hand sanitizer use. The students used up the hand sanitizer within the first ten minutes of the day and pulled from a locker an industrial-sized bottle to replace it. Apparently the rule was that if you blow your nose, you must sanitize your hands, and another student has to squirt the bottle, so as not to contaminate its surface. This seemed to be the only rule this teacher strictly enforced. Every time I turned around, 5 children were gathered around the sanitizer, squirting gobs of it onto each other's hands. I couldn't stop them, because this was the rule, and they would sneak over to the tissues and fake blow their noses every 2 minutes. By the end of the day, 1/5th of the industrial sanitizer was gone.

Oh yeah, and at one point, 4 children at the same table were fake crying about their dead grandparents. Except that the tears were real. Their eyes were all red, and their noses were puffy, and they were sobbing legitimate tears all over their desks as their friends rubbed their backs and offered to walk them to the guidance counselor's office. No thank you.

Subbing is the worst.