My life as a substitute teacher

I had a pretty exciting week!  Monday morning I taught a 1/2 day of beginning Spanish.  Tuesday I cleaned the house, caught up on things and ran errands.

Wednesday brought another round of tests to finalize my Oregon teaching license.  Last time was just math, reading and writing.  This time it was a 150-question test over everything I ever learned in college--biology, genetics, chemistry, physics, geology, geography, math, world history, US history, English, teaching methods.  You name it, it was on there.  It was like a giant game of Jeopardy!  I was very elated when I scored 96% on the test.

Thursday I got a sweet job as the wood shop teacher at the local high school.  I had not been in a wood shop since 1988 in high school.  And even then, I was much more busy flirting with the TA so he would do my projects than I was paying attention to anything the teacher said.  It turned out to be a pretty easy sub job--no tools or machines were allowed.  It was all a writing assignment for a project proposal.  I impressed the other wood shop teacher as we were switching classrooms and I had a football player come up to me and tell me that he could not do the writing assignment because he had to leave school a half hour early for the football game.  I handed him a paper and told him he had 20 minutes, so I hoped he was a fast writer.  The other teacher said, "Nice answer!"  Then he grabbed a piece of wood and a pencil off of a table and asked me what my sub # was.

Friday was a day I will never forget.  I subbed in a middle school"technology" classroom.  Basically the kids are either learning how to type or are working on some other computer assignment.  I am not the kind of sub who will just sit at a desk and let kids do whatever.  I roamed the room the entire time watching their screens to make sure they were all on the one and only program they were allowed to be on.  I thought the day was coming to a very nice close, when about 20 minutes before the final bell, I heard a scuffle behind my back.  A chair hit the floor and I turned around quickly and saw two boys punching each other.  It took me a second to realize they were actually fighting and not just being "guys."  I honestly have no idea what happened to start the fight--it was spontaneous combustion.  Even the girl sitting next to the boys had no idea what started it!

I stepped right in the middle, grabbed the back of their shirts and ushered them out into the hallway.  I showed them each a square on the floor and told them they could not move.  I flagged down an office assistant who promptly got the principal to come take over.  One boy was bleeding profusely from his nose, so I threw a tissue box at him and told him to make it stop.  I stayed totally calm on the outside, but my heart was pounding like crazy on the inside!

After a crowd of administrators and teachers had gathered in the hallway to take over, I stepped back into the classroom and kept the kids working on their assignments until the bell rang.  Then the teacher I had subbed for came into the classroom (he had been working on something else that day), and asked if I had been scared.  I told him, "No.  I have 7 kids, and 5 of them are boys."  He laughed at first and then he stopped and stared at me.  He asked how old I was, and I told him.  Then he freaked out.  It made my day.  He said that he thought I was a new college graduate.  I told him that I graduated from college 19 years ago.

Then the principal stopped me on my way out the door and told me that the teachers were talking about how calm I had stayed during the whole thing, and she wanted to thank me and make sure I was OK with everything.  I told her the same thing about the 7 kids, and she was also very surprised.  Then the secretary put me at the top of their school's priority sub list!

We'll see what happens.

And it all starts with a high school PE class tomorrow!