I am almost a full month into my new substitute teaching
adventure, and I’m still trying to work out where I want to concentrate my time,
grade-wise. I haven’t attempted it yet, but I’m almost positive I won’t be a
good fit for kindergarten.
I love dogs, but I’m not a cat person. It seems like running
a kindergarten class would be a lot like managing a room full of adult cats mixed
with puppies. Cats and puppies with open markers and glue sticks tangled in
their hair. And random emotions.
I believe there is a good reason that 126% of all
kindergarten teachers in America are women. Women just naturally deal with
random emotions and knotted, glued, emotionally-charged hair better than men.
I have subbed second and third grade, and that’s about as
low on the age chart as I think I’ll get. I mean, let’s face it, first grade is
basically just the second semester of kindergarten.
I subbed third grade the other day and the teacher was
telling me about the class before school started. “It’s a great group of kids,”
she said. “She’s a little squirrelly,” she told me, pointing to the desk
closest to us, “but no big deal. They’re great.”
Turns out, “a little squirrelly” to a third-grade teacher
means a girl who literally did not stop talking for the entire hour I was
covering the class, never sat down in her actual chair once, and at one point,
simply left the room without asking. I was informed by her peers that she had
to use the restroom and apparently, I was not responding to her requests.
It seems my years of parenting Son Number Three have given
me an above-average ability to tune out constant chatter. Probably not the best
trait for a kindergarten substitute teacher.
Fifth and sixth grade were OK, but so far, I have drawn a
line there, avoiding middle school. I drive a middle school carpool, and being
in the car for fifteen minutes at a time with seventh- and eighth-graders is
plenty for me. I’m not especially interested in an entire day of it. They’re
like kindergartners, but with B.O. and an advanced slang/curse word vocabulary.
The line is lifted after eighth grade, however. I’m finding
I enjoy subbing at the high school level. It’s far more humorous, on a
tragically hip level, than elementary school. Meaning, there’s still the same amount
of goofy issues with the students, but the high school issues are so varied and
insanely self-centered, that I’d almost go for free just for the entertainment
value. Almost.
An example of what I mean happened a couple weeks ago when I
subbed for a high school English teacher. The English class was actually called
LA-II on my paperwork, which stands for Lulling Asleep Individuals
Instantaneously. The school system has finally adopted truth in advertising.
It was immediately obvious which desk cluster I was going to
have problems with (and I’m using “cluster” in the truest sense of its slang
meaning, here). Two of the three young ladies could not keep their attention
off their cell phones. Why the teacher allowed them to have their phones at
their desks is beyond me, but I am not suicidal enough to try to separate a
teenage girl from her iPhone without body armor and a cattle prod.
The class was learning and writing about the Holocaust. They
were supposed to be watching a movie about the Auschwitz concentration camp, and
then answering questions and writing an essay. The entire class, minus the
cluster at issue, was watching the movie on their Chromebooks. Most of them
were using their own earbuds and a few had asked for the class headphones.
Over at the cluster, there was something hilarious on one of
the phones. A short while after we managed that issue, it was selfie time. I
looked over to see Girl Two leaning over to Girl One’s desk, with Girl One’s
arms stretched high above her head. Heads together, looking up, duck lips
deployed – snap. The perfect in-class dual selfie… wait, hang on, this stupid
Chromebook was in the picture. Let’s do it over… Oh, crap, that lame old man
sub is staring at us. Let’s pretend not to care about our phones for a while…
Girl Three of the cluster was clearly not friends with the
other two. She was completely uninterested in selfie time. She was also wearing
approximately six pounds more makeup than Girl One and Two combined. She was
also doing absolutely nothing at all.
I walked over to ask if her Chromebook had stopped working,
since it wasn’t even pulled up to the page that had the link to the movie, let
alone the movie itself.
“Oh, yeah, so, like, my AirPods weren’t connecting to the
computer and stuff, so I’m just going to watch it at home later.”
“Hmm,” I said, doing the mental calculation of the zero
percent chance that she was planning to watch the movie at home. “No problem. I
have a whole bin full of headphones over at my desk. Let me get you a pair.”
“Um, yeah, so, I have a cartilage piercing, and headphones
really don’t feel good on it, and stuff, so I’m just going to watch it at home.”
“Oh, OK, no problem. Let me just get on the phone and call
the last remaining Holocaust survivors and let them know you won’t be able to
learn about their unimaginable ordeal today because it’s a little uncomfortable
to wear headphones with your self-induced ear ornaments,” I said, inside my
head.
“OK,” I said out loud, “do you have a book you can read
instead?”
“No.”
“Of course you don’t. Best of luck with your future career
as an Instagram model/part-time barista. I’ll bet your TikTok about your
cartilage piercing gets like, a zillion views!” I said inside my head.
“Okey dokey,” I said out loud.
See what I mean? I’d almost do it for free, just for the
laughs.
Almost.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen
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