Redheaded Jill

My favorite assignments to accept as a substitute teacher are half day assignments. Today I was an afternoon sub for a class of 20+ third graders.

We had to do ELA, which is a new form of reading/writing and science all rolled into one. It was long. And the kids didn’t pay much attention to me. Thankfully it was somewhat interesting, and there were several paras in and out to help during the 90 minutes of ELA.

There were two boys in particular who needed extra help. They’re both smart as a whip, but they had behavioral issues. One was silly and one was angry.

It was about 12:30 when I had to get stern for the first time. The two boys were fighting, telling “Yo Mama” jokes. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing. One boy kept saying, “I have graduated from the comeback god to the comeback King.” (We’ll pretend that king trumps god…) The second boy kept saying, “Uno reverse, what now??” Is that a new thing? Uno reverse? Is that a song lyric? Why did he keep using that phrase?

Later the same boys almost had a physical altercation. I finally told them to stay away from one another for the rest of the day.

After the last recess of the day our angry friend was passing notes to his classmates instead of practicing his verbs. Some concerned students brought me a notecard that said, “Deez-nuts.” I told him to cut it out and saved the note for his teacher. The boy said, “You can’t get mad! You don’t even know what nuts I was talking about! I was meaning walnuts!” Yeah right kid… yeah. right.

All things considered the day wasn’t that bad. I really enjoyed working with the kids on verbs/nouns/adjectives, and we read some interesting facts about vertebrates and invertebrates. The weather was warm, but there was a cool breeze so recess was restful.

Next time rather than deal with the kids’ fighting I’ll probably send them to the office. I try to be extremely lenient with students because I hated school and I understand the frustration of sitting still for long periods of time and studying things I had no interest in. I draw the line at crude humor and physical altercations.