Tales from the Shark Tank

I’ve been substitute teaching for a couple of weeks now. I’d heard our little district had a distinct shortage of subs, but the reality of that has been born in upon me in that I’ve been getting 2 and 3 calls for each day, and I’m still an unknown quantity here. Indiana now licenses substitutes as well as teachers (pretty much a matter of passing a criminal history check), and since that comes through the state it takes awhile to wend its way through the red tape. So while I applied when school opened, my license just came in…and the calls began to follow.

I’m told I’m a rare creature – a substitute who isn’t actually a regualr teacher who still actually teaches. But I wouldn’t know what else to do, really. I mean, I can’t think of anything more likely to create chaos than a bunch of bored 10 year olds. So I’ve taught 5th grade a couple of times, and 4th, and really had fun doing it. I’ve also gotten sneaky; when I heard some anti-immigrant twaddle being repeated, I started a social studies discussion of immigration (fortuitously the subject of the current section in their book) that began with finding out where grandparents and great-grandparents had come from, and when…and pointing out that the descendants of all those immigrants were the Americans present in the room. And the discussion got lively enough that I think it likely at least a couple of them will remember it. Such a subversive I am.

But the fact remains that I am still establishing myself as reliable and capable, and so when I was asked to take the special-ed room at the same gradeschool, while I told the principal I had never in my life done such a thing, I agreed. He said that the primary requisite was patience, and that in his observation I was well endowed with that. And so it was that this morning found me unlocking the door to the learning-disability resource room, laptop in hand because every day I’d had so far had featured several hours of downtime in it while the kidlings were in music or the library or what have you.

Today featured no downtime at all. It was the closest I would imagine most schools now come to the old “one room school”; at any given moment, I could be helping a 4th grader who reads at about 1st grade level (and a struggling 1st grade at that), shepherding an autistic six year old through a meltdown, or trying to explain division to a 5th grade kid who had to be redirected about every 90 seconds. Sometimes I was trying to do it all at once.

I don’t know how those who do that daily manage. I couldn’t. I deal well with fairly normal kids of pretty much any age, and delight in teaching the bright ones. I could handle the meltdown king of the first grade. (Poor guy, he thought he could get out of doing his work by screaming, and was much taken aback when I was utterly unimpressed.) The ones whose letters turned backwards on them I understand; that’s a a disability, not a matter of intelligence. But the ones who couldn’t figure out that the plural of “leaf” is “leaves”, or that of “child” was “children” even when we went over it 20 times, the ones who had to sound out “cup” and then came across the same word in a sentence immediately following and didn’t recognize it – those I had trouble with. A mind that does not grasp the simplest concepts, when I can see clearly that the child is working terribly hard to do so is another world. I don’t know how to deal with that. But I can say with certainty that it requires far more than simple patience.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Life as I know it. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.