Yesterday, I went back to a full day of substitute teaching, fourth graders. It was a new district as I had taken some time off, because the district I was working at previously, banned me after I stopped a student from assaulting his classmates. So yesterday, at a new district, in a new school, with different kids--within the first 30 minutes, a fight broke out, and I had to stop it. That's kind of risky, because once you make contact with the kids, even to pull them off of each other, someone can lodge a complaint and you can lose your job. Also, notable about yesterday, was the level of disrespect and lack of discipline. Their teacher had been absent for a while, so they closed the door of the classroom and then started throwing things, running around screaming and playing games on their computers. There was no making them stop, and there's not enough support from the school. I'm not working today, and I don't miss it. And I don't miss being told by a 10-year-old to, "get out of her face," because I asked her to stop shouting and sit down. Teachers should be allowed to teach, and not have to deal with managing behaviors like this. There was one high point for me, when I managed to get most of the students involved in a reading about the American Revolution. In order to do this, I had to stop every paragraph or two, and interject on a more personal level, about what the people in the story had to deal with 250 years ago. The kids I was teaching aren't particularly interested in learning. But they did seem interested, when I described some of the difficulties that people had to endure. Such as, not having clean drinking water and the sickness that can result. However, there was a tornado drill in the afternoon, and any connection I had made, was soon abandoned by them, as they resumed their disrespectful and inappropriate behavior.
The thoughts of a writer.
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