Rollercoaster

It's been awhile again.  I've found it difficult to find the motivation to write something.  Also, most of my days are starting to feel pretty typical, even the more colorful days!  Today finally has given me something that feels "blog worthy." 

Today I subbed at one of the local junior high schools.  I've subbed for this teacher several times and now know the typical classroom routine.  This teacher does everything through power point and in the past has left me her login and password so that I can access her files and power point.  This morning, the login password didn't work.  I tried to mess around with the login a bit to see if she just missed the number or made another silly mistake, but none of my guesses produced a successful login.  I knew from the printed notes she left me that there was some sort of video that the power point had a link to.  I then logged onto the computer under my account hoping I could find some information or a link on the district website or perhaps a personal classroom website.  Again, even my technical wizardry couldn't produce the needed video for the days class.  Now in a slight panic, with only ten minutes before class started, I attempted to make a plan.  I looked through the worksheet they were supposed to fill out during the video and it seemed like the book could maybe provide some of the answers.  It would have to do for now, and perhaps the first period class may know more as to where to find the needed video.

All too soon, the first period kids trooped into the room.  I quickly took attendance and explained the situation to the class.  Luckily these students were eager to help and one of them bravely volunteered to log onto the student site to see if the needed link was there.  Unfortunately this only led me back to the same information I had found before school.  My next course of action was to hand out the worksheets, assign the reading and hoped it all would work out.  In the meantime, I sent the class TA to find one of the other science teachers that might know more about where the missing video was located.  A helpful teacher showed up at about the same time the students realized that the book wasn't very helpful in answering the worksheet questions because it didn't quite present the information in the same way.  So now I have thirty confused seventh graders with nothing to do, one helpful science teacher trying to work his technological wizardry on the computer, and one frazzled me.  Luckily the helpful teacher knew what it was I was looking for, even though he couldn't find it on the computer.  He then quickly got the needed disc from another teacher and I tried to get the students back to work.  Only for some reason, I can't find the right presentation on the disc.  I look around the information on the disc, I try to play a few of the slides, but nothing is quite right.  I again send the TA to ask the teacher who loaned us the disc if there is another disc with the right information.  A second helpful teacher arrives who informs me that the disc loads different material when you click "intermediate" or "advanced" on the loading screen and I apparently clicked the wrong one.  Finally I get the right video going and the students successfully answer all the questions for their worksheet!  Wheww.  And that was only period one.

The second period class I have to try and piece together what the rest of the days assignments are supposed to be.  I walk them through the video and worksheet and then assign them some of the reading and reflection questions from the book and then give them time to work on another worksheet.  By the end of the second period class I'm starting to get the flow of the class and decide that I've given the students enough work time that the second worksheet should be homework for tomorrow.  Third period also proceeds without incident.  At this point I'm starting to feel pretty good about my day as I go into lunch.

Then, fourth period happened.  Because I had already subbed for this teacher before, I knew there was a fairly difficult student in the fourth period class.  Ryan had worked pretty hard in my previous days to push my buttons and I knew today would probably be the same.  As soon as the video started, I noticed him folding paper stars and not really working on the worksheet.  At this point I wasn't too worried because he wasn't really bothering anyone else.  When I assigned the book-work, he continued his paper folding and then decided to distract his neighbor as well.  I tried to give Ryan options: either do his work or he could go to the office.  Unfortunately, the office seemed to be an enjoyable option for Ryan instead of motivation to work.  I could tell that his neighbor would get work done if he didn't have Ryan distracting him.  I decided to try and move Ryan to see if that would help the situation.  This sort of worked.  Ryan's neighbor did finally started working and actually finished almost everything (yeah!).  Ryan, however, did not get anything accomplished.  Instead he started making distracting noises to try and get attention from the rest of the class.  I decided to try and ignore the behavior to see if it would disappear.  Ignoring worked to an extent, and then Ryan tried bigger means of getting attention like falling off his seat.  After about half of the class time though, students were really trying to work on their assignment so they wouldn't have any homework.  No one was paying attention to Ryan, so he started calling students names to try and get their attention.  I was so happy when these students were so engrossed in their work that they didn't even look at Ryan.  At this, Ryan seemed to give up and just doodled and occasionally made a week effort to try and get attention again.

Then, I had my last class of the day.  I'm not sure I ever have enjoyed a science class so much (except for maybe the "lab" in high school where we got to make ice cream sundaes).  This class got really into the video explaining earth's layers.  Together as a class we made a lot of food analogies about the layers.  I think my favorite thing that came out of this was a student noting that basalt (the main component of the oceanic crust) was like B-A salt.  It quickly became a class joke that the salt was BA!  We also compared continental crust and oceanic crust to pizza crust (deep dish and regular crust!).  It was a bit surreal going from such a hard classroom management class to one that was so easy.  This is one of the reasons why I often find teaching high school and junior high easier than subbing for elementary schools.  With the older students, I get a whole new class after fifty minutes.  With elementary students, if there's a difficult student, I have to deal with him all day long!  Mostly, though, I'm glad my day ended with a positive classroom experience.