Political Pundits

I've been sitting here for about 5 minutes trying to figure out how to start this blog with a sentence more interesting than "Today I was subbing at..." But alas, I cannot come up with a way, so I'll just start anyways:

I've been to 31 out of Salem's 47 elementary schools during the past year, but today I went to my 32nd school! It was one of the few in south Salem that I hadn't been to. Now that I think about it, during my years of student teaching and substituting I've been in 38 different schools! Wow...that's a lot.

Anyways, I was teaching for the afternoon in a 4th grade class. Their teacher told me that they were a good group of kids but prone to talking. I had to pick them up from recess which is always interesting when subbing for the afternoon because you have NO IDEA which class is "yours"! So I just end up asking some random line if they are Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so's class and they usually aren't, but they always know which line is. So I found the kids and we came back to the room, and they were a bit chatty, but once I started reading their read-aloud book they calmed down.

After a while I had the kids work on reading the Scholastic News magazines and answering the questions on the back. These particular issues were about the presidential race. One focused on the Vice Presidential candidates and the other talked about the Presidential candidates. The students were surprisingly opinionated on the matter. They all kept talking about who they were "going to vote for". And there were opinions on both sides of the spectrum. I listened to one girl spout off about how Obama had "no experience" and how he "keeps saying that he's going to change everything but he doesn't say HOW he's going to do that". Followed immediately by two boys discussing how McCain was clearly the wrong choice because he supported the war in Iraq and he "wants to still have the war". However, I was really impressed at how polite the kids were to each other. These 2 very different opinions happened to be sitting at the same table, and they all calmly explained what they thought, listened to the others and then just moved on. I think we could all learn a lot from the way they managed to have a political discussion without resorting to name-calling and bickering.

We also discussed the differences between the primaries (can only vote for your own party) and the main election (can vote for whoever you want), as well as how everybody's vote is private, and no one has to tell you who they vote for it they don't want to. Oh, and I also had to point out that John McCain and Joe Biden were indeed 2 different people! (Kids got confused by the fact they they both were wearing dark suits and had white hair apparently).

Later in the afternoon we went out to recess which the class was very happy about. (Love it when teachers leave extra recess or a movie for the end of the day - gives me something to hold over their heads all day (or half-day))

Oh, and I almost forgot the tale of the fidget toy! You see, these kids all had these little stress-ball things that they called fidget toys that they made in class that they could bring with them to the carpet and keep at their desks to fidget with during the day. Well, when we were watching a video, one of the kids was throwing his into the air (somehow I didn't see him do it) and it landed on top of the light. He pointed this out to me when the movie was over and I turned the lights on. So in order to prevent a fire hazard I had to keep half of the lights off. The kids all wanted to try to get it down, but I had them go to their seats and start the next activity. Meanwhile, I got a chair and a yard stick and climbed up to try to knock it down. But I just couldn't quite reach it. By this time ALL the kids in the room are facinated my me, their substitute, standing on the chair in the middle of the room. I had some kid grab me a "Whispy" (a curved tube that you hold up to your head like a phone and whisper into one end and listen out of the other end) and I stuck that onto the end of a broom and climbed up again. This time I managed to knock it down and everyone cheered. Who know I was so entertaining?!

Then there was the kid with the shirt of a Mr. Potato-like figure dressed up as Darth Vador (it said "Darth Tator" on top) pointing to a french fry and saying "I am your father!" haha thought that was pretty funny.

Oh, one kid drew me a picture of a squirrel being abducted by aliens. Great stuff.