Hurricane Second Grade

Whew! I am very glad to be home this evening. I subbed today in a school I had not been to before, in a second grade class.

First thing I saw upon entering the room was that it was a bit of a mess. Well....mess is an understatement. There were great piles of teacher edition textbooks, papers, notes, books, etc. on the teacher's desk, one of which was topped by a giant box filled with yet more books. I happened to brush against it once and sent the whole thing tumbling down! There were also papers littered all over the floor in the teacher's corner. Just a carpet of papers. Not kidding. Also, there was a nice closet over in this area that had a bunch of shelves in it, but none of the shelves had anything on them. All the stuff was on the floor, and a big file cabinet was smack dab in the middle of the doorway with yet more boxes and papers piled on it. Now, I'm not a complete neat-freak, but I do have lots of obsessive-compulsive tendencies and I'm usually organized with most things - and when I am organized I'm pretty picky about it. So this just about sent my brain into orbit so early in the morning! I had to fight all my instincts to clean up and straighten and organize the room just so I could read the lesson plans! Ah!! It still send shivers down my spine! Must! Clean! Mess! haha

Well then the kids got there and they weren't too happy to see me. Apparently they've had a lot of substitutes lately, and they were pretty weary of it. The did a pretty good job in the morning. There was an assitant who came and took about 2/5ths of the class for reading which was nice. They also had recess and then a Spanish lesson which was taught by another teacher - I just had to come and watch. However, after lunch things went downhill. (I blame it on the cupcakes one of the girls brought for her birthday!) There were about 5 boys who just could NOT sit still! They were out of their seats getting pencils, going to the bathroom, getting drinks, or just plan goofing around. The teacher lets the students take the bathroom or drink pass and go without asking as long as it's not during instruction time. I've been to a few classes like this, and sometimes it's just fine, but today it really annoyed me. The kids were abusing the privilege and it was just a CONSTANT stream of them coming and going. I eventually took away the drink pass and told them no more drinks. But back to my little challenging boys. Whenever I tried to have the class sit at the carpet for more than 5 minutes to give instructions, these boys were lying down, rolling around, sitting under tables, playing with stuff on the shelves, talking, bugging other kids, picking at each other, etc. It was driving me CRAZY! I had to stop so many times to tell them to sit up, stop talking and pay attention I felt like a broken record. Needless to say I was very tired by the end of the day. And I vowed to myself never to let my future students dismiss themselves to go to the bathroom - if only to save a substitute some grief.