Oh the Life of a Sub

So I woke up this morning at 7:45 to a phone call. I was asked to sub for a 5th grade class & needed to be there around 8:15. I quickly got ready and arrived to the school for my first sub job. After signing in at the office, I got escorted to my room which required walking outside to an annex. The teacher I was subbing for was in her classroom as well as all the students. Even though school starts at 8:30, they were already there and working when I arrived at 8:20. The teacher quickly explained the day and left me alone with her class (she wasn't feeling well upon getting to school so that's why I subbed). She warned me that her class was talkative, but I was not prepared for what was in store.

Her class talked non-stop! I gave warnings, used her behavior chart (color-coded popsicle sticks according to the students' behavior). Once I started learning names, disciplining became a little easier. When lunch rolled around, I tried to stick to the teacher's procedures according to what the students told me; however, when you have 5 students shouting different procedures I just rolled with it. Apparently, the students are supposed to walk single file with no talking while in the hallways. I of course figured this out as all the other teachers popped their heads out of classrooms and yelled at my students (oh and the art class was in an open area situated in a high-traffic area, so the art teacher laid into my students quite often!).

After lunch, we were supposed to go through their vocab words & have students use them in sentences. What should have been 10 minutes was more like 25 minutes due to me continually having to refocus the class as well as yelling at students for talking. One student ended up receiving his red stick which gave him a trip to another teacher's room. With him out of the class, things went a little better. I felt like I just roamed around the room putting out fires. And to make matters worse, it was one student's birthday and his mom brought in donuts for the class which just sugared up the kids and added to the fiasco. Some 0f the students swapped classrooms for a Math class. I felt bad for those students coming into my room from next door. The kids that had been in my classroom earlier were way out of control and caused most of math class consisting of me shushing them all! Plus, during the math class, the students found the answers to the worksheet in the book. I had the teacher's book and was supposed to read through the steps and help the students figure out the problems, but with the answers the students just shouted answers without knowing how to do it. Ridiculous!

Here is when the day really went sour (for the students). Last class of the day required them walking through the annex, through gym class, outside, and into the cafeteria. I told them upon leaving the room that they were to prove themselves in the hall by not making a peep. Yeah right Mrs. Ackerman! All it took was the little trip down the hall and through the gym for the chaos to begin. One of the students apparently farted which caused all the other students to go crazy. Another teacher rounded the corner as I was coming up towards the scene of the crime. The other teacher went NUTSO on the kids! She started yelling at them for being rude & misbehaving and then wanted to know who farted. Myself as well as the whole class knew who had done it (he had been farting all through my class earlier which also happened to be birthday boy). Since he wouldn't fess up, the entire class got a detention instead of going to music class. They had to do something called "write-offs" which all I could figure out was something like writing "I will not, blah blah blah" 100 times or so.

I thought my day was almost over when I went back to pick the kids up. We returned to the classroom for the dismissal. Instead of all the students leaving at once, they had to stay in the classroom and one bus at a time would be called out. The whole process took 45 minutes. Close to the end, one of my students informed me that the teacher made them sit in their desks quietly until their bus was called. Thinking that they would leave quickly, I made them put all their seats on the desks (as told my janitor) and let them talk and roam around. This just made a chaotic ending to a chaotic day. I even had teachers come into my room to yell at the kids. The secretary kept telling me that they were really a good class. So either they're a good class and I'm an awful sub, or they're an awful class and I was an unlucky sub. I guess I'll figure it out when I sub again for that teacher on Monday!

Oh, and once I got home at 4:15, I got a call from another school asking if I would sub tomorrow. SUUuuuuure. Why not? So tomorrow, I have to be at a high school at 7am in order to sub for the theater teacher. Then, I get to bee-line it home to hang out with a cute baby all evening (and no I'm not talking about Steve, even though I think he is cute and I get to hang out with him too all evening, I'm talking about little Hadleigh).