2nd Grade

I've been subbing this week for a second grade teacher.  I love second grade.  I love kids.  I love teaching.  I love school.  The kids are so fantastically weird, and if I let them, they would talk to me all day and tell me crazy stories.  ALL DAY.  I am already too indulgent with them because I crave their crazy stories, so I'm afraid that there is a good chunk of our day spent with me sitting at the teacher's desk and the kids lined up under the pretense of getting individual help with their math or reading, but we actually all know that they are only lined up to tell me something strange that they dreamed about, or that they saw on TV or that their parent's did.

Yesterday I got a scene by scene retelling of a movie about a girl who got her arm bit off by a shark while surfing.  Surely the synopsis was a million times better than the actual movie because the girl that told it to me was so intensely involved in the telling, dramatic gestures and all.  This morning a boy told me all about the show Terra Nova.  Dinosaurs! Blood sucking worms! The jungle! Violence! Terror! (I can't believe what parents let their kids watch.)

This afternoon one boy was tired and had a bit of a meltdown that landed him in the hall.  I got so much secretive, unsolicited advice about how to handle it.  One girl told me she didn't want to see me get my feelings hurt so I should call the principal and let her handle things.  Another kid told me to make him sit in a time-out during afternoon recess by the bee hive.

The only thing I don't like about teaching is the hard schedule.  And the only reason I mind that is because (and forgive my bluntness) when a girl has to poop a girl has to poop.  And a girl can't say to 25 seven-year-olds, "Talk amongst yourselves for ten minutes or so while I drop the kids off at the pool," because it only takes about 90 seconds for them to devolve into a Lord of the Flies type scenario (re: time-outs by the bee hive).  So teaching makes me constipated.

I saw something incredibly strange today.  There is a student teacher working with another teacher and she is young and thin and beautiful, but today she was wearing the strangest thing.  She had on a normal, properly sized, oxford, button down shirt.  No pleats, no puffiness, nothing special.  What was weird was that she was wearing a thin leather braided belt around her rib cage.  Right under her boobs.  It looked so uncomfortable, and so weird!  Is this a new thing?  I've never seen anything like it so I was staring at her under-boobs all day wondering what-the-hell and I'm sure she just thinks I was staring at her boobs, which I kind of was.  So who's the strange one?