Why I Love Third Graders

I have been teaching in a third grade class all week.  I love them.  They are so fun and cute.  Sure, they have their annoying moments, like the three (or five) kids I call "the questioners" (in my head) because they walk up to ask me a question about absolutely everything.  Like this: 

Questioner:  Mrs. Lindahl, what do we do with our papers when we are done?
Me:  What have you been doing with your papers when you finish them from the beginning of the year?
Questioner:  Put them in the done basket?
Me:  Yes.

Or:

Questioner:  Mrs. Lindahl, what time are we having lunch today?
Me:  What time do you have lunch every day?
Questioner:  11:45?
Me:  Yes. 

Today we brought the kids on a field trip, which is usually a sub's NIGHTMARE because what if you don't know the kids in the class?  What if you don't know the logistics of the field trip?  What if the field trip is to a swamp with kindergarteners, and you only wore some cute little maryjane shoes, not knowing that you were going to be fishing kindergarteners out of a freezing swamp most of the morning?  See what I mean?  (seriously, it really happened, but they didn't call it a swamp, they called it a "nature center."  It was a swamp.)

Our field trip today was to the symphony and it was so fantastic!  There were about 2000 kids there and the program was geared to the elementary school student.  The kids had a great time and so did I. 

Anyway, one of the reasons I love third graders so much is because they are so weird.  I told them yesterday that it is customary to wear nice clothes to the symphony.  A girl came this morning, worried, and said to me, "Mrs. Lindahl, is it okay if I keep my sweatshirt on at the symphony today because I forgot to take off my pajama shirt when I was getting dressed."  She was wearing a pajama shirt, dress pants, and a sweatshirt.  How adorable is that?!

All week a bunch of them have been singing the words "salty nuts" in a very dissonant, sing-song voice.  It seemed a little strange, and slightly inappropriate, but I didn't say anything because I liked it, and obviously it is something they learned in school.  I learned about it today.  At the symphony the trumpet player talked about Dizzy Gillespie and how he wrote a song called "Salt Peanuts" and they played it for us.  Ohhhhhh!  Salt Peanuts!  I'm sure glad I didn't say anything about the inappropriateness of singing "salty nuts" and then having to explain to nine-year-olds why I find the words salty nuts inappropriate. (Here's why.)

I got a picture from a student today (I get pictures every day), and this one just sums up the wonderful weirdness of the typical third grader.  Here it is:

It's a picture of a girl and her giant dog, Bob.  Bob is apparently 100 feet tall and judging by his eyebrow and his speech bubble, he's not a very friendly 100 foot dog.  A squirrel (squerl, OMG!) is talking with the girl and complimenting her 100 foot, growling, angry dog.  Okay, for one thing, why would anyone want a 100 foot dog.  Can you imagine the poops?  Yuck.  And another thing, why is that masochistic squirrel anywhere near a hundred foot, angry dog, and where did it learn to speak English?  It doesn't look like Bob is tied to anything, so I imagine that in the split second after the snapshot of this picture, the squerl was torn to gory shreds.

Noisy

I worked last week in a second grade room and they were so noisy and out of control I lost my voice by the end of the day.  That hasn't happened in a while!  The only way they would listen to a word I said was if I made them sit in their desks and put their heads down.  Otherwise it was like I was talking and nobody could hear me.  I had a microphone and had it turned up as high as it would go without giving feedback.  You know what, School District?  Thirty three 7 year olds is too  many kids for one small, echo chamber of a classroom.  I don't know how the regular teacher can stand it.  I'm still recovering.  This week I have to do a day and a half of kindergarten, half a day of 1st grade and a day of third grade.  I'm not looking forward to it.  This is the same kindergarten class that I taught last time when the kid stuck his hand in his mouth and puked down his arm. YUCK.

Child Abuse

That title is misleading.  Nobody was abusing children today.  Children were abusing me.  I got called in last minute to teach kindergarten.  I rushed through showering and making my lunch and got there to relieve the teacher who was feeling terribly sick.

There were six kids absent today because there is some kind of horrible bug going around.  Ten minutes into class, I was reading a story and somebody stopped me to tell me, "Brady is puking!"  I looked at Brady and he had his fingers in his mouth and was puking down his arm, all over his lap, all over the rug.  Endlessly puking. Gallons of puke.  It was so so so gross.  When he finally stopped, I gave him some paper towels and sent him to the nurse with a helper.  Then I called the janitor to come and clean it up.  He came in to survey the damage and one kid said, "Hi, Bob," then every kid said, "Hi, Bob!" and wouldn't stop saying it until he said hi to each one individually, but I think he freaked out a little because he gave up on that after about five kids and bee-lined it for the door which only made the crazy little bastards say, "HI, BOB!" with more and more desperation.  It was like a whole classroom full of Chuckie dolls.  Ask Bob, I bet he'd agree with me.

Hi, Bob, Hi Bob, HI BOB!

Bob cleaned up the disgusting mess, Brady went home and we got on with the business of kindergarten.  Things went smoothly until it was recess time and I was zipping jackets and when I was bending down to zip a girl's coat, she sneezed a very wet, productive sneeze all over my face.  ALL OVER MY FACE!  I wanted to shriek and dance around and say, "GROSS GROSS GROSS GROSS GROSS!!!"  but I didn't.  I said, in a sweet sing-song kindergarten teacher voice, "remember to cover your mouth when you sneeze!"

After lunch they came back in and had rest time, which would more appropriately be named watch-your-classmates-and-tattle-on-them-for-not-resting-every-second time.  Not very restful.

I got through the afternoon without being too horribly grossed or freaked out until it was time to get ready to go home and I was helping them pack their crap into their backpacks.  Oh My Dear Sweet Lord some of those backpacks are gross!  I can't even tell you how much unidentifiable crusty crap I had to avoid while zipping and unzipping backpacks.  What is that stuff?  Food?  Snot?  Whatever it was, it was gross.  Hey parents, backpacks can be washed.

I need a new job

I think I need to find a job.  I'm really starting to hate subbing.  For one thing, I think that all the laid-off teachers have started subbing and are getting all the decent jobs because when I do get called to sub, the job description is something like this:

Job # 12345 7:30-3:45

-Start at Central High for Mr. So-and-so.  Teach 1st hour special ed. in resource room.  (question:  where the fuck is the resource room?) Teach 2nd hour Consumer Science (fancy name for home ec.) in room 153.  (walking down hallway, see rooms 152, 154.  There is no 153.  After walking about a mile looking for it because it MUST BE by 152, learn that for some inexplicable reason it is on the second floor. ??? Oops!  Clerical error!  We meant 253! lol!)  Walk in late, flustered and sweaty.  Read lesson plans and learn that you have to supervise thirty-five 16-year-olds making flan. (what the fuck is flan?)

-Go to STC (Where the hell is that?  Oh, it's across the 15 acre ice-rink parking lot?  I wonder how many times I will fall.)  Teach 3rd hour remedial math for Mrs. Whats-her-face in a freezing cold totally isolated classroom with 15 boys who look like they want to kill you and make your skin into a suit.  

-Drive to East High School.  Teach 5th and 6th hour  for Mr. Blahblahblah in room 353.  Yes, the school in fact does happen to be 95 degrees!  How did you guess?  BTW Mr. Blahblahblah is a slob and won't have any lesson plans for you.  Good luck!

-Drive back to Central.  Babysit an 8th hour study hall that has a student teacher.  Sure, it's a total waste of time but what do you care?  You're getting paid an almost poverty-level wage no matter what you teach so quit your bitching!

Or even worse:

Job # 23456 7:30 - 3:30

Any Elementary School: All day kindergarten.


(Actually, I taught in kindergarten yesterday and it wasn't so bad.  The kids were very cute.  I was wearing a red jacket and one little girl came up to me and said, "I like your jacket," and on the word "jacket" she poked me hard, dead-center in both boobs with her tiny monkey fingers.) 

I think I want to find a job that pays a lot of money, has low expectations, is part-time, where I won't have to drive around all day or get sexually assaulted by small children.  Is that too much to ask?

Kindergarten = Insane Asylum

I am subbing at one of my favorite schools today, in the morning for a fifth grade teacher and in the afternoon for a kindergarten teacher.  Fifth grade was a breeze.  Fun, easy, rewarding.  I felt like I was really something special after that.  Teacher of the year!  

Then I came into this kindergarten class and they are slowly but surely eating me alive.  This may be the last thing I ever write because they are at lunch right now and I only have another 15 minutes until they get back.  I forgot how fucking crazy kindergarteners are.  As soon as their teacher left, we were doing an activity on the smartboard, putting pictures that started with S next to the big S and putting pictures that started with M next to the big M (easy).  They started arguing with each other about who was going to get to pick which picture, and who was in line first, and who got to be in line first last time blah blah blah.... pandemonium.  

We finished that awful activity and then we went to the gym to play Duck Duck Goose.  Total chaos.  The "it" person would go around the circle and touch each person's head and say "duck" but you could always tell when they were about to goose someone because it went like this:  duck...., duck.., duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, Duck, Duck, DUCK,DUCK, DUCK, DUCK!, with each new kid getting slapped just a little harder in the head until someone got goosed, I meanGOOSEd!!! and then those two were running around the whole gym like a couple of maniacs, and the Goose person would go after the It person with such a vengeance that when the It person finally got tagged by the Goose person the It person usually fell on the floor from the sheer force of five-year-old excitement/gooseslap-rage.  Holy shit!  Calm down, people!  And THEN the people who were tagged were supposed to sit inside the yellow circle, but they wouldn't stay there.  If I turned my back they would slide their little bodies out of the circle and try to trip the Goose person and the It person when they were running around like maniacs.  

Then we had to go to the bathroom and there was almost a class brawl while they argued about if they are supposed to line up next to the wall, or on the black line.  First of all, I didn't see any black lines anywhere, so I don't know what the hell they were talking about, and second of all, just line the fuck up and shut your toothless little traps!  

And then we came back to the classroom and they were supposed to have center time.  It was total chaos trying to tell them what to do at each of the four centers.  When I'd go to help one center, the three I wasn't at would start yelling poop and pee words and laughing hysterically (it was kind of funny) and wouldn't do their center activity.  One kid had to sit in time-out because he instigated the whole poop conversation amongst his peers and whipped them into a poop/fart/pee frenzy.  (Kady, you would have been in hysterics.)  I have to go pick them up now.  Farewell...

****************************************

I'm home now.  I survived the afternoon.  I have a headache of massive proportions.  After lunch went better than before lunch.  The most alarming thing about those little people is that they really like me. Why???  I try to be a hardass and make them a little afraid of me, but they won't be intimidated.  When I was standing in front of them when they were lining up to go to the bathroom, the kids in the front were petting my stomach fat with their tiny monkey hands, and telling me how beautiful I am and how beautiful my clothes are yadda yadda yadda, and when I walked them down the hall the line leader held my hand.  Then the fat kid couldn't get his pants unbuttoned so I had to do it, then he couldn't get them buttoned so I had to do it, and whenever I would turn my eyes away, another one was running away, or getting in trouble.  

One girl lost her tooth during story time and wanted me to hold up her disgusting bloody little tooth-stump and show the class.  Gross.  

The worst part was at the end of the day when we were getting ready to leave.  The teacher didn't give me any directions about what time to get them started, or her procedures for having them get their stuff on or anything, so I was basically winging it and gave them 15 minutes to get their stuff on.  About a third of the class was ready in two minutes and then standing in line causing problems, another third took about ten or fifteen minutes (and were causing problems while they were dressing), and then the last third were making me sweat because they hadn't even located their jackets by the time the bell rang and it was time to get on the bus. 

One kid said he was mad at his classmates for some reason so he just wasn't getting ready to go home.  Um, what?  I said,"YOU'RE GOING TO MISS THE BUS!"  He didn't care.  

But then mixed in with the utter chaos were moments where they were so cute I could barely stand it.  During their story (Over the River and Through the Woods) there was a picture of a woman rolling out dough with a rolling pin.  I asked them what they thought she was making and one kid said, "Cookies!" another one said, "Pumpkin pie!" and a third said, "Green beans!" another said, "Chicken!" which led to this argument:

Kid 1: You don't make chicken, you kill it!

Kid 2:  Well, if you don't have a chicken to kill, then you just make it.  

Kid 1: ...Oh, okay.  

They were talking about their class "tuwkey" named Albuquerque and they told me that he gets a new feather every day they are really good.  He had some really nice, shiny, foil feathers.  They really wanted a yellow one today, hint hint... 

Ha ha... revenge is sweet.  TFB, Albuquerque. 

Substitute Teacher Orientation

I had mandatory substitute orientation today.  There are about 350 - 400 subs in this district and we all meet in an auditorium and have a series of 45 minute presentations by different departments.  Most of the information is completely irrelevant to substitute teaching, or to teaching in general.

The first 45 minute period was dedicated to learning about blood borne pathogens.  The gist of it was this:  no matter how badly you want to stick your hands all over the snotty blood from the kid with the bloody nose and rub it all over your cuts; try to resist.  It's not sanitary.

The second 45 minute period was dedicated to special education.  The presenter, Imminent Heart Attack, had a buzz cut and was built like a rock on toothpicks and he was wearing a polo shirt with a tie and he was sweating profusely.  I didn't really listen to him because I never take special ed. jobs.  Most of them would be fine to do because they are usually in resource rooms reading tests or whatever, but there is about a one in a thousand chance that I might have to change the diaper of a 150 pound severely retarded high school student.  To that I say, "no fucking way."  It's too risky so I don't take any special ed jobs.  Imminent Heart Attack kept talking about the "meat and potatoes" of special ed.  Judging by the fact that he was out of breath his entire presentation, I think he should maybe focus more on the "leafy greens" of special ed., or the "crudité" of special ed., or the "brisk walks" of special ed.  

The next presenter was Internet Hater.  Her official title with the district is Prevention Specialist and she is mainly supposed to deal with bullying.  The gist of her presentation was this:  "Kids these days........ (sad shaking of head.  Sigh.)"  Her main idea was how toxic technology is to kids and people in general.  (Ironically, she had a very high tech power point presentation to go along with it.)  She gave us anecdotal evidence like this:  "Three kids were set on fire last year," which got many ohs and ahs from the subs, but she failed to explain how it was related to technology (unless she thinks lighters are high tech), or where it happened, or why.  My feeling is this; there are about 6 or 7 billion people on the earth and if only three kids got set on fire all of last year, that's pretty good.  After her presentation she got TWO big applauses from the audience, which apparently means that it's not hard to whip a bunch of virtually unemployable teachers into a frenzy by vilifying the internet in general.

The next presenter was the district technology guy (Tech-guy).  (Ha ha, Tech-guy, you had to follow Internet Hater!)  Every year they have a technology presentation, to which they only allot 15 minutes because all he has to tell us is how to get on district email, but it is always filled with about 40 minutes of inane technology questions which are all slightly varied versions of this:  "I don't have a computer because I'm a total Luddite and I'm done learning anything new, and I refuse to jump into the 21st century because I'm not going to spend money on something I'm pretty sure is just a passing fad, and I was wondering how you are going to accommodate me and my ignorance and bull-headedness?"

This year the 40 minutes of Tech-guy's presentation was mostly a primer on how to use Facebook, stupid questions, and Tech-guy rolling his eyes and looking at people like "Are you fucking serious?"  It was my favorite part, just like every year.

The entire orientation is supposed to last four hours but it always goes long, mostly because of the stupid questions during the technology presentation, but this year there was a woman in the audience who, I counted, asked ELEVEN questions.  I call her Lispy the Questioner because she had a lisp and asked a lot of long, wordy questions like this:  "It'th been my exthperienth in the patht that thubthtitute teacherth don't get keyth to the roomth.  What are we thuppothed to do in a lock down thituation?"  But waaaaaay longer.  I started counting when she had already asked three questions during the blood borne pathogen presentation.

I listed Wet Head as a major player because I usually call her "Wet Head the Questioner" but Lispy took over that role this year.  Wet Head is a woman I run into quite a bit and I call her Wet Head (to myself) because she has thick longish hair that I swear she must not towel dry at all when she gets out of the shower because when she gets to school her hair is still dripping wet and plastered to her head, and her shirt is drenched.  She always has her arms crossed like she has a chill which I'm sure she does because of her wet shirt.  She' so weird.

So now school has officially started for me and the rest of the weirdos who sub in Duluth.  Have a great year, Weirdos!

I'm gonna be a Pilot!

Minnesota legislators are soon going to vote on a bill that would allow people with a four year degree, but no teacher training, become teachers!  You could spend four years in college, get a degree in underwater basket weaving and then get out and teach school! All you will have to do is take a 200 hour crash course in teaching.  (I was a real sucker for taking over four years to learn to be a teacher.  It apparently only takes five weeks.)

The second having to have a license or any kind of specific training to practice a profession is moot, I think I will try out all kinds of things, why not! I have a four-year degree!  I can do anything!

The first thing I'm going to do is become a nurse.  RNs  have four-year degrees, I have a four-year degree, therefore, according to the Minnesota legislature, I could probably do a decent job of being a nurse.  I want some scrubs.  I'm kind of squeamish though so as soon as bodily fluids come into play, I'm outta there.  Kind of like when I joined track in high school to get the cool sweatsuit, but then learned I was expected to run. Every day.  Yeah, right.

Then I think I'll be an electrician.  I use electricity literally all the time.  I'm an electricity expert; flip switch up: on.  Flip switch down: off.   I'm trained (enough)!  I have a bachelor's degree in education.  I'm educated.  If I'm educated, I can do anything, right?  All that's been in my way are these pesky licenses!

Need anything rewired?

Oh, you know what I'd really like to do?  Fly commercial airliners!  I'm sure that YEAR LONG course I suffered through, Methods and Materials of Teaching Secondary English will really help out with takeoff and landing. Once I get my job being a pilot, flying will be much more pleasant.  Trips go by so much faster when I'm the driver.  I have lots of experience driving a car, and a little bit driving a boat, and I actually took over the yolk (that's what they call it) in a small plane and controlled it myself once for about five minutes (actual flying experience).  I'm totally qualified.

Then I think I'll become an architect for a while.  I live in a building, I go in buildings all the time, I've built Sims houses.  I could do it.  I'm qualified because I have a bachelor's degree, and more importantly, I BELIEVE I could be an architect although I have a degree in English Education; just like some Minnesota legislators believe that anyone with a four-year degree can walk into a classroom and teach 30 kids.  Easy.

If this bill passes and you can do ANYTHING with your four-year degree, what do you want to do?