Kids sent to the office: more than I remember (4? 5? something like that)
Kids who threw me completely off by standing up and announcing a decision to voluntarily go to the office: 2
Best thing I had to say: “LUCAS! Put your tooth BACK in your pocket!”
Look here for part 1: http://www.porchcoffee.org/2012/02/16/place/
One week plus some change later, I get a call. From the teacher. Here’s how the call went down:
Teacher: Hey Dave…I don’t know you want to come back [he was only a little bit joking], but I’m going to need a sub for a day in two weeks.
Inside Dave’s head: Oh no. I was really hoping no calls from this guy for a while. Those kids owned me, trounced me, played me like a fiddle and hung me out to dry. Is it even physically possible for mayhem and pure chaos to NOT fly into destruction mode at the moment I walk into that room if I walk into that room again?
Dave [with the bravado of an angry mother grizzly bear]: Absolutely, bring it on!
Inside Dave’s head: you idiot.
Teacher: Great! You know the drill, and I’ll leave the day’s plan on my desk.
Dave: Perfect. How have the freshman been, have they recovered yet from that horrible day with that wackjob sub?
Teacher [laughing]: Well, they went into a pretty hard spiral, the room turned into hell on wheels for the rest of the week. But they know they’re on a short leash, things have calmed down a little bit.
Inside Dave’s head: YOU IDIOT.
Dave: ok, sounds good!
Inside Dave’s head: really. Really?
Two weeks go by, the morning comes, I wake up, have my cup of coffee and breakfast and make the long drive to the school, deep breath and in I go. The bell rings and the kids come in, easy now Dave easy, deep breath you are nothing but pure calm and tranquility and teacher, you are the champion and you are ok these kids are great, easy now Dave, easy. Little stuff let it bounce off you like tiny hail, big stuff keep your cool and do what you know how to do. Easy now Dave, easy.
And here’s what happened: it was a great day. Everything went smooth. The kids were great.
Inside Dave’s head: Right. Go figure.
Little Diomede Island. The village is named Diomede and I have the privilege, the million dollar job: I am Diomede’s next 7-12 math and science teacher.
‘Excited?’ No. That word doesn’t really work; here, this works better: I’m kinda excited like the horsehead nebula is kinda big.
Reference: here’s the horsehead nebula:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsehead_Nebula
Yeah. Like that.
:D
A little glimpse of how teaching works.
Thanks to the AKT2 Staff for the great (insert: hard. time consuming. effective learning. grumblegrumble.) assignment and to Randall Munroe for inspiration (insert: plagiary worth comics. flattery!)
PS:
Ready for the meta? Here it is: a second deepest apology to Darby Conley’s apology to Robert Frost. You caught that? You are my hero, I will buy you a cup of coffee :)
*well, at a least a test won’t keep me back. How could a test keep me back? It’s a sorta-long and very-boring story. TLDR: I am incredibly excited that I passed a hard test.
Here’s what went down. I pulled a dummie and didn’t get my mits onto a study guide until two and a half weeks before the test. Open the cardboard box, crack open the book, 50 bucks for one single 18 page chapter on the particular test I’ll be taking. And oh my word those 18 pages are all little bullet points, things to study each bullet point a huge thing to get into my head and working well. Might as well be 180 pages. Or 500 pages. Yeah..definitely 500 pages.. Biology. Geology. Astronomy. Chemistry. Physics. Lab procedures. Me, I love science, right? Even better teaching science. But this is a LOT of science in not much time.
Two and a half weeks plus three hours later I walked out of a room feeling like I just finished having my science head and knowledge and ability stomped and sqrcckkked (that’s the sound when you twist your foot on gravel) into gravel..because that’s exactly what taking that test felt like. And of course, all the teachers I talk to say “ohhhh that test, yeah that felt horrible after I took it, totally thought I bombed, but then I passed!” and I say to myself Oh gees thanks for the nice little ‘make me not feel so horrible’ gesture.
And four weeks later: 190/200. Certificate of Excellence mailed to me. Kinda felt a bit of the coolness of DiCaprio’s Abegnale at the end of the movie, albeit briefly, as any of the coolness that remained after my nobody-is-around-so-I-can-fully-show-my-joy-by-couch-vaulting was definitely lost in the midst of still-nobody-around-celebratory-somersaults.
So what now?
Diomede. Nunam Iqua. Hooper Bay. Koyuk. Tuluksak. Final polish on my resume today, submit apps tomorrow, job fair friday, my gut says if she goes steady as she goes than Nunam Iqua or Diomede…but I’ve heard that a job fair can be a pretty wild thing, so we’ll see.
Place. What is it? Where’s mine and where’s yours, right? Cities, towns, pueblos and glens and farms, where’s who’s place? There are books and theories and studies about this idea, this thing: place. And I don’t need any of them. And did I really commit homonymage there? Yes, because it looked better that way.
Because today work put me in my place. Hands of stone and no gloves and no 3 minute rounds with the 30 second breaks inbetween. Me, living breathing sweating bleeding heavy bag, while work did well the role of Ali, of Fraser, of Ward.
But you know, for the unpleasantness of it, maybe one twentieth the magnitude of that unpleasantness, there is a refreshing feeling about a good ass whuppin’. Very small, probably even smaller than a twentieth of the unpleasantness. But it’s there. Bleeding heart’s a beating heart. Breathe in. out. in. out. Breathe out deep. And breathe in deep. Breathe deep. Shake it off.
Time to go home and eat and sleep. We step into the ring again tomorrow.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
–that’s his name. Well, it’s not his name actually. But, as a substitute teacher, I have to use good memory hooks; I find out this student is from Louisiana, the name stuck fast. Also, a relevant fact for later: I have this thing I do sometimes: I bring in half a dozen doughnuts and I tell my students they win a doughnut by putting me on my heels–do something to impress me. Mind you,if you’re going to ask students for excellence, you do not use supermarket doughnuts, no that would be idiotic; thankfully there’s a little doughnut shop in town that is as wildly amazing as it is pricey.
I subbed yesterday for a photo/computers teacher. When I saw “photo/computer” in the job description, what happened wasn’t so much that I ignored the computer half, more that I never even got that far. Photo. Photo. Wait…I can spend time in a classroom doing stuff with…photography? Really?
I stopped, did a quick pinch-test, nope, not dreaming, this is real. Great!
The lesson plan took all of 5 minutes to cobble together: can’t go wrong with good photojournalism. Aaron Huey.
Louisiana picked a war photo (this one: aaronhuey.com/afghanistan), and he did not address even one of the three assigned questions. In this failure, he wrote this, perfectly succeeding:
I don’t know what to think I saw this man walking not knowing if he had a bomb on his chest or if he was on our side we kept on driving he stared at us until we disappeared I still think about that man he stared at us with a grin on his face as if he was saying “we got you we got you once you think your ok we got you.”
“Um, so, I didn’t know how to answer any of the assignment questions, so I just sorta put myself in his shoes and wrote something” Louisiana told me, handing in what he’d done, what he’d done instead of completing the assignment. Louisiana was smirking, because he wanted a doughnut.
He got one.
Half a million dollars and four to five years of both full time apprenticeship AND weekend coursework. A lot of time and money. That’s the name of the game for an electricity or gas (power generation/distribution) company to take a worker from entry-level apprentice to proficient wireman. And except for the time consumed by weekend coursework, the power company eats that. All of it. After the fact, it is another five years for the company to break even on their investment. Ten years after a worker enters an apprenticeship program, it is finally worth it. It’s the same story for many other trades.
For government recognition of proficiency in education, you’re looking at two to three years of part time coursework and six months to a year of on-the-job training.
I’m an American and I’ll have my electricity reliable, please. Thanks.
It’s funny how very often the more words a picture’s worth the less the quality matters. By the way, that’s a motorcycle designed for agricultural use in the Australian outback. I love the sound of that exactly as much as I have no idea what it really means. And I have absolutely no idea.
