Battleship Exchange

I had some long days at the end of this week. On Thursday I took a job that was listed as a para position in a classroom alongside a teacher and assistant. When I got there it emerged that they actually wanted me to teach a first grade class alone, last minute, without plans and with no other adult in the classroom to lean on. In a class usually run by three adults.

I did it, and no one got badly hurt. One girl got a little pencil prick and bled a bit, but that was the worst direct child-harm. The little boy who normally has his own one-to-one para needed redirection about every thirty seconds, but I managed to keep things fairly calm and tear-free while getting through all but one of the emergency make-do lessons the very kind teacher next door printed for me. One student was determinedly destructive, which eventually forced me to break a long streak of not removing students from my classrooms. I hate doing that, but I tried everything else first. 

Sometimes at this job, I'm thrown into a situation where I just have to tell myself that I need to do the best I can with the skills and tools I have. From a surprise solo teaching gig with zero premade sub plans, I ended up with a roomful of alive, uninjured children and a couple stacks of semi-complete worksheets. That's not a bad result, even if I'm not as polished at lower elementary instruction as I hope to eventually become. Everything is practice.

The funniest moment of the day was when a teeny six year old boy looked down at his subtraction worksheet and back up at me, scrunched up his face, and said in his birdlike little voice, "Ms. Gremdark, why are you such a bastard?" I did a strategic lip bite to keep from laughing. It was an absolutely hilarious delivery.

Today, things worked out so that I was in the classroom directly across the hall from Thursday's, teaching K-5 music. The music teacher had planned her absence well in advance and left an absolute holy grail of sub plans. She had detailed teaching scripts for each class, bonus suggestions for if material ended early, and all kinds of supplementals to cover various contingencies. As a result things went very smoothly. I taught 5th and 2nd grade music in the morning, then saw 4th grade and Kindergarten after recess and 3rd grade just before dismissal. It was a nigh-perfect day, even with the usual shoving matches and tattling and stolen pencils. I've started bringing a little bluetooth speaker in my bag, and I use it to play a specific jazz album when classes are doing ""silent"" solo work. It's a very effective strategy, though it was no match for post-recess Kindergarten energy.

3rd grade was the most challenging. One boy repeatedly asked me if I was a virgin. "That's not a question we ask people at school, Name. Focus on your worksheet." Later in the class, the same boy asked to go to the bathroom, then flooded it. According to his teacher, he's done that several times this year.

My favorite moment of the day happened in the 4th grade class, which the sub plan had warned me would be "chatty and high energy." Sure enough, I had to raise my voice more than I prefer and separate several people. The older kids were doing a webquest about Black musicians. The jazz album brought the chattiness down to a low rumble. Then I had to spend a good fifteen minutes intervening in a situation where two girls were bullying a third girl, calling her names and trying to make her upset. It was clearly an established pattern.

I finally got the instigators separated on opposite sides of the back of the room, but by then the girl they'd been cruel to was crying. She'd already been stuck on the worksheet before the bullying picked up steam, and of course it's so hard to figure out a confusing assignment when something else is upsetting you. I sat with her for a bit and made sure she knew that I would tell her regular teacher what happened and that there would be no consequences if she couldn't finish it by the end of class. That made her feel better about taking a breather in the "calming corner." It took about twenty minutes, but she emerged with dry eyes at last and settled in to work out the tricky part of the worksheet.

Just as I was about to walk over and see if I could help without embarrassing her, two little boys looked at each other and crossed the room to talk to her. These two had previously been very high energy and done a lot of roughhousing, but now they made sure to speak quietly and kindly to their classmate. They invited her back to where they were sitting and folded her into their little group. I was touched to see how gently a previously loud and rough group of kids met their classmate's anxiety and stress with compassion. I didn't need to say a word to that group for the rest of the period. With their support, she finished the worksheet just before the end of class. I made sure to tell all three that I was proud of them before they lined up.

That's one thing I love about teaching. For every kid I see acting out cruel patterns they've adopted from adults, I see more making choices like those little boys and using the tools they have to do what they can for the people around them.

My interview with the alt-certification program wrapped up an hour ago. Since then, I've been snacking, snuggling the cat, and collecting my thoughts.

That went well, I think. My interviewer had prior teaching experience near the community where I live, so we had a good shared knowledge base at the outset. Vibes were good. My sample lesson hit all the notes I wanted within the five minute timeframe, and afterward my interviewer said he'd enjoyed learning more about the topic. I was particularly pleased with the results of the data review portion. In the Q&A section after I presented my documents, my interviewer mentioned that he'd had to skip a number of followup questions because I'd already addressed their contents. 

I know I'm a well-qualified candidate, and since my surgery last year I know I finally have the energy to do this work. So now we wait. I'll hear their decision in early March. If things go particularly well, I could be working under a provisional license alongside a professional mentor as early as August. Fingers crossed!

At this point I've done everything I can to positively influence the outcome, so all the pressure's off. In the absolute worst case scenario, I'll keep subbing while building application portfolios for the other alt-certification programs in my area. It feels so good to have momentum again after I was so sick for so long. Even the worst days now are better than operating at that level of constant pain.

I had to take a break from writing for almost a month to pour my free time and energy into getting my application materials together, so I'm very excited to have my hobby time back. And I guess I'd better get back to doing my full share of the household dishes now that I'm not buried in a heap of time-sensitive deadlines. Eyeing up the kitchen sink as we speak.

Busy day today, but at least I can feel my momentum in a positive direction.

I got up early and went in for what had been listed as a one hour substitute gig at a nearby middle school. When I showed up, they asked me to stay 8:30 to noon, as apparently there had been a mistake in the coding on their side of the app. With an inner wince at the derailing of my morning, I agreed.

As it turned out, the school needed about 40 minutes of substitute teaching from me. It wasn't my favorite 40 minutes I've had as a sub. A student called me a faggot before 9 a.m. I was grateful to hand the class off to their regular teacher. For the remainder of the morning, they asked me to sit in the empty auditorium and keep students from entering it. When I got to the auditorium, I found out that I was the second sub they'd asked to sit in there. The two of us sat together for three hours, during which maybe six students total poked their heads in. Still, we had a nice chat, and I've certainly done more strenuous work for less money.

In the last hour I was there, the in-school suspension group was moved into the auditorium. I quickly developed a very low opinion of the teacher running things. He responded to one disgruntled twelve year old's needling by going off on a tirade about how children have no rights, then settled in to watch tiktoks on his cell phone without headphones. At full volume. His weapon of choice for keeping the students' volume under control was a metal whistle. Every time he interrupted his scrolling to blow it, the students responded with a cacophony of high pitched sounds of their own, then steadily ramped up the volume until it hit the prior level. To say I was glad to escape out to the parking lot is an understatement.

The library across the street from the school is hosting early voting, so I swung in and filled out a ballot. There's a larger-than-usual effort to primary my state's evil, Trump-crony senator, so I held my nose and voted in the Republican primary to help move the needle away from Trump and towards the candidates who at least pretend to care more about farm subsidies than making life worse for immigrants. I like everything about my state except the people who run it, so here's hoping local politics shift enough that I don't have to plan a cross-country move in the next few years. There are people here I'm loath to leave behind.

The rest of the day promises to be a good one. It's my neighbor's day off, and he's coming over with a box of free cookies from his bakery job. The plan is for him to get writing done while I finish my interview prep work, and with any luck we'll keep each other on task. I'm excited to hug him. I'm glad we both found jobs this month, but with him working evenings and nights and me going in at 7 or 8 in the morning, I'm seeing much less of him than I prefer. He's off Friday too, so I'm cooking him dinner. That'll be a good emotional reset. 

I finished my slides and speaking notes for the sample lesson last night. I had to cut out some content from the beginning to make it stay under five minutes, but it still feels meaty and reflective of the things I'm best at as a teacher. Now I just have to get the slides and citations for the data analysis piece together and make sure I've practiced delivering those. One way or another, the interview is tomorrow at 11 a.m. After that, I can breathe a little more easily.

Just got back from a lovely afternoon walk in the park with my fiance, where I listed off my plans for the next week. "Wow," he said. "You're booked up!" 

I have to keep reminding myself of that, and especially that anyone with my workload on their plate would be a bit stressed. So far this month I've completed my initial application to the alt. certification program, which required writing two essays, purchasing an official copy of my college transcript, and attending a truly ridiculous number of webinars and video calls. At the same time, I arranged for the repair of our oven, which had a part conk out just before the ice storm, and sorted out using the oven-centric dinner ingredients we'd already purchased to make stovetop meals before they went bad.

I also just sent off another round of accumulated evidence to my fiance's mother's lawyers for the custody negotiation portion of her ongoing divorce. There are some specific types of documentation that I was the best person to collect because I'm more tech savvy than her and was unemployed until last month, meaning I had a hair more free time to go digging through text chains and social media comments. That, at least, should be over with now. It's all well and good to be an orphan (by way of estrangement) marrying into a large, tight-knit family, but it does mean there's always something going on. I'm happy to help with the custody suit, though. Unfortunately it's a situation where one parent has made it clear that she will not work with the other, and it's gotten bad enough that my fiance's ex-stepmother has refused to let his youngest brother attend school. Currently he gets homeschooling during the weeks he's with my fiance's mother, and otherwise nothing at all. So something will have to give there.

Next week, I need to get my car insurance and tags up to date. I'm hoping to do the insurance bit tomorrow after a doctor's appointment. It should be a simple phone call, but I hate spending money over the phone and have been putting it off as a result. Then on Tuesday, my boyfriend has symphony tickets. I've already warned him that I'll cancel if I don't get far enough along with my second-round application materials by that evening, but my fiance has bravely volunteered to go along in my stead if he has to. Wednesday is my big interview, where I'm expected to do a five minute response to a dataset they've given me and follow it up with a five minute "sample lesson" before proceeding to a more standard interview format. I'm told it'll last 90 minutes. On Thursday, my girlfriend flies home from Seattle. I've promised to pick her up from the airport.Then on Friday, I'm cooking dinner for my neighbor. We haven't picked a meal yet, so I'll probably go for something fairly simple.

Most of the busyness of my life right now is the exciting sort, but there's still so much of it! With the new job in the mix as well, I'm doing my damnedest to get plenty of sleep and brain rest so as not to burn out.