Before yesterday, it had been 20 years since I was last in a 4th grade classroom. On Wednesday morning I got in touch with the Human Resources office for the city public school system and found that my paperwork had gone through, I'd been hired, and could enter myself into the substitute teacher system. Enthusiastically, I set myself up and went to look to see what was available for the rest of the week. At the time, there were two assignments listed. One was for a 4th grade classroom not terribly far from where we live, and the other was for a special education class, both for the next day. I didn't feel confident tackling special ed my very first day, so I signed up for the 4th grade.
"How bad can 4th graders be?" I asked myself, blithely forgetting the fact that I got into the most trouble ever in 4th grade, eventually being suspended in February that year. I didn't know much about the school system, or the neighborhood it was in. I was incredibly nervous, but it was mostly an excited kind of nervous. I did ardently hope that I would get into the classroom to find that there had been no instructions left and I'd basically been thrown to the wolves.
When I arrived in the school office, I was told that the teacher I was subbing for had a planning day, so he was in the classroom at the moment. Fantastic, I thought! I'd get a chance to talk with the teacher, get tips, information on the kids, and more information on their daily schedule and curriculum. The teacher was great, I thought he was fantastic, enthusiastic, and easy to talk to. I let him know that it was my first day subbing, and that's when the first bad sign showed up. He paused, his smile faltering before showing up again. He asked, "Well, have you done any orientation or student teaching before?" Nope. Sorry dude, you've got someone completely green here.
So he sat me down and told me that he would try and check in on the class as much as possible, as would the principal, and some of the behavioral counselors for the kids. Uh oh. The demographics of my classroom: 22 boys (no girls), all of which either had an IEP for behavioral conditions, behavioral counselors or some combination thereof. "More of them need counseling than they have, but if their parents don't have insurance or Medicaid and they can't afford it, the kids go without." He said with a frown. He showed me a stack of papers, saying it was the permission slips from their last field trip two weeks ago. He hung on to them because with many of the parents, their phone numbers would change so often that it was hard to keep track of which numbers would work if you needed to call one. Uh oh. He gave me tips on who to keep apart, which students would fight, including two boys whose parents were feuding and who often brought the fights to school. Uh oh.
About half of the class was in and out all day, going either with counselors, tutors, or to the other classroom. There was another sub there for those kids. Apparently the two small classes of boys with behavior problems mixed in and out to try and help them to work in larger groups as well. I felt the kids were behind so much in the curriculum. I'd brought the 4th grade Brain Age with me to have something fun to do with the kids to fill up space during transitions and when we were waiting for them to be dismissed, but I never pulled it out because I felt that they were behind too much. There were a few children who worked well and ahead of the others, but every lesson was like pulling teeth. And as a substitute, the kids didn't respond to me well.
During recess one young man was sitting in the middle of the yard as everyone was lining up, with a look on his face that he had been crying. I went over to him and knelt down, trying to talk to him. He wouldn't tell me why he was upset, who had made him upset, if anyone had made him upset, and only responded to me when I asked, "Do you want to go with me?" He asked where we would go, and I told him we needed to get back to class. He immediately shut down and refused to talk anymore. Eventually I did get him to line up, but he stayed in a poor mood until we got into the classroom and he was kicking desks and chairs. The teacher came to talk to him and he did respond to him much better. I couldn't hear what was going on, but I was quickly distracted by trying to prevent a fight from breaking out between two boys.
Preventing fights and gently (as possible) reminding the boys that we keep our hands to ourselves, not on our neighbors or on their things took up the majority of the day. It was tough, and I felt very ineffectual by the end of it. The teacher encouraged me, told me that it was pretty much a typical day and that some of the boys had been misbehaving all week, that it wasn't me.
But let me focus on the good: There was one boy who was delighted when I showed him he could multiply by 9 using a nifty finger trick I learned in elementary school, one little boy who constantly gave me hugs through the day and a huge missing-tooth smile, and one boy who while I was helping him use lattice squares to multiply large numbers in math, he got frustrated, put down his pencil, crossed his arms and said, "I can't do it, I'm stupid." "But you're doing really well so far," I encouraged with a smile, "I don't think you're stupid at all. Look at how much you got done on your own, that's great!" He jerked his thumb over to a boy he had gotten into a fight with earlier. "He said I was stupid." "Well, why do you care about what other people say? People are always going to say things to try and upset you, but I'm looking at you right now, and I can see that you aren't stupid at all. I think you're really smart and I know you can do this if you focus on you." He smiled and started working again.
The teachers of the school were amazing, and I could see they all cared and believed in these kids, and at the end of the day I'm glad I took that assignment. Being put in a classroom of kids with behavioral problems in an inner city school where most of the kids are living under or just at the poverty line was terrifying but now I see what teachers are up against, and just how much these amazing people care, and just how amazing and how much talent these kids are and have and that they only need someone who is willing to be patient and bring that out of them. Watching the teachers work with the kids made me completely positive that teaching is what I want to do, and I can only hope that when Lorelai gets to school she has teachers who are half as passionate as the ones I worked with yesterday.
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