Ah hah, I found you.

It's only been three weeks, but I have found my blog again! : ) I knew it was in here somewhere. I finally did the thing that helped me set it up in the first place: I read somebody else's blog and tried to post a comment. Somehow, trying to get the world to recognize who that opinionated person is who is sitting behind this keyboard turned into discovering the venue for getting my own story out into etherspace.

So, what is my story? This week, half of the story has been that I substitute teach at the local high school. It's not a very big school, only about 900 students in the three grades; but even so, my classes manage to be 30 to 35 in number on average. Usually I get along pretty well with the students. They are often surprised to find that my son, William is a student at their school. They are always very complimentary about him. There's something about electronic nerdliness that fellow students admire. They can already see the benefit of having a friend who knows how to fix your computer, or who can program games on his calculator.

I'm learning to know the names of many of the students, too, but that is taking time. There are so many of them and I'm rarely in the same classroom two days in a row. But some of them make a point of standing out. On Monday I filled in for a teacher who taught 'bonehead math'. Granted, geometry is not for boneheads. These kids are going to have to really think if they want to learn this stuff. Heck, I only remember about half of it. It's been a quarter of a century since I studied it in school. But most of them either don't want to learn it (don't want to think that hard;) or they're convinced they can't learn it. Either way, it's required for graduation and they don't feel they have a choice of whether or not to take the class.

So we're stuck there together in classes that are much too long, given a 5 class-period day. Usually the teachers' lesson plans leave about 20 minutes of unstructured time that a substitute must scramble to occupy. When students decide not to do the assignment, we can have nearly an hour of free time staring us in the face. Monday's assignment should have been fun. A creative student, enjoying the assignment, could have taken the whole time making a colorful circle design with compasses and colored pencils. When I was their age, I would have hated an assignment like this one and completed it quickly. But then I would have pulled out my current novel and spent the rest of the hour escaping quietly into oblivion.

But that was then, and now I was the teacher. Something whizzed past my ear. I turned about quickly, trying to ascertain what had been thrown and who had thrown it. All I saw were the faces of angels. Every eye looked at me in innocence. 'Surely you don't think I did it,' they seemed to say. By the time twenty more minutes had passed, the colored pencils were flying from one side of the room to the other, in a wild pencil-fight. (it's a good thing our compasses were the flat plastic variety and not the ones with the angle and the sharp metal point!) I had lost total control. At least the more innocent side of the room (the ones who hadn't started it) had managed to find trash can lids with which to defend themselves.

I picked up the wall phone in a firm display of 'I'm calling the office now'. And the battle was over. I hated having to use that tactic, but it worked. I hated even more having to complain about their behavior to the regular teacher. It felt like giving myself an 'F' for that hour. And I knew that the kids who got into trouble didn't need any more trouble. What they needed was an education system that engaged their interest and taught them something valuable. And for that hour, I had failed them.

On the upside: the problems were in third hour. Fourth and fifth hours were reputed to be as bad or worse than third hour; but I was ready. They didn't get away with anything. At the first sign of the smallest infraction, I was all over it. It never got carried away. Nobody got in trouble. I learned from third hour.

I'm going to have those same students again. Different days, different classrooms. It remains to be seen who learned enough to come off conqueror.