Failure

First period I was sent to cover a middle school special ed. class. Reading. Their word of the day was "failure". I was to give an example so that they could get a grasp on what the word meant. I had trouble coming up with something right off the top of my head. Too bad that that was the harbinger for things to come.

The rest of the day I covered an 8th grade U.S. history class. But the subject turned out to be irrelevant. I had a very bad day.

The teacher had been out all week. I was the third sub. That's never a good sign. And the room looked like it had been through numerous battles. I saw about ten books missing their front covers. These were hard cover books. They were new (well, about a year old). The books looked like they had been thrown at wolves to keep them from attacking.

I spent the day trying to keep the classes from running wild. And mostly I failed.

I had one kid throw sharp objects at the ceiling. He was trying to get them to stick up there. He succeeded. I had students who would not remain seated. They tried to play with their toys. One girl's pen got stolen at least five times; she was one of the roamers, so I didn't have much sympathy for her. And that doesn't even take into account the constant pencil sharpeners or the ones who suddenly needed to find paper/pencil more than half way through the period (why they didn't think of this at the beginning, I don't know).

I sent several kids packing. I should have sent many more. And they were loud. I couldn't hear questions asked of me even when I was standing right next to the student. It's amazing that anyone got anything done (some actually did).

It was the passing period before 6th period. I was wiped out. And one girl came up to me to ask me a question. She had heard that I was strict. She wanted to know if it was true.

They were calling me strict? Awwww. How sweet.

Too bad it didn't feel like I was being strict enough.