Idyllic Transition

The day had finally arrived. The day I had been anticipating since September (or October). I would be taking over Ms. A's classes for 30 days. 

Ms. A has been out since the middle of February. But because emergency teaching credentials only allow us subs to cover 30 days total in one class, and because Ms. A planned a 14-week maternity leave, two subs would be needed. Ms. A told me she wanted me to do the second half. 

The first half had been done by Ms. S, who I had worked with in the past. We were given two days of transition, which are days where she tells me what I need to know to keep the class going. Only, as I had covered Ms. A's classes before, I knew what I was in for.

That is not to say that the transition wasn't needed. It's good to have a couple days where I get up to speed before teaching the class. It's way better than the scramble I usually find myself doing. 

But, we really only needed a couple hours of transition, not two days. (We both got paid for them, so I'm not going to complain too much.) 

I recognized many of the faces in the classes. I had had many of them before, most notably in the math class I covered at this time last year. 

On the first day of transition, Ms. S taught the classes. (They had "study hall", so there wasn't much to do.) On the second day, we were beginning talking about The Great Gatsby (which is what we'll be reading until pretty much the end of the school year), so I took over. 

We started with a bit of background on the 1920s, and then they had an article to read on the author's life. They were to annotate it. I uploaded the article into their Google Classrooms, and then I explained to them what they were to do.

To annotate an article online, they use the comment feature on Google Docs. They highlight the passage, and then they can add a comment to it. Easy enough. 

About halfway through class, Aria approached. I have had Aria in classes for the past couple years. I may have written about her before, but I can't remember what alias I used. Sigh. 

Anyway, Aria had a problem. She had made all sorts of comments on the article (allegedly), but they all vanished. 

Upon some digging, we figured out what went wrong. Aria had clicked on a check mark on the comments she made. Which, if you've ever used the feature, is the thing that tells the program that you have "resolved" the issue from the comment, thereby deleting it. 

And there's no way to retrieve the comments. 

On the bright side, I now knew of one issue that might again crop up, so I made sure to warn every other period about it. 

But Aria's comments... Knowing her as I do, I just said I'd take her word for it and not make her redo the comments. (She wouldn't redo the comments.) 

At the end of the day, Ms. S was again free to do day-to-day subbing assignments. And now I'm in another long term. Should be interesting. 

Today's A to Z Challenge post brought to you by the letter