Sub-sistence

I have been doing a lot of catching up on TV shows lately.  This has eaten into my available time to write in this blog.  That, and my interest is sort of lagging right now.  I now have several DVDs I checked out of the library in addition to several hours of TV shows I still haven’t watched.  I also checked out Mario Kart DD for my Gamecube.  With all of this expect my posting to continue to be like this for a while.

As for work, my week had some interesting moments.  I subbed for 7th grade science on Monday.  Not a lot going on there.  Six classes of handing out books then letting them do an assignment out of them.  Mostly good classes.  Tuesday I subbed for 6th grade math, staying on the analytical/logical side of the brain.  This teacher had math classes at three different levels, two classes of each.  All were similar in going over homework, my answering questions, and the starting the next section.  Some actual teaching!  I will have two days of 6th grade math at another school at the end of next week.  I saw a former student from 4th/5th grade ministry on Monday at science, and I hope to see one next week who just started this year at the school I will be at.

Wednesday I found myself in the elementary school right next to the middle school I will be doing math at next week.  The level was third grade.  The day started out with the smell of electrical fire near the classroom, though there was no fire as far as I could tell.  This turned out to be sort of an interesting day.  This is the only school I know to have a vocabulary special- a teacher comes in to teach vocabulary- and they had that in the morning.  Now, music, gym, and art are standards, and I’ve also subbed for an elementary social studies teacher.  There was a Japanese special at another school, but this is the first school where I’ve encountered a vocabulary special, though not the first classroom I subbed in where they had this special.  A couple of months ago I had five days in second grade at this school, and some of those classes had vocabulary as well.  Moving on, they had MAP testing, so that killed another 45 minutes or so.  It ended early so we played Sparkle using their spelling lists before finishing the morning with a language arts lesson.  After lunch they had a “holiday store.”  This is similar to a book fair, but instead of books the students could buy cheap gifts.  The rest of the day was typical with reading groups, math, and science.  Nothing interesting like labs, just book-work for the most part.

Thursday and Friday were both music days.  Friday I subbed for an elementary music teacher.  These are always potluck days as to which grades I will get.  It turned out I would get two classes each of kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, and 5th grades.  Almost all with different lessons of course.  1st and 2nd played music insrument bingo, 5th did a science tie-in lesson about bones using an old black spiritual song about Ezekiel and the dry bones, which turned out to be a review lesson since they had already done it before.  Oops?  We just made a little competition of it.  Kindergarten had the only real new lesson.  They learned about the difference between a lullaby and a march- fast vs. slow, loud vs. soft.

My other music day, Thursday, was actually a very odd class for middle school.  There are schools that have divided up the year for certain classes into quarters, fifths, and sixths.  This school has the year divided for a set of classes into, get this, eighths.  That’s right- each class is just four weeks long, and for 7th grade at least (8th grade actually has this class for a full quarter) this was one of those classes.  That’s not the most unusual aspect of this class.  That would go to the focus of the class- African drumming.  I have not heard before of this sort of specialization in middle school.  College, maybe high school, but not middle school.  Anyway, the classroom of course was filled with drums, mostly more modern renditions of African drums, but also a few more traditional models.  Also, bells and rattles.  These three instruments make up African music (at least Ghana, the country in Africa the video focused on) I learned from the video.  Yes, with this sort of specialization comes the usually correct assumption that the sub will have no idea how to teach it, so the video is the standard staple of the sub for this sort of class.  Unfortunately the video was only 20 minutes, leaving me to fill in the rest of the time.  So, we went of the sheet they filled out and then I let them play silent ball for the rest of the time.

Well, that’s my week in review.  We will see what the future of this blog holds.  I am toying with the idea of starting another blog at some point where I will attempt to write a story a little bit at a time.  Maybe write a choose-your-own-adventure like I brought up in Taylhis’s blog .  For now, just an idea.  We’ll see if it goes anywhere.