Sometimes you just wanna kill* them . . .

*meant entirely in the “frustrated parent” sense, not in the “proclivity to violence” sense.

So this entry was definitely when I was on an early-tenure high. . . even had thoughts like, “I could almost be a teacher.”   Seems absurd now.  Now I’m a in a little different place in the cycle, and I’ve been feeling like I’m rebuilding my work here from scratch.

Two weeks ago were exams, and so the week before then my students stopped coming, and instead I ended up supervising a study hall spanning 3-4 classrooms, and worked a little with one of the younger students who came a couple days.  Not expecting this, I had had my whole week of lessons planned out, so got the idea that the more prepared I am, the less things go according to plan.

Then a week of exams. Still study hall.  Then a week of vacation, when I tried to have class in the mornings.  That happened the way I imagined on about one day,and so during the rest of the time I helped out in the office, with cleaning, whatever was needed.  But I went every day in the hopes that there would be someone to teach, as one of my virtues/vices is that I can stand my own disappointment far more than that of others.

Now we have started up again, and I have become Laura the Substitute Teacher, as we’ve been missing teachers for a number of reasons, (and a couple without any reason at all) including illness, tragedy in the family, and continuing education.   Which has been met with mixed success.   I’ve been making up lessons on the fly, since I don’t know where I’ll be needed until I see a classroom full of students but empty of authority.  I’ve done the following lessons with anywhere from grades 3-8, at least trying to give practice in English, and maybe teach a little critical thinking while I’m at it (1-5 stars give approximate success of each lesson according to my own perspective

• taught quick phonics lessons on hard and soft "th" and the "e is silent, and the vowel in the middle says its name." (**)
• given math problems  . . . word problems, long division, giant addition, subtraction and multiplication problems (***)
• asked them to allocate and justify the expenditure of an imaginary $1 million “gift from Obama” on various dichotomies (university/hospital, primary schools/the military, agriculture/good roads, etc.) (***)
• showed them how to extract clues about a family from just a few sentences of the Nigerian novel I happened to have in my bag (***)
• tried to teach how to play Hangman  (***)
• tried to teach a version of “20 Questions,” where they have to write questions on the board and read my response to guess a mystery item of my choice. (*)

This has been met with mixed success. In the eyes of many I see the same look I remember my own school classes giving to substitutes, the look that says “I can tell you don’t quite know what you’re doing or how things are done here, and moreover am not really accountable to you, so if I humor you and listen, consider it a privilege, not a right.”

Some seem to enjoy and engage with the lessons that are generally far more interactive than what they’re used to given the different educational culture here.”

In other cases, I’m just floundering, resorting to the passive aggressive classroom management methods I used to completely despise in teachers and subs.

And it’s frustrating, for me, for them, for everyone involved. Sometimes, just a part of you just wants to kill ‘em.