Yesterday I substitute-taught a children´s english class. My boss asked me to do a favor and fill in. I´m spoiled at my other job, I only have one child at a time. More than that sounded scary, but I´m not really in a position to turn down work. So I arrived at 8:30 Saturday morning after maybe two hours of sleep to find find my curriculum supremely unhelpful, requiring props, preparation and a lot of interpretation. I tried not to fall asleep waiting for my kids. At 9:00 parents started arriving with their children. The children couldn´t really speak english, and their parents even less so. I spoke with the parents a little but I couldn´t concentrate because of all the kids arriving. I could tell they were kind of freaked out leaving their children with someone who spoke so little spanish, but it´s a 3 hour break from their child, and there´s a mall and theatre right across the street. So they left anyway. After about five minutes, I realized what this job was going to be. Here are some numbers: 10 (quantity of children), 5 (age of the children) 3 (hours I have them), 1 (teacher), 0 (kids that understand english). I have no clue how the class is supposed to be run. They´re all screaming and dumping out the contents of their backpacks on the table. One kid runs out of the room to go to the bathroom and I freak out- how can I take him to the bathroom when I have a million other kids? Agghhh . . . then I realize there are sort of "hall monitors" outside to help with them. But only two, for like 100 kids. So it´s very possible that a kid could run out and they would both be occupied with other kids. So I realize in five minutes that this is basically a babysitting job, but one where I can´t really communicate with the kids. Some of them kind of understand english, but they´re not used to being spoken to in english. I´m supposed to be teaching them english, so I´m trying to figure out how much I should speak to them in english anyway. Also, I don´t know how to give commands, which is different than just saying something. Except for siéntate! Sit down. So I shouted that a lot. Siéntate! Siéntate muy bien. No tocas! When I wanted them to stop touching each other. At the end of the class this little girl asked me in spanish what "no tocas" means. I was supposed to say no toques. Close enough right? But no. Actually, a lot of the kids understood some english. But if they´re all fighting I had to yell at them in spanish. Parts of the class were great. I taught them stuff, we had little segments of learning. But 3 hours? Come on. Once I realized they liked singing, we did that. We sang the eensy weensy spider like 100 times. They loved it. We sang everything I could think of, including jingle bells and happy birthday. Then I made them one by one stand on a chair in the front of the room so we could practice colors. (What color is his sweater?) Halfway through the class, the hall monitor came in to tell me it was break time. I was like "I´m supposed to supervise 10 kids who don´t listen out of the classroom to the cafeteria?!" I tried to get them to line up, but they´re used to just running out like crazy people. Their parents brought them snacks, which they grabbed and then ran to the tables. The hall monitor people helped the kids open their snacks, so that was nice. After that, I had them play games outside, where they ran around and screamed and the oldest kid there got so wound up that he grabbed this other kid´s head and bit him on the forehead. There was no blood fortunately. I was counting down the minutes til the class was over. It was almost so bad it was good, though. The situation was totally ridiculous.
I´m kind of sick today. My throat hurts and I feel sort of fevery. I just watched Garden State while playing scrabble online and writing this, and I hated it way less than the first time I saw it. I even kind of liked it. I´m softening up in my old age.