Impressive Sir.

Today I met a very impressive high school teacher. I subbed for a high school math teacher (yikes!) I was really worried when I was told that I would be in this classroom.

First off, I do not love subbing for math. You never know what you are going to get (and not in a Forest Gump kind of way!) Sometimes I am given instructions to simply follow the teacher's manual in order to teach a brand new concept. Well my friends I do not like doing this. Those things are ridiculous! The scripted ones are the worst. We already know the standardized testing is not that great. Why standardize our instruction? A manual does not know the different ways a student learns. Frankly who wants to watch me read from a manual? How is that helping students relate to their math problems. Standardized instruction is not meaningful. In other words, kids have no idea WHY they need to learn this stuff. This is especially true for high school (quadratic formula any one? When was the last time we used that?!) Plus, I am a sub. Hello! I waltz into your classroom and can sometimes not even pronounce a student's name correctly. Why are we expecting me to know where the student is instructionally (meaning what they are ready to learn.) I digress.

When you walk into a classroom you can also encounter the opposite. Sometimes they give you something to easy for a class. This is normally no problem for me. I am comfortable teaching English, History, and Science. If students misbehave, I simply make up my own homework assignment for them. But with math I don't know how to whip out a high school level math assignment. I have no clue what page they are in and I have no way of making up my own math assignment (again do not ask me to explain the quadratic formula. That I have worked very hard to forget.) So you can see my discomfort.

Luckily I had a very good teacher to sub for. She had two work sheets ready for me for the first class. This period the kids were very well behaved and the TA filled me in on all the juicy gossip. The next period was filled with kids whose names I have learned. (For those of you following along at home, when a sub knows your name it means you have done somethings to make them remember your name, if you catch my drift.) But this teacher had paired students up very well. Everyone stayed on task while working on their class project. I only had a minor technical difficulty for the time I was there.

The really impressive part was when I she returned to the classroom. She asked me about the student who was having technical difficulties. She was concerned that he was trying to get out of his work. (If you have worked with this student, you would know that it is not much of a stretch.) I assured her that the student was truly having difficulties. I informed her of my attempts to get the technology to work and the attempts of another student to get the technology to work as well. The teacher then asked me if I tried to get one of the struggling student's friends to help. I assured he that I would not make that kind of mistake. All in all I was very impressed with this young lady. She was super on top of her game. You go sister!