With my official teaching license in hand, I head over to the school where I will be working for the next 5 months. After a long, relaxing Christmas break, it was refreshing to return to the verve of an Elementary School setting. The moment I walk in I am reminded why I decided to enter this profession. Kids bounce around the halls, their energy pulsing and rushing through the walls and floors.
I meet with the principal and finalize hours and scheduling, then head over to room 142 where for the next 3 hours I do observations of Early Step, Next Step, and Read Naturally interventions. During what I thought would be my lunch break, the principal calls and says that one of the teachers is very sick and went home. They need a substitute to step in immediately. “Could you sub the rest of the day?” she asks in a nervous tone. “Sure!” I say, “What grade?”
And so I head upstairs to teach 3rd Grade, not knowing what I will be teaching or what their schedule looks like. I laugh at myself inside my head thinking “As long as their not doing those dreaded fractions, I’ll be fine.”
For the afternoon I have 30 amazing, energetic, and very talkative 3rd graders. We went with the flow and had some fun along the way.
My afternoon was a validation of the true art of teaching. As an educator, your art is to be inventive, create something out of nothing, turn a boring worksheet into an adventure, all while juggling a cracked tooth and a barfing kid. This is a true art. I haven’t mastered this by any means, but today was a look into what can be.
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