Back at middle school. Same one. Yet again. The best part about being at this school in this particular assignment is that I have such a long planning period, just over two hours. It occurred to me today that I could easily go home, eat lunch, have a quick lie-down and be back in time for my last class period and no one would even notice. But I don't think it would be right. Plus, this gives me time to read and sometimes squeeze in a meditation if I have enough privacy. And the special ed. office in this building is so nice and soothing that I don't mind being here for a while. This is the second day of the two-part assignment that I started last week.
Friday found me at another special ed. classroom, this time as a teacher assistant in an elementary school. It was nice to get to observe, and the other teachers in that room were cool and chatted with me, but I didn't have much to do so the day really dragged on. Plus, it was cold in there.
But I did get to go with one of the other teachers and take the kids to their music and gym classes, in which they are integrated with the rest of their grade level. In music they got to try playing the autoharp, which got me thinking about the movie Walk the Line and one of the songs Reese Witherspoon sang in it, "Pale Wildwood Flower". I think the instrument she was playing when she sang that was also an autoharp. In gym all the kids played dodgeball, which was painful at times but mostly hilarious to watch, and if they got tagged out they had to do exercises before they could get back in the game. The best part of that class, though, was the warm-up, during which they had to run laps around the room. Two of our kids from the special ed. class ended up just running around in circles in the middle of the room and laughing. It was so adorable, they were having a blast just running in circles, the other teacher and I cracked up watching them.
Anyhoo, I figured out how to publish posts from my email, since I can't access my blog from the hyper-restrictive locked-down school computers.
We did more work on the persuasive essays in language arts today, and I got to take a group of students to the media center to work on them there, which was nice. I helped them research sources for their outside expert source or whatever. It's a good assignment, but there I feel like their teacher is being a bit too formulaic about it. Who knows, maybe that's how "the county" wants them writing these days. Either way, it was nice to get out of her classroom and out from under her somewhat oppressive energy. In math they took a test. Social Studies should be fun, though. I'm looking forward to it, the teacher is a riot and he lets me participate in class. I think the idea is that if I, having apparently been labeled as a "cool sub" by the kids, get excited about social studies then the rest of them will follow my example. Whatever works, it beats sitting around and zoning out, and I always liked learning about other cultures and all that junk. This week they're learning about the Middle East so I might tell some stories about my trip to Egypt back in 2001. Shake it up a little since most of the personal stories are told from the teacher's experiences during the Gulf War.
Well....... I guess I'm going to read for the next hour. Woot!
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