My First Day As A Substitute Babysitter

I guess I figured I was mildly prepared for my first day of substitute teaching solely based on my babysitting experience.  No one else seemed to support this claim, seeing as how I have zero teaching experience unless you count my stint as an after-school Mad Scientist, where I was regularly unable to both factually answer questions or execute simple experiments until I got fired. But, I felt supremely confident that substitute teaching involved an introduction and several videocassettes (or DVDs, depending on the school district). 

However, subbing was, to my surprise, so much like babysitting it was a breeze.  It did involve more actual teaching that I expected, but it really just turned out to be several hours of arguing with 3rd graders about what their teacher does and doesn't let them do every Tuesday.  I had a sneaking suspicion that Mrs. Rikena doesn't typically let her students sit on the floor under their desks in lieu of chairs. Or spend the entire day making origami cranes that are missing heads, (only because she hasn't learned that part yet).  Or erase words from a sentence I'm currently writing on the board because it's her job.  But what do I know? I'm not in 3rd grade anymore. 

Despite the part where another teacher had to come and quiet down my screaming class, I think things went relatively well.  

There was also the part where we were using adjectives to describe things in the room and one student wrote the words "big,"  "blonde hair," and "heart necklace," to describe me.  So maybe I didn't clearly explain what adjectives were.  My bad.  

And the part when the math lesson was completely beyond me so we just built structures out of straws and twist ties until it got too out of control.  That wasn't my fault, all the plan said was "explain pyramids and build them." Oops.

The best part of the day was when I found that the agenda left by the teacher had scheduled for a Power Hour at 2:30.  It wasn't until later that I found out this was an the hour of the day in which other children from all over the school joined my class, doubling it in size, and tried to fill out worksheets far beyond their intellectual capabilities. This resulted in me explaining how to figure out each word problem at least thirty times.  

Somehow, I have to say I would rather spend an hour drinking a shot of beer every minute than explaining word problems to 3rd graders.