Drawing Dragons

After walking into the Kindergarten class Jan was working in the other day, I immediately realized I was not cut out for elementary school teaching assignments. Yesterday, I taught elementary all day long…
We are not exactly in a place to get picky about what jobs are available, so when I heard that there was no middle school or high school jobs available, I bit the ugly bullet and took the elementary job.
I was what is called a “rover” in the substitute teaching biz, which basically means I cover a bunch of different classes for about 45 minutes each throughout the day. I subbed for 9 different classes. Couldn’t help but laugh at different contexts I found myself in over the course of the day. I covered a variety of classes from Kindergarten to 6th grade.

A couple of my favorites/most memorable were:

1. The little boy that wouldn’t stop turning his Lego creation’s into machine’s guns and running around the room like Rambo no matter how many times I told him guns were bad.
2. The little kindergarten girl who believed with all of her being that it was her job to tell me how the “Real” teacher runs the classroom. Including who and how to discipline.
3. The sixth grade boy who during “Sustained Silent Reading” chose the profound tutorial called “Drawing Dragons.” Yes, a step by step reading(with illustrations of course) on how to properly draw your everyday dragon.
4. The little guy who couldn’t help but tell me why every color of his jelly fish, which he had just finished making out of a coffee filter and water color paints, had so much purple in it.
5. Finally, playing heads up 7-up, pictionary and musical chairs with my last class of the day which had only about 11 kids of whom all spoke only a few words of English.

Some cute kids…but I STILL am not cut out to teach elementary kids.