It wasn't bad.
I'd agreed several weeks ago to be a replacement in a classroom today, and again in Feb. at the same location. It's probably the most desirable elementary school in the county: the one your kids have to 'test' to get into, and the only one in town every student is in the magnet program. Other schools have specialized tracks, but are also neighborhood schools, with kids who live in that zone/area attending. This one has students from all over town, but they are there because their parents want them to be in a place where they are expected to excel - from Kindergarten.
Teachers were out of their classrooms today for several hours of IT instruction, so they were all still present in the building, just being trained instead of teaching. I spent half the day in a second grade classroom, with a group of students who were well behaved, doing work that I would not have expected eight year olds to accomplish, and remarkably cooperative, a very pleasant experience. After lunch, I was sent to a class of fifth graders, who were doing stuff that completely baffled me. Posters up on the wall with examples of what they were expected to know, from early in the school years, were well beyond my comprehension. (Math: you're not surprised, of course!) Polite, well mannered, knew what to do and when to do it. If the system did not require an instructor to be on hand at all times, the fifth graders would be perfectly capable of managing their classroom for several hours without my 'adult supervision'. Plus they went from sustained reading and AR testing to PE to computer lab and then went home, so they really didn't need me.
This is the same school where I was a sub. about a month ago, in a Kindergarten class, where the teacher had the students so well organized and on track - the five year olds could have done it without me - had there been a talking clock there to tell them the time, since that was probably all they could not do. And the kids in the second grade today was actually practicing their time-telling skills when we did a work sheet that had clock faces on it and they had to write in what time the hands were on - plus several rounds of Clock Bingo, which was pretty amusing. I guess it's all a matter of readiness.
It is interesting to see how skills build on skills and develop in complexity. I remember all those years ago when I was in Head Start and giving kids papers that had a jumbled up series of illustrations on it. They had to color and cut their work into squares(practicing fine motor skills) then glue them down on another sheet of paper in the proper sequence - figure out whether Billy got out of bed first, or got dressed first, or got on the school bus first, or walked out the door of his house first. Another of those things we forget we were not born knowing; requiring a bit more thinking, and a different kind of information processing than how to operate a coat hanger, since you have to do it all in your head.
Interesting to ponder...
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