backing into ...

... a day of substitute teaching in an elementary school. My phone consistently rings each week day morning at 6:00 o'clock, with a call from the automated service the school district uses to find replacement teachers to fill in for teachers or para-professionals who are absent. I sometimes ignore it, and sometimes answer the call, to keep the robo-calling computer from making a dozen more calls, hoping I will be available to jump in the fray. This morning, when the phone chimed at 6, it woke me up, but I did not get up to answer, so I knew to expect more calls. The computer that searches for substitutes is nothing if not persistent.

For some reason, I answered the next call: it was not the computer, but a staffer from one of the elementary schools I have not been to in years. Actually one of the best run, most efficient in the entire county. It is a magnet school, that requires students to test for admission. Pretty competitive even at the first grade level. When they are accepted, if they don't make sufficient progress, are not able to do the work as expected, they are invited to transfer into another school the following year.

It was a remarkably pleasant day, being in a classroom of five year olds where every one of them did what they were trained to do: get busy, cooperate, toe the mark consistently all day long. I would go back in a heart beat. In fact, I spoke to the staffer who called me at 6:45 this morning before I left and told her was available again tomorrow if she could find me a job. Probably won't happen, but I would most definitely go.

What I learned in Kindergarten today:
A big sign on the wall in the lunchroom: "Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game." Babe Ruth
A note on the teacher's personal space, where I was the para. sub for the day: "When life gets rough, feed the turtles."
And when the kids went to the computer class room, I noticed a long list of tricks to have up your sleeve for solving problems when you are struggling with navigating technology, amongst them being when you think you have erased your document, hit 'control + z'. A good thing to know/remember when I have been typing on the blog, or composing a email and it suddenly disappears because I failed to periodically hit 'save.'