One of the 1st grade teacher is going to be out for the entire week, so yesterday Heather and I substituted from 9am-12pm. I think that may have been three of the longest hours of our lives. Have you seen Kindergarten Cop? We reenacted it. It was especially infuriating because these kids are angels for their regular teacher and when any one of the other teachers stepped in to see what was going on (I'm afraid we may have been disrupting the entire school) they would quite right down.
Needless to say, we were fired from our substituting gig and went back to our usual work around the school today. It is a blow to the ego, but I think everyone involved is better off. Heather and I were about to run for the hills yesterday!
Today, after having a little distance and getting back to our usual routines we were able to appreciate the children much more. We spent a couple hours with them at play time and I even went back over for story time. They were so cute--even as they were sneezing on me and decorating my hair with sticks and flowers ;)
Take away point for today--you need to fully understand a situation before you try to fix it. Over the past few weeks Heather and I have sat in on several classes and offered our recommendations on how to improve the effectiveness of the teachers, but perhaps we underestimated (make that grossly underestimated) how far they had already come with the children.
There are lots of things like that... Many issues here seem fairly strait forward and easy to handle, but without fully understanding the culture and how things work, it's nearly impossible to make a lasting change for the better. Lesson learned the hard way.
No comments:
Post a Comment