My View From the FRONT of the Room

First things first, a decision appears to have been made regarding the removal from our school of one EH (emotionally handicapped) teacher.  Gnu was one of the teachers under consideration.  As of this posting, it appears that Gnu may not be the teacher leaving. 

Gnu will be out of the classroom for six school days.  The search was on for a substitute teacher because I am not a licensed teacher plus two adults need to be in the room with our scholars at all times.  On my last blog post I asked the readers to give me their best guess as to how many days there will be a substitute teacher in the classroom.  Four individuals responded and all four stated the number of days a substitute teacher would be in the classroom would be zero.  Let's see how they did. 

As I entered the school on day one (Wednesday) without Gnu I stopped by the office and asked the administrative czar if there would be a substitute teacher in the room with me.  The response from the administrative czar was, "forget it." There was a plan "B" as Gnu told me that one of the overhead personnel would try and make an appearance on Wednesday.  Did that happen?  I'm not even going to answer that question.  Gnu left the lesson plans and academic materials for the six days she would be gone in various locations around the room.  I gathered everything labeled Wednesday and got organized.  It's around 10:00am and we are in our math block.  The subject was geometric shapes, angles, and lines.  I was doing great until I reached the section on rhombuses and trapezoids.  Yikes!  Where is my device?  I love technology, a rhombus looks like a kite and a trapezoid is a quadrilateral with two sides parallel.  I wonder if I have to explain quadrilateral to my 9Patch readers in as far north as Michigan?  Who says you can't teach and old guy, with a view from the back of the room, some new tricks.  About halfway through our math block my day was interrupted.  Did a substitute teacher arrive?  Seriously.  The door to the classroom opened and in walked Leftside (a scholar from last year) and his posse, two men, Knew2 (the other EH teacher), and the BigB.  Apparently Leftside left his classroom a tad bit angry and went for a walk.  Leftside was corralled outside our classroom so a decision was made to transport Leftside to our timeout room.  Talk about disrupting my math lesson.  Except for Leftside taking his shoes off in the timeout room and throwing them at the ceiling tiles and managing to break two ceiling tiles before his shoes were removed, he was pretty quiet.  Despite this interruption, two huge positives came from it with the BigB in the classroom.  First, the scholars pretty much ignored what was going on behind them and stayed on task.  Second, with the Big B in the room I had the document camera fired up, the overhead screen pulled town and I was teaching math.  Dang man!  I'm looking like a real teacher.  Despite the Leftside incident, the day was pretty smooth.

Briefly, before I move on, each day that Gnu was gone PhD(*)Pete (behavior therapist) lead a group session with our scholars.  PhD(*)Pete's daily presence in the room gave me a nice break to gather my thoughts and prepare for the remainder of the day.  In fact, and although not necessary, PhD(*)Pete supported me everyday that Gnu was gone and I couldn't thank her enough for that support.

On day two (Thursday) without Gnu I caught a huge break.  Was it a substitute teacher?  No way.  ShortTime, Prophet, and Knapper did not arrive at school.  This is going to be too easy and it was.

Day three (Friday) without Gnu turned a bit ugly.  Because I was in the room alone with the scholars I was required to eat lunch with them.  The inability of our scholars to eat lunch without Gnu or I accompanying them is because real teachers with real licenses who have lunch duty responsibilities think it's above themselves to address behavior issue with our scholars while they eat lunch.  Just before heading to lunch, EM asked me if everyone could eat their lunch in the classroom rather than the cafeteria and I agreed.  With food in their hands the scholars walked back to the classroom.  EM, Uh-Uh-Uh, and Prophet sat at Gnu's table at the front of the room.  Grr! sat at his desk and I sat where I have a view from the back of the room eating my triple decker peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  EM brought a pack of nacho chips from home to go with his lunch and was quietly eating them.  At one point Prophet reached for the bag but EM grabbed it and politely said to Prophet, "my mother bought these for my lunch so please don't try and take them."  A couple minutes later Prophet  successfully grabbed the nacho chips.  EM, still being polite said to Prophet, "those are my chips, can I please have them back?"  Prophet starting walking away from EM so I stood up.  As soon as Prophet saw me get up he started cramming full hands of nacho chips into his mouth.  By the time I reached him, his mouth was so full of nacho chips that he couldn't even close it.  When I removed EM's nacho chips from his hands he erupted.  He started slamming cabinet doors as hard as he could and I instructed the scholars to take their lunch and head to their safe place outside the classroom.  The scholars were absolutely perfect in their departure and I pushed the emergency call button by our classroom door to get assistance as I was alone with a very angry scholar.  When helped arrived Prophet had really trashed the room.  At one point he raised chairs up over his head and was throwing them.  He also knocked over desks and did an excellent job of scattering all of the documents on Gnu's desk across the room.  With help now in the room, Prophet was escorted to our timeout room and the BigB went to call his parental unit to come and get him.  With Prophet gone, the scholars were directed back to the classroom and we continued into our reading block.  The reading subject for the day was a punctuation exercise on quotation marks that I though was pretty funny.  If you've read my blog long enough, and have the ability to recognize the proper use of punctuation, you know that I've probably made some serious punctuation mistakes.  It was for that reason that I found it funny that I was teaching a lesson on quotation marks.  Although I completed the lesson I knew I didn't do a very good job as the scholars weren't catching on.  It was near the end of the day so I decided to repeat the lesson plan on Monday and called it a day.  Gnu has been gone for three days, it's the weekend, and I'm surviving.

Real quick before I move on to Monday.  The overhead person, that was supposed to be in the classroom on Wednesday, showed up on Friday.  The total time this overhead person was in the classroom was less than two minutes.  This is the same overhead person that felt that Prophet's behavior had improved in our classroom and made arrangements to have him permanently assigned to the room.  Sadly, this overhead person arrived after lunch and missed Prophet's eruption.

It's Monday morning and as I enter the building I passed the BigB who says to me, "I'm really trying to find a substitute for your classroom."  I thank her for the effort and head to the classroom.  It's around 8:30 when my cell phone beeps and I see that a text message poured in.  I opened the message and there was a picture of this large wave glistening in the sunlight and bearing down on three women.  I checked the text that goes along with the picture and all it said was, "I'm in the middle."  I thought I'd text back either my Leftside story or my Prophet story just to be hateful but chose not to.  I work with a great teacher and I'm hoping she is thoroughly enjoying her time in Hawaii.  After looking at the test picture Gnu sent to me, I decided to start the day with a geography lesson as I'm thinking the scholars are probably clueless as to the location of Hawaii.  I pulled out, from our social studies drawer, a map of the United States and traced on it Gnu's route to an from Hawaii.  The outbound trip went from Indianapolis, to Dallas, to Phoenix, and then on to Maui.  The inbound trip went from Maui, to a city in Oregon, to Chicago, and then to Indianapolis.  As I studied the map I noticed that the distance from the California (that is even farther west than Utah) coastline to Maui is only about two inches.  That didn't tell the true story of Gnu's location so I set up my iPad and using Google Earth, centered the satellite picture right over Hawaii.  When the scholars settled down I started my geography lesson and as expected, they were clueless as to Hawaii's location.  In fact, I'm confident in saying this was the first time they saw a picture of an island.  Academically and behaviorally, the day went well.  Except for Prophet's constant disruptions I survived day four.  For the record, the number of days that an unlicensed teacher led the class stands at four.  The number of days that a licensed teacher led the class stands at zero.

Shortly after the scholars departed to go home an instructional assistance from our Pre-K classroom walked into the room with an adult that looked to be someone's grandmother.  This instructional assistant asked me if Gnu was still on vacation and I replied, "yes, for two more days."  The instructional assistant then told me that the person with her just finished as a substitute teacher in her room and did an excellent job.  I introduced myself to the substitute teacher and then explained to her what type of classroom she was standing in.  I then told her if she was interested she should talk to the BigB on her way out.  The substitute teachers response to me was, "I'll think about it." 

I'm combining Tuesday and Wednesday as things went well.  TheSUB arrived at 8:30am and said to me, "you set the agenda and whatever you need me to do I will do."  The day went amazingly well.  We worked together on the distribution of work and everything on the daily lesson plan was completed.  I was so impressed with TheSUB that I walked over to the BigB's office to inform her as to how my day went and suggested that she schedule TheSUB for the rest of the school year at our school.

It's Wednesday afternoon and I'm within two hours of surviving without Gnu for six days when things turned a bit ugly.  TheSUB was working with the third grade scholars and I had Grr! and Prophet with me.  Prophet lost his focus and headed to the front table.  When he sat at the table TheSUB said to him, "you need to go back and sit with Mr. Schultz."  Prophet looked up at her and in the matter of a few moments laid the N-Word, B-Word, and F-Word on her.  TheSUB stood up, took off her glasses, glared down at Prophet and calmly said, "you have no business being in this classroom."  Dear overhead person that permanently assigned Prophet to our classroom because his behavior improved, did you just hear what a substitute teacher said about Prophet?

I received a text message later in the day from Gnu informing me that she arrived safely back Indianapolis and would be in the classroom early on Thursday morning.  I already have a title for my next blog post.  It will say, What The.....  As you can read, I cleaned that up a bit but I'll give you a hint.  I'm upset, my part time editor, part time consultant, and full time spouse is upset.  In fact, three other classroom teachers voice their outrage at what transpired upon Gnu's return.  I also feel confident that the school teachers that read this blog next week will also be upset.  How upset am I?  I sent an email message to our school corporation's main office questioning if the proper protocol was followed when placing a new scholar in our classroom. 

That's it.  I'm out.  Thanks for continuing to read my blog.  Talk to you next week, if I still have a job.