I subbed for a middle school math teacher today. However, during what would have been my prep hour, I had to cover for a middle school band class.
The whole class period involved the kids watching the Original Star Trek episode, The Return of the Archons. They even had a worksheet to fill out as they watched!
I don't know how this fits into the curriculum for a music class... but that's not for me to understand. I just follow directions.
Last week I had two separate assignments as history teachers. During both of those assignments I was asked to sub for a gym teacher on what would have been a prep period.
The first day I was in a very large class being co-taught with another gym teacher. She was there that day, so I just needed to supervise. The class was having a badminton tournament. About 15 minutes in the other teacher asked me if I wanted to be her partner against a pair of students with no one else to play. I agreed, and quickly discovered two things. 1) I am HORRIBLE at badminton (though the teacher and the students were cool about it.... going so far as to let me re-serve shots when I missed the shuttlecock entirely) . 2) Badminton is a surprisingly athletic game, and wearing a button-down shirt and tie while playing is a very bad idea.
On a side note, the other teacher and I DID end up winning a very close game. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been given an unofficial handicap we would have lost. Also, she nailed a kid directly in the eye with a shuttlecock, then laughed at him once she realized he hadn't lost any vision.
The second day was a much smaller gym class, and the students were playing Pickle Ball, and I also joined in on a game the last 10 minutes of class. Despite all appearances it was much more difficult than badminton. It was good that the group I was playing with weren't really keeping score. In fact they were not all that interested in the competitive aspect of the game period.
Yesterday I subbed for a high school biology teacher. It was the last day of the trimester, and two of the four class periods were taking an exam.
About 10 minutes into first period, when all the kids were silently working, the feeder crickets in the back started to chirp. It was so perfectly timed that at first I thought a kid was playing a sound effect from their phone. It was pretty funny.
Twenty minutes later a chair (which had been put up over night) fell off an unused table in the back. It was very loud, and very unexpected. After a few startled screams, most of the kids started laughing, and saying that the classroom is haunted. A few others started saying that it was a bad sign, and that I should cancel the test.
Later in the day, one of the class periods had already taken their exam, so we watched an episode of the BBC documentary series, Planet Earth.
