Training To Be Awesome... or Subbing to Skip School

This week was an interesting one, if only for the fact that I taught only Monday and Tuesday. Last week, my principal told me that I was going to represent our school at the SharpSchool training and become a "Trainer of Trainers". In layman's terms, this meant that I would be spending Thursday and Friday learning about our district's new web hosting/template system so that I could be our school's webmaster. The training was quite fun, and the system is pretty user friendly. I had a few qualms with the design system, as it's a little limited and will be frustrating to set-up initially, but it's better than most web template services I've seen. I'll be sure to post the link when I've got it up and running.

Since I'll be serving as the webmaster for the entire school, I've decided to push back creating my own website. Perhaps my thinking will change and while I'm working on the school site I'll need a break and some time to be creative, but I really need to get the school page up and running as soon as possible. Right now, all I really have is a random image script in place for the main page so that it switches between 8 different school photos (that I can change often and easily), a few classes set-up, and all of the students in as users. I still need to meet with the principal and administration to see exactly what they would like for the site, and I will have a lot of data entry to do with the teachers and classes. (Getting the students in the system was much easier because we could use a spreadsheet with their student numbers... teachers might have to be put in manually, by me, and their classes will definitely need to be put in by me). Basically, this means that I have a lot more work, but at least it's work that I know I'm good at and can finish with little stress.

What happened to Wednesday?

Wednesday I was supposed to teach. Tuesday I was supposed to be in training for Open-Ended Rubrics, (so the kids can do better on standardized tests). Unfortunately, neither of these proved to be correct. When I did not receive a sub for Tuesday, I was forced to skip training and scrounge together a new lesson, since there was no reason to teach the "substitute lesson" and I couldn't teach Wednesday's lesson out of order and confuse the heck out of the kids. Imagine my surprise on Tuesday when I heard that I didn't have a sub and that I might be in training on Wednesday... not the OER training, but a different one. Interesting, since had I attended the OER training I would have only taught on Monday.

Now, when I say I couldn't teach the substitute lesson, I'm being fairly liberal with the meaning of "lesson". Every teacher on my campus has said that the best you can do with a substitute is worksheets. "Don't ever try to give them a full lesson because you'll only have to teach it again the next day", said everyone else. Me, being the naive, dapper young fellow that I am, tried to push it a little bit. I figured that I would use worksheets on Tuesday and give the students writing time on Thursday and Friday for their rough drafts. It shouldn't have been that tough, even for a sub, who can technically be an 18 year old high school graduate who has taken a weekend class to become a certified substitute teacher.

The worksheets went amazingly well, and the substitute seemed more than competent, (he used to work with the school's disciplinary department). However, I had a different substitute on Thursday and Friday, and I guess my "quiz/rough draft writing" was a little more than the kids could handle. Some of them did very well on the quiz and the writing, but others... well, I don't know what I can say because they had a substitute. I was told to only give the kids worksheets, but I didn't want to lose the better part of a week. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. I guess I'll just find out tomorrow.

Pics of the room

I finally got some pictures of the room, so here they are. It's smaller than the other rooms, and doesn't look like a typical teacher room, but it's mine, and I'm comfortable with it. Heck, at least the kids notice the movie posters and asked me about them. They didn't say a dang word about the traditional educational ones though. Maybe I was on to something with my idea to "educationally" vandalize popular movie posters.
*click to see the full size pictures

Student Gems

Not really that funny, but I'm sure all you other teachers have heard it a million times.
"Why did you fail me sir?" - generic failing student
"I didn't give you a failing grade. You earned it by not turning in any of your work" - Me
"But why did you fail me?" - same generic student
*Smacks head* "Turn in your work and maybe you won't be failing. Let's take a look at your grade after class." - Me