The morning started out well: I got to eat a bowl of Rice Krispies with home-grown Quinalt strawberries. Boy were they sweet! Then I got called in to come to Bisbee and I gladly accepted.
The drive into Bisbee, naturally, was relaxing, although two large USBP vans pulled into our street as I left and I saw three more USBP vans down the main road into town.
The teacher I had to sub for was the same one I subbed for last December and I remembered the students fondly. One boy in second hour even hugged me because he liked me from last time.
However, it turned out to be the day of hell. By the end of the day I had a tension headache.
What went wrong? First off, the teacher told me that one particular hour was especially rough. He wasn’t kidding. But so were two other classes. It was all the same thing:
“I don’t have my book.”
“I don’t have a pencil.”
“I’m not going to do this.”
“I must have given out over a thousand pencils!” the teacher said before leaving for a district athletic meeting.
For one hour I had an assistant who had no scruples sending some boys outside the hallway to work (which meant they were able to goof off without proper supervision). It was the only hour I had an aide for, and I could have used them for the other two hyper hours. The teacher's aide came up to me at the end of the day and apologized for not helping me out.
"It was just one of those days, you know?" she told me.
So, for the first time I can remember, I wrote up students for all kinds of disrespectful behavior and for refusing work or coming to class unprepared. By the end of the day I walked the school baseball field and collected all the broken pencils I could find so that no one for the rest of the school year can claim they don’t have a pencil to write assignments with. Most were stubs but better to have a stubby pencil than none at all.
“That’s cool that you’re doing that!” said one boy to me, the same boy who during third hour was very disruptive.
But for some reason the real problem were the high percentage of Hispanic girls who rolled their eyes at me, told me to stop looking at them, or who purposely were disruptive for whatever reason. The teacher next door told me the names that I gave her were the typical “bad ones” and that I shouldn’t take anything personally. I didn’t, but I also know that students are near the end of their school year and simply don’t care about their grades anymore. Normally I have no problem with Hispanic students, but today was quite the exception.
My last instructions before leaving were to sanitize all the desktops before leaving. I did that AND all the personal dry-erase boards, even the white-and blackboards in the room. This was to keep any potential swine flu from spreading.
I went to the district office to confirm what one teacher told me earlier: that even though the school is going to longer hours next year four days a week, the pay for everyone, from teachers and custodians, subs and administrators, was frozen for the next school year. Which means the other school district still pays $4 more an hour. I told the Human Resource woman that I work for another school district, too and let her know that I take the first district that calls me.
I always enjoy the drive to and from Bisbee, often getting carried away with the scenery. But today I almost missed my turn-off and the entire drive was a blur. I couldn’t wait to get home and get out of my dressy clothes and into my garden clothes. (The pants zipper were stuck midway anyway, which made pulling my pants down extremely frustrating!)
I called in a suspicious-looking white cargo van parked along the San Pedro River. Was this a van picking up illegals? Better safe than sorry.
And then, once I was home and comfortably in worn-out clothes, watching the 4pm news, I learned that the two wildfires outside Fort Huachuca are still blazing (the news reported that a "high percentage of patients" were coming into the regional health center complaining of upper respiratory problems from the wildfire smoke), the swine flu totals have shot up from 403 to 642 overnight, and that hot and dry conditions are forecasted for awhile. The wildfire season in southern Arizona has arrived with a vengeance and I don’t see it being a mild season at all.
With days like today I am looking forward to getting out of here this summer.
http://www.kvoa.com/global/story.asp?s=10309380
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/291764
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/291701
http://www.svherald.com/articles/2009/05/06/news/doc4a0131c010e3c591477517.txt
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