I had to work today after laying all day yesterday in my bed
drooling the flu all over various pillows and thinking it might be my last
night on earth. Of course the sub call came in at 5:45 a.m. and I stood up to
walk around with the phone in the dark deciding whether I was feeling like
barfing in which case no, I would punch in no, I can’t take the job, and when no
barf feeling happened I sighed and said yes, third grade, Bridgely Elementary,
some slacker teacher who didn’t want to come in after 5 days of rain, sure I’ll
take your dumb class, sick as a dog. I
need the money.
So I go out in the dark to the barn to feed the horses even
though the mud is so thick it sucks my boots off, and then get breakfasts and
lunches even though I ate nothing yesterday and I set off.
The classroom I get is steel grey with the blinds sealed shut
like the Rapture is happening outside and nobody better look at it, and the
weather is just prison weather. A sad, thin French rain with a side of
cement. I look at what the teacher left
and on it I see the magic sentence : we have computer lab. It gets better: we have computer lab for an hour. And even better: Usually the teacher after us doesn’t come in
so stay an extra hour. I feel like crying. Computer lab is like getting
paid to play arcade games, without the noise. A lady then comes in the empty classroom and
says “Oh I have you in the wrong room.” NO. She’s bustling me out. “You’re next
door.” NO. I look back at the paper. But…Computer lab… The lady is hustling me
next door. What are the chances the next room will have that magic computer lab
formula on the teacher plans. After deposited
inside, I scan the page on his desk. Nope. No chance at all. It’s now my goal
to somehow, renegade, get to computer lab.
This room also has the sealed flat grey slatted windows and
that is just enough of that airtight stifling situation. I twist the blinds to
let some of real life in and I see the stumpy building across the walkway
instead of the misty green Scottish highlands I had conjured in my desperation.
Well sun light is better than no light.
Then the class rattles in and for the next six hours we are
on a bad date where I’m getting to know each of the 25 kids individually and
trying to make a relationship work that won’t last past 2 pm. There are wiggly
boys. I just had the flu and may still be sporting some of it in fact. Jayden
shreds little pieces of orange construction paper and spends most of his time
with his back to me dropping shit on the floor. Another kid can’t stop talking
in fact he should get an award for the amount of talking he can do while
simultaneously getting out of his chair after being told every 3 minutes to
stop talking and sit down.
I get that school is boring. But wiggly boys should be put
in a room next door filled with snakes. I could be in this room, teaching the sweet ones, while the boys are in the next
door room climbing the walls, trying to escape. This is something they would
all volunteer to do, by the way, rather than grammar and math. In fact, if I
asked right now, every boy would say YES GIVE ME THE SNAKES. I might do
it too, instead of math.
So after a few hours I know the sub next door is in heavenly
computer lab and I’m in juvie and I know her class has that extra hour that we could steal so you
know what, the flu says just GO MAN, so I take the class over and kick her out
of computer lab and then some mean office type prison guard lady who looks like
she takes her vacations on the side of freeways, getting take out food and
overseeing grisly traffic accidents – she busts her way in like no kidding, she
materializes STRAIGHT FROM HELL and says is
this your computer lab time? And she’s checking a chart on the wall and I
KNOW we’re not on there and she says was
this on the lesson plan and I think man, why did I listen to the flu but I say wellll he said if no one was in here… (because, come on, that WAS on ONE of the
lesson plans.) And she kicks us out and we walk back to the class deflatedly and
I think well at least I ruined that other sub’s day.
Then it just keeps raining and about 20 minutes from the end
of the day I know which kids are kind and which kids are criminals and there’s
a few kids who are hoping I’ll be there tomorrow they say and we like each
other and it’s sad because now I know them I could try less hard and get the
same results but now it’s sort of over. And I was sick so they got the worst
version of me, the kind of flat, raspy tired me. But there were two nice kids
and I got to eat Del Taco with a lot of ice in my cup. And I got money for
basically just inwardly rolling my eyes a lot and at one point drawling and
filling in the blank with a pronoun answer I knew.
So I left the class without stealing anything and turned in
my key and walked in puddles and felt free and went back home and cleaned up
horse poop and put out hay and got in pajamas and went back to bed.