Did you hear about that teenager?

I finally got a call to sub today. I hated it. It's not so much teaching as babysitting. And I hate kids. I really do. I thought this blog would really pick up once I had amusing stories to tell about subbing, but I probably won't have many more because I told the school not to call me unless no one else was available.

But I do have some anecdotes from today. In my first class, they were supposed to watch an episode of the Twilight Zone (awesome, btw), then, if there was still time left, they were either supposed to talk about it as a class or watch it again since they had to write an essay on it. But they were very much opposed to both of those options and wouldn't stop bitching until I put on Tremors. I think I caved in large part because I also wanted to watch Tremors.

Then I had a prep hour, which I mostly spent trying to make my legs and hands stop shaking.

Then I had the class for kids who can't read good. They'd been listening (yes, listening) to Fahrenheit 451, and had watched the Truffaut adaptation (which I gather they didn't like), and we spent the hour in the library so they could work on their power point presentations about the book(/tape/movie). Most of them used the hour to go on the search engine Google and look up pictures of fires and explosions and graphics from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. One kid spent most of it applying chap stick to a spider bite on his stomach. I also had to help him and his partner spell "Fahrenheit" a few times, but then they never liked the way it looked on the page, so they would delete it and then forget how to spell it again. Also, at one point he said to his friend, "Hey, did you hear about that teenager?" The teenager in question was apparently the one who sent something like 1,400 text messages in one day, but I just like the way he phrased the question.

The next class was to do an ACT practice exam, which they then graded on their own and didn't have to turn in. But I still caught a lot of them cheating. They would look up to see if I was looking, and then pretend they weren't when I saw them. I didn't even bother to stop them because who cares? they aren't even being graded.

And then I repeated the same things over.

What amazes me most is the difference between 11th and 12th grade high school students and first year university students. They're essentially the same age, but I hated teaching university students way less. I might have even liked it. You can actually have a conversation with them. A few of them even want to learn. With high schoolers I usually got so fed up, I spent the last ten minutes of each class having students pass back papers while I ignored them completely.

Also, one thing that apparently hasn't changed since I was in high school is that high school kids think my clothes are weird.