60 Second Teaching Stories

For some reason today I spend the day riding the city bus as I did my errands. It made me think about how much I missed being in the classroom - that was until I saw 40 kids crossing the road with their ONE little tiny first year teacher trying to coral them and keep them alive. That poor dear. She will be dead by November. I wanted to go help her but then I remembered what having 40 kid classrooms was all about. No thank you. I did my decades in that Snake Pit. But I am reminded of a story.

I was subbing for a week once with grade 3 kids. One of the things they were preparing for was a big spelling test. A government test. I quizzed them daily on their list of words but to make it more interesting I made up sentences with the words they needed to know. Most of my sentences had poodles or puddles in them because I wanted to make them laugh and not feel so stressed about a test exam. Great fun for us all and was a fun way to deliver 100 words. Then the test came.

Seems when the kids were given the words many, many of them put either poodle or puddle in place of the word they were suppose to know thus invalidating the test. It was the funniest thing ever to the regular teachers at the school. I volunteered to come back fix my error and it took a week but we got them back on track and the best part is that that class crushed the curve with over a ninety percent success rate. I loved subbing at that school. It was so low stress and I had a lot of fun and success with those kids. They were up to do any projects.