After staying up late again last night (and note to self: I must get my sleeping patterns back to something that resembles normalcy), I woke up this morning at 11 for a teaching assignment at 1 p.m. It was only an hour and forty minutes. I was absolutely sure that it wouldn't be difficult at all. Although, prior to going into the room, I was unsure whether I would be on crowd control duty or if I would have lesson plans to follow. Substitute teaching is sort of like working at the emergency clinic. You never really know what you're going to end up doing before you walk in the door.
Today, I filled in as the teacher for CBIP - career-based intervention program. It was not a normal class. Quite honestly, I do not know how to describe the students that I was in charge of today. Some seemed to have quite a bit of potential, but unable to realize it for whatever reason. Others seemed like being in school was the farthest thing from the top of their priority list.
I finally found out what OGT stands for today. It's the state graduation test. When I was in school, we just called it the proficiency test. I think there may be concern that these students will have a difficult time passing the exams. All they had to do today with that was read three paragraphs, and choose from a list the main idea of the paragraph. It sounds like a simple assignment, especially when the answer is right there in front of you. However, some still had problems with it. They were happy to be up and moving out of their seats with the next activity. They played a game related to their vocabulary words. The student who had won the past two games was knocked down by an unexpected competitor. The whole class was shocked, I think. Tootsie rolls for the winner!
The last half of the class was a filming of the students' interpretation of a couple different scenes from the book Go Ask Alice. While they were filming, which was a chaotic event from the beginning, I flipped through some random sections of the book. While I understand that this is one person's diary (fictionalized I presume) of a student with a drug problem, I was shocked at the language and themes in the book. Sex and drugs mainly, but this is a high school student. I guess I would be naive if I held to the fact that high schoolers are not having sex, drinking, and even potentially doing drugs. But all the same, I thought the book almost encouraged it. The language was reproachable in the book! I guess I just remember reading much more traditional books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when I was in junior high. Perhaps books like that will not keep these students' attention, though. I guess I'm just not sure of the purpose of this book being on the reading list for junior high student. Ah, but I'm just the substitute...I do what I'm told.
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