Long Term Sub

While student teaching, I encountered one of the holy grails of substituting opportunities: a pregnant colleague.
One of the teachers I had lunch period with happens to be expecting her first baby in February. When a teacher goes on maternity leave, she's gone for a solid six weeks, sometimes longer. That means they need a long-term substitute. I hear that and I think steady work for a month and a half.

Luckily I have become friends with this teacher, and it appears that a coveted long-term sub position could be mine! This teacher is the Media teacher and her classes include yearbook, media tech and speech. While my degree is in history education, I'm fairly computer-savvy, participated in yearbook/media tech in high school... in short I don't feel super underqualified.

Still the task of creating the school's daily video announcements was a bit daunting sounding, so I came back up to school for two days of observation in the Media classroom. Honestly, what else am I going to be doing with my time?

The level of technology available to the class surprised me. The kids were clicking away on programs I had never even heard of. Luckily the kids are so fluent with the tech that they can basically run everything themselves. Which is lovely since all the tech runs on macs anyway and macs and I are quite possibly the epitome of mortal enemies and I refrain from interacting with them. (My iphone is the only exception... and my parent's computers. And my brother's. Okay maybe Macs are creeping into my life.)

Aside from the tech classes, the speech classes I think are fun. I've never had a problem with public speaking and basically speech class is about teaching kids how to communicate in front of others. Part of that process is practicing, aka giving speeches.

On my 2nd day of observation I got to see about 3 dozen speeches. The topic was "Persuade the Audience to Believe..." and they could talk about whatever they wanted, following a format of course.
I got to see speeches on such topics as "Why Ghosts Are Real" and "The Cowboys are the Best Football Team Ever." Needless to say, I was entertained, especially when the kids pulled out their mandatory visual aides. The Cowboys presenter put up a photo of all the Cowboy's Super Bowl rings and then just stood there with his arms wide and said "No other explanation needed." A moment passed and then the Media teacher had to prompt him that in fact an explanation was needed, his whole speech can't be a picture and one sentence. I was amused, definitely more so than in a typical social studies class.

The long term sub job doesn't start till around February if the baby stays on schedule. I'm going to go ahead and start looking forward to it :)