Today was: STRESSFUL

I realize that most of what I write here regarding Student Teaching revolves around the girl with autism, and that, in a nutshell, is the problem. I feel like what I do most of the day (I know I mentioned this yesterday, but bear with me...) is watch after her, and make sure that she is AT LEAST not harming herself, other kids, or classroom objects. Today was nightmarish.

Let's start at the beginning. You know all that stuff that I wrote yesterday about "I'm going to go in and tell the substitute that I'm going to handle everything all day"? When I walked in to the classroom this morning, Miles was talking with this woman like they were old friends. Turns out, the sub worked at Bryant part-time last year doing som art/drama stuff, and is the Patron Saint of the school. ALL of the other teachers in the building, upon seeing her, ran over, embraced her and asked how she had been doing. As she was looking over the sub notes that Miles had left, she seemed like SHE wanted to run the day, and I would only get to do the things that Miles had specifically noted that he wanted me to do. SO, when the kids showed up, I immediately went into hyperdrive and took charge. "Good morning, everyone. After you put away your coats and backpacks, be sure and answer the Question of the Day ["Who plays with you at home?"]. Then, go to your tables, take out your Browsing Boxes and read through the books you chose yesterday... Ok, put everything away and come to the rug. Let's go over the Question of the Day and the Buzz Book. Let's talk about "beginning sounds" [this particular activity went horribly...] ..." As I was about to let the kids know where they were all going to go for Workshop Time [almost an hour after the kids walked in the door] the sub piped up and said, "Um, Eric, before we do that can I introduce myself?" Oops. I guess that I was a bit over-eager to take charge...

Mid-way through the morning, I look up and see the girl with autism with a pencil clenched in her fist, running from table to table, scribbling FURIOUSLY all over the place. After wrenching the pencil from her fist, she ran to another table, grabbed another pencil, and continued scribbling. After we hid all of the pencils and pencil containers she picked up a red marker and began FURIOUSLY scribbling with it all over the tables. SHE EVEN DREW A RED LINE ACROSS MY CHEST [these markers had BETTER be water soluble]. By this time, the rest of the class was sitting on the rug listening to the substitute read them The Gingerbread Man [I wanted to read it to them!], the special ed teacher and I had hid all of the markers, called the girl's mom [who wasn't home], and the girl had moved on to paint brushes [thankfully, they were all clean...]. After a few minutes, she gave up on the brushes and started getting up on tables and jumping up and down. She was SERIOUSLY OUT OF CONTROL. I turned to the special ed teacher [she said that we should just let the girl do her thing because the more attention we gave her the worse she got - which is true - although, I worried for her safety] and whispered, "She's pretty much writing her ticket out of this classroom right now, isn't she?" The special ed teacher looked at me and said, "Oh, she wrote her ticket a LONG time ago..." Right about then the principal showed up, saw what the girl had done, picked her up, and took her out of the classroom - all the while, the girl was kicking and fighting him. [Oh, and Miles happened to come in the room around this time - he looked around with a horrified expression, grabbed some papers and another kid to test, spoke with the principal for a couple of seconds, and left.] The principal eventually brought her back to the room, and with a STERN voice told her to clean up some of the scribbles [I had already cleaned up most of the marker scribbles because kids needed to work at their tables] - and, after that, until lunch, she sat at her table and did her work.

Cut to: after lunch. As the kids were filing back into the room, the kindergarten teacher next door grabbed me and said, "Will you take this girl from my class to the office/nurse?" I looked over and there was a little girl with BLOOD POURING OUT OF HER NOSE and spilling all down the front of her white shirt. Are you kidding me? After the morning I had, now I've got to take this little girl that I've never seen before, and who is bleeding HEAVILY, down to the office? Who's testing me, and why? When I got back from the office, the kids were all seated on the rug, and the girl with autism was crawling around where she shouldn't, as usual. Eventually, she made her way behind a pocket-chart stand [near the circle of kids]. It looked like she was going to topple it over so I grabbed her and took her to the play area of the room. I sat her on my lap and asked her calmly if she wanted to play with the kitchen stuff or clothing that was there. She shook her head and tried to wrestle away from me so I said to her, "I feel sad. I would really like it if you could sit quietly on the rug with us, but you aren't being safe. Can you be safe and come over and sit with us?" She fell to the ground and then got up, ran back to the pocket-chart stand, and then proceeded to push it over onto a group of kids. I marched over, picked her up, and carried her to the office, and as we approached the office she started shaking her head, like she didn't want to go there. Tough crap, kid. To cut this story short, she was brought back to room and was LESS disruptive for the last half hour of the day. Oh, but right before we were about to go home, the class was seated on the rug listening to the sub read from Winnie the Pooh [I wanted to read it to them!]. I was seated with them, off to the side, and THE girl pulled the "Sharing Table" sign off of the sharing table, crawled over to me, stuck it to the front of my shirt, and then INSTANTLY passed out next to me. I looked over and she was fast asleep - well, she had a pretty exhausting day, eh?

So, all in all, not the best day. As far as my teaching went, well, it wasn't anything to write home about. The morning [before all hell broke loose] was fine, but I was SO rattled by lunchtime that the stuff that I did with the kids after lunch was only done with half of me there. It was the kids' first time with a sub, so they were ALL a bit wild. Miles said that this was typical and unavoidable - he said that I'll learn, when I have my own classroom, "to not think about what's going on when you are gone for the day because there is nothing you can do about it". After school we walked down the street and he bought me an ice cream cone.

I got the new Bowie CD today. He really is the coolest human being to ever walk the Earth.