Are You Smarter than a Second Grader?

MY VERY FIRST DAY SUBSTITUTING 2ND GRADERS

Today started off with a bang. Since I'm an officially certified licensed substitute teacher (hmmm, do you smell sarcasm?) I was expecting to hear the phone ring at 5am. That call I was expecting never came. So I fell back asleep and woke up (thanks to Brett) to the phone ringing at 8:45am. It was my first assignment and I was going to sub-teach 2nd graders! The only problem was that I needed to be there by 9:30am and that's a little tricky because I can take fooooreeeverrrr to get ready (for some odd reason). But I made it and the teacher was apparently in a rush because of an emergency at home. She quickly explained what lessons I needed to go over and did I mention she did it very quickly? Man, I was in for it.

It started off smoothly because the kids were at recess (like the first of twenty it seemed like). After recess, I had only 9 students for the first 30 mins and it went by smoothly. When that was over, I got a taste of what it was REALLY like to be a teacher for a day. The students were awesome-it was I who was not so awesome! Let me pause for a sec and ask you if you've ever watched the show, ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A FIFTH GRADER? If you haven't, I suggest you take the online quiz and test yourself (just so you know, i don't think anyone has won yet!). I think for me it should be: ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A SECOND GRADER. The answer: N-O. Back to my story. It was "grammar time" and I had to explain what a PRONOUN was. I thought I would be cool and ask the students what a pronoun was to see if they knew. So this kid, Matt, raises his hand and says "blah, blah, blah, it's something that can take the place of a noun". And my response: "Yeah, I'm not so sure that's it". Then it seemed like total silence took over. So I looked at the text book and he was 100% right on the money. They must have thought-- man is she really our substitute? And that wasn't the end to my humiliation. There was another kid, Mikey, who was very outspoken. Right after I corrected myself, I tried to do an example of what a pronoun was BUT, this time I was gonna play it safe and use an example right off their worksheet. ERRRR! MODED! I did the example backwards and Mikey pointed out what I did wrong. But stupid me didn't even catch on and I repeated myself because I thought I was right. Then I looked closely at the example on the worksheet and I was "WRONG AGAIN" (as Rafiki would say). I felt like they should've taught themselves! Wait! I'm a COLLEGE GRAD. Boy, does that look pointless now...haha.

If any of you ever want a week of laughs, go and substitute the 2nd grade. I must say, though, that I had way more fun than I anticipated. Out of all the things I expected substituting to be, I never thought it was going to be FUN!