Overheard in class today

Teenagers are so funny. This girl came into class today, pissed off, and announced, to no one in particular:

I may be eccentric, but I am not contrived! I put effort into my appearance because I take myself seriously. Why can't the world?

True story.

Seriously.

Love it.

word for word, a diatribe against subs who don't let girls wear hats

So I'm teaching a freshman class today and they're all supposed to be reading quietly, so that's what they're doing. Kinda boring. But this girl launched into a diatribe when she walked into the classroom and saw me and I thought I'd reprint her diatribe here, 'cuz it made me laugh (and she seriously would not stop talking and just went on and on, and I kinda understood why, maybe, this other substitute teacher might have clashed with her).

GIRL: (upon seeing me sitting at the lecturn at the front of class) "Oh my god. Thank you. Yes, you're not Mr. Buca. Yes, oh my god, this is so awesome. I totally thought you were going to be Mr. Buco. Oh my god, I heard we had a substitute today and I was like, "it's so going to be Mr. Buco because Mr. Buco hates me and it's so going to be Mr. Buco" and I am so happy that you're not Mr. Buco. Oh my god, this is so great. You don't even know. He wouldn't let me wear a hat. How stupid is that? Because when guys wear hats it's disrespectful, but when girl's wear hats it's a fashion accessory. Why don't teachers ever understand that?"

She actually went on longer than that, but I was wondering if her hat comment is the consensus in the real world:

Hats on guys = disrespect, while hats on girls = fashion.

True? False? Depending on the circumstances?

Just call me "the cool sub"

Okay, so my goal in life was to become known as "the cool sub," (to right the karmic imbalance of never being very cool when I was an actual high school student) (not that I really wanted to be cool) (I mean, I liked being a dork) (but still), and I've officially achieved status as "the cool sub," so now I need a new life's goal.

This is a conversation I just had with a student in my sixth period class:

STUDENT: Yes! It's you.

ME: What's me?

STUDENT: You're the cool sub.

ME: (soooo excited, but trying not to act too excited) I am?

STUDENT: Yeah, I was talking to my friend in fifth period who had you for a sub in first period and I asked him who our sub was and he said "the cool sub" and I KNEW he was talking about you.

ME: Cool.

STUDENT: Yeah!

ME: So...what makes me cool?

STUDENT: You just are.

--end scene--

So there you have it, folks. I just *am* a cool sub. Feels nice. (Especially after having been called "Jeff Goldblum" by a record FIVE different students today.) (No one ever says I look like anyone unless I'm at school, is that a teenage thing to do? To say, "has anyone ever told you you look like x" to someone?)

(warhol photo idea stolen from soleclaw)

UPDATE: As soon as I posted this--literally the second I hit the "publish post" button--I overheard the abovementioned student say to another student "isn't he a cool sub," to which the other student replied, "eh, he's just okay," and I was taught a lesson in humility: don't go publishing blog posts about how cool your students think you are because (1) that's sooo not cool, and (2) they can take away as easy as they giveth.

It's, like, so going to happen to her, though

The kids are reading Macbeth and they're working on an assignment where they're supposed to write "what they know about Shakespeare and his background." I just overheard the following conversation, verbatim:

TEENAGE GIRL: What do we know about Shakespeare?

TEENAGE BOY: He was married and he had three kids and then his wife found out he was gay.

TEENAGE GIRL: Really?

TEENAGE BOY: Yeah.

TEENAGE GIRL: That's, like, my worst nightmare. Being in love with a guy and then finding out he's gay.

Detention Watch update

So, earlier today I posted that I wasn't looking forward to fourth period because of the attitude I knew I was going to receive from the students I gave detention to on Friday. (I just reread that sentence and it seems really convoluted, but I'm not going to change it to make it less convoluted.) (I'm not lazy.) (It's just really fucking cold in this classroom.) (Anyway.) Just wanted to check back in to my blog peeps with a report. The girl I gave detention to TOTALLY gave me the cold shoulder when she walked into the classroom and saw that I was going to be her substitute today. She soooo hates me. Like, she walked into the room and she saw me and then she literally rolled her eyes. Scoffed. Annoyed. The guy I gave detention to, on the other hand, hasn't given me any 'tude at all. He looked at me, said "hey Jeff Goldblum," and then sat at his desk, happy. No care in the fucking world. I'm assuming that the girl hasn't spent very much time in detention and that the guy has, so detention felt like the end of the world to her and it was just business as usual for him. That's my interpretation, at least.

I identify more with the girl's attitude, which is why it frustrates me that she's giving me the cold shoulder, because I feel her pain. (A teacher can never get away with saying that they feel a students pain, though, because no student is ever going to believe that anyone who ever experienced detention would ever give it away.) I only ever had real detention once. It was in seventh grade. I remember the moment vividly because I felt like the detention had been issued to me unjustly and there's a part of me, somewhere, some recess of my brain, that is still thirteen and still incensed. We were supposed to be reading quietly and the girl who was sitting next to me asked me what I was reading and then I told her and then the teacher snapped at us, "no talking! That's detention!" And I was like, "what the fuck?" Only I didn't say "what the fuck" because I was a really good student, which was why getting detention for saying the name of my book to someone seemed like a great injustice to me at the time. Of course, I was thirteen, so a lot of things seemed like great injustices, but still.

I remember we had detention in the library and it didn't really feel like The Breakfast Club, but I really wanted it to, so I kinda willed my detention experience to be as Breakfast Clubby as possible. (Like, I sat there wishing that life was cooler than it really was.) Still, no one threatened me with any horns, no one escaped into the gymnasium, and no one hid in between a girl's legs and looked at their panties, so it wasn't quite what I was hoping detention would be.

Not that I wanted to hide between a girl's legs and look at her panties or anything, I'm just saying I wanted a Breakfast Club experience.

Again with the freaking Jeff Goldblum

I don't know if I've mentioned this on the blog yet, but I was hired as a permanent substitute (oxymoron much?) by this one high school, and I only sub in the English Department, so every day I'm in a different English class, which means that I'm getting to know all of the teachers here and the students all know me too and I'm even beginning to learn a lot of the kids names--even though there are, like, a million students here. However, there's only one me here, so pretty much all (or most) (or some) of the students definitely (probably) know my name by now. The thing is, they don't call me by my name. What do they call me? They call me "Jeff Goldblum."

Yeah. I'm fucking serious. They call me Jeff freaking Goldblum. As in, "Jeff Goldblum's our sub today!" Or, simply, "Mr. Goldblum!" Or "Hey Jeff Goldblum, how are the dinosaurs?"

See, they were all starting to realize how annoyed I would get every day when they'd say (every day): "Do you know who you look like?" and I'd roll my eyes and grumble "yes," and then they'd say it ("Jeff Goldblum") in case I didn't really know who I looked like (to them, at least), and so they decided to be teenagers and just call me "Jeff Goldblum" every time they saw me, and so then I decided not to give them the annoyed reaction they were looking for and to embrace the name, figuring that if they didn't get a reaction they'd get tired of calling me "Jeff Goldblum" and the name would die a natural death. But that hasn't happened yet. So now I'm stuck with the name.

And it's eating me alive.

So, if you see me in the halls and you call me "Jeff Goldblum," yes I'll respond, and no I won't roll my eyes, but you're killing me inside. Just, fyi.

Scarlet

Yesterday, I was talking to some students about The Scarlet Letter--we were talking about Point of View, and the difference between third person and first person--and I actually asked the students: "How do you think the book would have been different if Nathaniel Hawthorne had written it in the first person? From Scarlet's point of view?"

And then there was a pause and these students looked at me like I was crazy and then I suddenly heard what I had said.

"Uh, wait, I meant...uh, Hester. How would the book have been different if it had been written from Hester's point of view? Hester Prynne."

But by then I had lost them. By then I was the dumb substitute teacher who thought the heroine of The Scarlet Letter was actually named Scarlet.

(I was about to make a joke about how "that's when my cheeks went red, or, uh, scarlet," but the truth is I wasn't really embarrassed--I thought it was funny too.)

In my defense, it's been fifteen years since I've read The Scarlet Letter and I was teaching the book cold. When I started making fun of the fact that I thought her name was Scarlet, I won the kids over again--so in the end it was all good.

New Thing #169: I gave a kid detention

New Thing #169: On Friday, I gave my first detention ever. My least favorite thing about being a substitute teacher is the disciplinarian aspect of it, but it has to be done. If you're going to come into my class and start calling people asshole and calling people gay and hitting kids--and that's what this kid was doing on Friday, repeatedly--then you're going to get detention.

So now, today, Monday, I'm at the same school I was at on Friday, but I'm in a different classroom. It's second period. This is junior high school--seventh grade. In other words, hell. (Oh, and it's my alma mater, too, which is strange and surreal. I swear to god this school is The School That Time Forgot.) (Every single inch of the school looks exactly like how I remember it, nothing has freaking changed.) (On Friday, we had an assembly in the gymnasium and so many memories flooded through my head; most vivid was my election speech for 8th Grade Class President.) (I feel like I've blogged about that fateful day before, but if you weren't reading the blog back then, here are the cliffnotes: it was supposed to be the best day of my life; instead it was anything but. I was naive and fresh and excited and I truly believed that I could make a difference. My campaign slogan, slathered on posters all over the school, was "Erik Patterson's mom wants you to Pat Her Son with your vote." [I'm not making that up.] [Seriously.] [That's how big a dork I was.] [I honestly thought that was a brilliant campaign slogan.] ["Erik Patterson's mom wants you to Pat Her Son with your vote."] [Actually, now I think it IS a brilliant campaign slogan, but in seventh grade it ended up being totally. Completely. Mortifying.] I had this great speech prepared, mostly about how I wanted to get the blacktop repaved and how I was going to "bring back the read-a-thon." [I remember that very specifically. One of the boys in P.E. asked me what my campaign promises were, and when I told him I was going to bring back the read-a-thon, he was like, "who wants to read?" And in my head I was like "I do," but I knew enough to just keep my mouth shut. We were, after all, in P.E., and I didn't want to get pantsed.] Anyway, flash forward to speech day. We're in the gymnasium. They started with the secretary speeches, then the treasurer speeches, then the vice president speeches, [there was this girl Kirra Steel, who I would later go to my junior prom with, who was running for vice president--during her speech, she asked everyone in the gymnasium to stand up and look to the left and then after everyone did exactly as she asked them to, she said "look at that, we're already working well together," and I remember that all of the other candidates were like "wow, Kirra really brought her A-game, that was the speech they're going to be talking about tomorrow, I wish I'd thought of that"], and then, finally, it was time for the President speeches. There were three of us running for President, and alphabetically I was the third in line, which meant I was going to be the last person to give a speech. This kid Graham went first, his speech went well. Then Katie Hawkins gave her speech, which was even better. And then it was my turn to step up to the podium. I was very nervous. I had my speech written out on flash cards and I didn't look up at the crowd until I was on my third flash card. And that's when the sounds of laughter started to seep into my consciousness. I had been so concentrated on what I was saying that I hadn't heard them. But as soon as I looked up, it was like God had turned the volume in the gymnasium up, way up, and I suddenly realized that everyone was laughing at me and then I heard someone yelling--like, SCREAMING at me--"We can't hear you!!!" And then I felt a hand on my shoulder and one of the teachers told me that the speaker system had broke and that I'd have to yell the rest of my speech. So I stepped in front of the podium and started yelling as loud as I could about read-a-thons. But I had lost the crowd, no one was listening, it was awful. The next day, one of my friends who was alread on the ASB told me that I'd only received two votes, and I knew that one of them had been mine. Katie Hawkins won--and she deserved it, she was totally presidential.) Anyway, sorry, but I was in the gymnasium on Friday and that whole experience came alive for me again, and it's kinda fucked up that junior high school even exists, like, in reality, you know? Like, maybe as a concept it's a good idea, but in reality we should really spare all of our kids the horrors. The horrors.

But moving on, back to today: the kids are supposed to be reading silently and taking notes on one of the chapters in their textbook. And the kid I gave detention to on Friday? Yeah, he's in my class again. When he walked into the classroom, I heard him say "dammit" and then he ran out into the hall. And then he came back into the room a minute later and he was like, "hello, Mr. Patterson, thanks for giving me detention." And I wish that I hadn't needed to give him detention, but he was out of control and I tried, I tried, but finally detention was the only thing that would get him to settle down and do his work. Now he's sitting in his desk looking at me like I'm the enemy and talking about me under his breath--he doesn't think I can hear him, but I can SO hear him--or maybe he knows I can hear him and that's why he's talking about me. Either way, I wish that he was reading his textbook right now instead of calling me names. But I just don't know how to get through to him the fact that doing your work is ultimately going to be so much more satisfying than being a bully. How do you get that message through to a thirteen-year-old kid?

Tales of a Substitute Nothing

The following is a verbatim transcription of a conversation that took place yesterday between me and some Freshman dude named James.

James walks into the class, looks at me.

JAMES: Are you our sub?

ME: Yep.

JAMES: (looking at the board) Your name’s Mr. Patterson?

ME: Yep.

JAMES: Did you know our real teacher’s name is Mr. Patterson?

ME: Yeah. I know. Freaky.

JAMES: Did anyone ever tell you that you look like—

ME: Don't say it—

JAMES: That actor, that guy—

ME: No, I don’t.

JAMES: The guy from Independance Day—

ME: Seriously. Don't say it—

JAMES: Jeff, uh—

ME: Dude. Stop.

JAMES: Bloomberg. Jeff Bloomberg.

ME: It’s Goldblum.

JAMES: Yeah, that’s it! You look like Jeff Goldblum.

And in my head I’m all “oh my freaking god” because I’ve been getting “you look like Jeff Goldblum” since 1993 and I’m so over it and I really wish Jeff Goldblum would do the decent thing and just, like, fade away into obscurity, or stop looking like me.

And then this girl Kylie is like:

KYLIE: Actually, I think you look like Vince Vaughnn.

And then, even though I think I look way more like Jeff Goldblum than like Vince Vaughnn, I turn to Kylie and I’m totally like:

ME: Thank you—Vince Vaughnn is way better than Jeff Goldblum.

KYLIE: I know.

And then this other girl, Danica, pipes in with:

DANICA: Actually, I think you look like my dentist, except my dentist has a bigger nose than you do.

ME: Um…

And then I put the kibosh on this conversation and shush everyone so I can take roll.

UPDATE: Hey, check out this pic I just found. It's me and me.

An actual conversation I had with a fifteen-year-old

Last week I was subbing for a high school Integrated Science (whatever that means) class, giving an exam. I told the students they could study for five minutes before taking the test, and most of the kids started cramming immediately, but I noticed this one girl, Hallie, who was just, like, staring at the wall.

Hallie had dark raccoon eyes (the thickest layer of eyeliner I've ever seen), bleached blonde hair, and lots of random jewelry. She reminded me of Madonna (fashion-wise) (circa Desperately Seeking Susan) crossed with Kim Kelly (attitude-wise) (from Freaks and Geeks).

I'm sure Hallie has been described as a "problem child" by her teachers for years. That's the thing I've discovered since I started subbing. There are all of these kids who, from what I can tell, started out with (for whatever reason) this attitude that's like "you're gonna give up on me, I know it, I dare you to" and then most of their teachers were probably way overworked and had way too many kids to deal with and they didn't have time to prove these kids wrong and to, like, believe in them, so their teachers proved them right and gave up on those kids and branded them "problems." It starts in kindergarten and then gets worse from there.

But I don’t want none of that. I feel like, if there's any small contribution I can make to these kids lives while I'm passing through as their substitute teacher, it's to care about these kids who so obviously don't care anymore.

So I sat with Hallie and asked her why she wasn't studying.

"Because I'm just gonna get an F anyway."

"Why would you say that?"

"Because I am."

"Well maybe you can learn something in the next five minutes and get a D at least."

“I doubt it. I don’t even have any notes to study from.”

When she handed in her exam thirty minutes later, she’d only answered half of the questions. (And it was a multiple choice test.) She’d spent most of test-time doodling on the back of the exam. (I took a picture of her doodles, and I will post it here when blogger decides it likes me again and lets me post more pictures.)

“Don’t you want to at least guess the rest of the answers?” I asked her.

“Not really.”

I couldn’t make her guess. So I tried to engage her. We started talking. And then we had the following conversation, which isn’t an example of me “making a difference” in this young woman’s life, it’s just a funny conversation that could only have been had with a teenager and I’m typing out as verbatim as I can remember it:

“Mr. Patterson, did you hear about the guy who died because he poured cement up his butt?”

“Uh, no.”

"Yeah, there were these two guys--they were, you know, like, lovers? Like, gay lovers? And one of them had this thing for cement so he asked his lover to pour cement in his butt and then he died because he couldn't, like, poop."

"Do you really think that happened?"

"It's a true story. It happened to this friend of a friend of mine."

“I don’t know.”

“What, you don’t believe me?”

"I just find the story highly illogical. Why wouldn't he go to the hospital?"

"Because he died."

"Okay, but--do you watch Survivor?"

"What's that?"

"You know, the television show."

"Is that where they're all in the jungle?"

"Yeah, and they're trying to survive. It's a reality show."

"Okay, yeah."

"Well there was this guy Bruce on the show. He got all blocked up and he didn't poop for two weeks and he had to leave the show to go to the hospital."

"So see--you could die from not pooping!"

"But he didn't die."

"But this guy died."

"What I'm trying to say is, you wouldn't die overnight from not being able to poop. You could live for a few weeks, you'd just get really sick. The reason I think your story is just an urban legend is--why wouldn't the guy go to the hospital? He would have gone to the hospital."

"He was embarrassed."

"Okay, fine, if you want to believe it--"

"It happened, Mr. Patterson."

El Snapo

When you were in high school, did you used to snap your fingers to drive your substitute teachers (or even your regular teachers) crazy? Because apparently that's what the kids are doing nowadays. One kid will snap his fingers and then you'll look in the direction of the snap and then another kid in another part of the room will snap their fingers and then you'll look over there and then another snap and another snap and another snap and by now your students are all giggling and then your head explodes.

Just another day in the salt mines, or whatever it is they say.

Balls. (oh, and New Things #82-84)

I didn’t have any friends in junior high school. I remember, at lunchtime, I used to eat my lunch with these kids who tolerated me (i.e. didn’t kick me away from the table) (probably because they were dorks like me) (but we weren’t friends, really) (because I didn’t have any friends in junior high school) and then after I finished eating my lunch I would walk in the quad from Point A to Point B as if I had someplace that I had to be, and then when I got to Point B I would walk back to Point A with this look on my face, like, “I guess that’s not where I was supposed to be, I need to go back to Point A.”

I’m sure no one bought my act. I’m sure kids knew me as that weird kid who spent the lunch period walking with a purpose. I’m just telling you this story to illustrate how sucky my junior high school experience was. It was really sucky.

And the no friends thing was just the tip of the iceberg. I think PE was probably the worst. There wasn’t anything really unique about my junior high school PE experience, just your run of the mill always-picked-last, always-taunted-because-I-sucked-at-every-sport, terrible, awful junior high school dork experience.

So when I was offered the assignment to sub for a PE class at a junior high school, I have to admit that my stomach balled up into a bunch of knots. I mean, fucking junior high school PE???? Are you kidding me? Who wants to go through that again, even as a teacher? I was working on a script with Jessica yesterday and I noticed a typo—there was this line of dialogue that was supposed to read something like “you’re going to hell for this” and instead it said “you’re going to the hell for this” and that made me laugh and made me think of there being, like, lots of hells, but only one hell that was truly “the” hell to watch out for, and if that were true I would say it’s gotta resemble junior high school PE.

FIRST PERIOD

When I get to my office, I find out that we’re going to be playing basketball today. (I was on a basketball team in fifth grade. My step-dad was the coach. I made two baskets the entire season. Both baskets I made were for the other team. I just kept forgetting that we switched sides after each quarter or at halftime or whenever they switch sides in basketball. I actually have one of these baskets on videotape. You see them throwing the ball to me and then I start dribbling it down the court. I am so excited because the hoop is totally open and no one is stopping me. Then you start to hear the people in the stands yell, “No! Erik! Wrong way!” But I’m in “the zone.” I’m feeling it, I’m gonna make this basket. I shoot, I score! And then I look to the rest of my team for some validation. And that’s when I hear someone say “that was the wrong basket.” And then I look out into the stands, towards the camera, and I shrug. Oh, well. It’s really a sad and pathetic and humiliated and wonderfully funny video. You should see it.) This kid named Daniel tells me that he’s my assistant. Daniel can’t be much more than three feet tall. Okay, maybe four feet tall (maybe) but he’s really super short, regardless. I don’t think Daniel is really the teacher’s assistant. I think he’s just trying to pull one over on me. While we’re doing warm-up stretches, Daniel doesn’t do any because, he tells me, the assistant doesn’t do the warm-up stretches. The other kids get mad and tell me that Daniel’s supposed to do the warm-up stretches. I understand why Daniel would want to get out of doing anything and everything in junior high school PE, so I let it slide. The rest of first period goes pretty smoothly. No one gives me trouble. Everyone plays basketball.

SECOND PERIOD

We do our warm-up exercises, the kids start playing basketball, and that’s when I meet Leonard. He’s late. He doesn’t suit out. He tells me he doesn’t want to play basketball. I tell him to sit on his number. He does. At some point—and I’m not exactly sure when this happened—there are SEVENTY kids in each PE class, mind you—Leonard gets off his number and starts playing in one of the basketball games. I see the ball hit him. It’s an accident. It hits him in the shoulder. Not hard, but it surprises him. He doesn’t see it coming. And he thinks that someone threw it AT him (which isn’t the case) rather than throwing it to him (which is the case). And that’s when Leonard starts to freak out. He attacks one of the other kids. (I’m not even sure if it’s the kid who threw the ball to him—it might have just been the first kid he saw.) They both go down to the ground. I run over to them. I try to split them up, but they’re rolling over each other, wrestling, pummeling. Kids start running over to us, chanting “fight! fight! fight!” I finally break Leonard and the other kid apart, Leonard is fuming, breathing through his nose, clenching his fists. His face is read, he can’t talk, he won’t calm down. HE IS FREAKING OUT.

I just keep telling him “it’s okay, it’s okay…calm down.”

The other kids are still standing around us, trying to taunt Leonard. I tell them to go back to their games. No one is listening. Leonard will not calm down. He will not talk to me. HE IS FREAKING OUT.

Finally, I get him to unclench his fists. He’s still breathing through his nose like a bull, but he’s relaxed slightly. The other kids realize there isn’t going to be another fight. They finally go back to their basketball games. One of the kids comes up to me and tells me that when Leonard gets like this, he usually goes to the office. The kid offers to take Leonard to the office. I let him, and they go.

One of the other PE teachers comes up to me.

TEACHER: “I can’t believe you broke up that fight.”

ME: “Yeah, it was intense.” TEACHER: “That was Leonard, wasn’t it?”

ME: “I guess so, yeah.” TEACHER: “I can’t believe he didn’t hit you.”

ME: “Um, yeah.”

TEACHER: “Didn’t they warn you in the sub plan?”
ME: “About what?”

TEACHER: “He has Asberger’s Syndrome.”

Which explains everything.

TEACHER: “Where did he go?”

ME: “Oh, one of the other students took him to the office.”

TEACHER: “You let one of the students take him to the office?”

ME: “Um, yeah.”

TEACHER: “Oh they are so at 7-11 by now.”

The teacher laughs and looks at me, like, novice.

THIRD PERIOD

In my sub plan, the teacher has warned me that “third period is not capable of playing basketball with a substitute teacher. Third period is barely capable of playing basketball with the regular teacher. Just have them run around the track for the entire period.”

After I take attendance, I tell the kids that we’re not playing basketball today.

“Then what are we doing, Mr. Substitute?”

“We’re running the track.”

“What the fuck?”

Seriously, that’s what one of the kids says.

“Um, yeah. So—let’s get to it.”

I tell them to go to the track. All seventy of the students get up from their numbers…

And then they scatter.

They just scatter. About ten kids walk towards the track, while the other kids walk everywhere. Like, everywhere. Some of them walk over to the bleachers, some of them walk over to the soccer field, some of them walk towards the parking lot, some of them walk towards the bathrooms, some of them walk over to the basketball courts. And I’m standing there, like, what the hell am I supposed to do now?

I go over to the kids on the bleachers.

“Come on, let’s go walk the track.”

“We’re not in your class.”

“Um, yeah you are.”

“No we’re not.”

“Then why were you in my class during roll?”

“We weren’t.”

(And here’s the thing: there are so many kids in this class and I only had them sitting on their numbers during roll for about a minute and I didn’t really get that good a look at their faces and I don’t recognize any of these kids, so I guess some of them could be telling the truth, but some of them are definitely in my class.) (I just don’t know which ones might be in my class and which ones might not be.) (Help.)

I tell the kids they don’t have to run, they don’t even have to jog. “Just walk. Please. Walk around the track and talk,” I plead. “Just walk.”

This girl, Brenda, is like, “why should we walk if, like, you don’t have to, you know?”

“You want me to walk?” I ask her.

“Yeah, Mr. Substitute.”

“Okay, I’ll make you a deal—I’ll walk the track with you if you agree to walk.”

As unlikely as it seems, they pretty much al take the deal. (All of them except for a couple of them.) I walk with Brenda. She spends the rest of the period telling me how uncool I am for making them walk.

FOURTH PERIOD

This is my conference period. No PE for an hour. Heaven.

LUNCH

I decide to eat lunch in the teachers’ lounge. It’s freaking weird to eat lunch in the teacher’s lounge because it’s filled with teachers. I still don’t consider myself an adult, I still feel like an interloper. But the teachers apparently think I look like one of them and no one kicks me out.

As soon as I sit down, I notice a woman entering the teachers’ lounge. I know her.

“Jill?”

She looks at me, like, how do you know my name? She doesn’t recognize me, which is to be expected. After all, we haven’t seen each other in fifteen years (since I was 13) and I look quite different after all of these years while she looks remarkably exactly the same.

“Do I know you?” she asks.

“I’m Erik Patterson. You played my mom in On Golden Pond.”

True story. This woman played my mom in this production of On Golden Pond at this tiny little theater fifteen years ago. (For people who know my poop in a cup story—Angela Kang, I know you know the poop in a cup story—the poop in a cup story happened during On Golden Pond.)

As soon as I tell her who I am, she instantly beams and remarks how old I am now and then she corrects, for anyone within earshot, “I played your step-mom. Not your biological mother.” (Because she obviously didn't want people to think she would ever have been old enough to have played my birth mother.) (Because I look much older for my age and she doesn't look like she's aged much at all in the last fifteen years and we really do look like we might be brother and sister rather than mother and son.)

Jill invites me to sit with her and we spend the lunch period gossiping about our students with three other teachers.

(Every single teacher at the table had a trouble student named Cody. Apparently Codys are bad seeds.)

FIFTH PERIOD

Ten of my seventy students show up. At first I think that the students have learned that there’s a sub and there’s been a mass ditching effort, but then I find out that this is my one period of 6th graders (all of my other classes have been 7th and 8th graders) and most of the 6th graders are on a field trip today. Save for these ten students, apparently.

They are the nicest kids in the world.

We pay hand-ball.

SIXTH PERIOD

I am exhausted by now. I’m not used to wearing shoes AND being on my feet (in said shoes) for such a long time. If I ever get on The Amazing Race, I’m going to have to do a lot of physical training. The kids will not stop kicking their basketballs. They keep kicking them over the fence, into this construction area.

One of the kids asks if he can climb over the fence and get the balls. I tell him it’s okay. I mean, he’s a kid and kids climb fences. That’s what kids do. Unfortunately, the Vice Principal chooses this moment to walk by my class.

“Don’t climb that fence young man!!!”

Whoops.

“You’re getting detention!!!” she yells.

I tell her that I gave the kid permission to climb the fence and get the balls.

“You did what?”

“Um, I gave the kid permission to climb the fence and get the balls.”

“He could get seriously hurt, or die. Are you crazy?”

Apparently, I am.

Class ends, I’m done with my day of PE. I kinda feel like I can do anything now. I mean, I survived hundreds of junior high school kids in PE. What could be fucking harder than that?

New Thing #82: I subbed for a junior high school PE class.
New Thing #83: I broke up a fight.
New Thing #84: I ate lunch in a teachers’ lounge!