At the beginning of school year, I noticed that Rye’s math class is scheduled from 12 to 12:40.
Huh, I thought. I’m leaving home at 12:45 to pick Knox up from preschool each school day. If Rye’s math teacher ever needed a substitute, I could do that without being very inconvenienced. Also, I will already be following along with second grade math as Rye’s personal tutor on our homeschool days.
Math is one of just two classes that the full-time second grade teacher doesn’t teach, probably because that’s when she can get her lunch break, I assumed. Mrs. P, the second grade math teacher, is another parent like me who teaches part time at the school. She had taken over the reins of coordinating the school’s math program this year, and whether by design or default, took on the second grade math students as well.
I know I feel super stressed about the times when I may need a substitute for the ninth grade English class that I teach at their school. One normally asks friends first for favors, and I’ve gotten to know the other English teachers better than most of the others. Unfortunately, they all teach at the same time as I do, ruling them out as potential subs.
On the flip side, I also get stressed when I see an email request for someone who needs a last-minute substitute teacher. I’m a scheduler, and while I may not have plans or commitments to someone else during my non-teaching times, I usually do have a specific plan for my time. When I see another teacher in need of a substitute, I feel like I should want to help more than I do, and then I either feel guilted into saying yes or guilty for saying no.
I would much prefer to operate with a sort of planned back-up system, and have someone who has been established as my back up who I can ask first when I need a substitute, and in return, I'd like to be someone else’s set back-up teacher. Feeling a little nudge from God, I decided to offer my noon hour availability to Mrs. P.
As soon as I reached out to Mrs. P during the second week of school, she emailed right back: “That would be wonderful, are you available Sept. 28?” I was, and so I happily agreed to do it. The day went well and I got to put faces with names from Rye’s stories about his classmates.
Fast-forward to the end of Christmas break, when Mrs. P reached out to me again. She was out of state and had been for over a week, caring for her parents through some health concerns. Could I teach second grade math for Jan. 4 and 6? Yes! I responded, glad that I could help her out. It would have been nice to have those first two mornings to myself after the kids’ month off at home for a mental and emotional recharge, but if the shoe were on the other foot, I would hate to have my attention to my loved ones be distracted by worrying about a second grade math class.
I looked at Rye’s math textbook and saw that they were starting a new unit on measurements, starting with grams and kilograms. Perfect, I thought. I can handle that, and it should be a nice break for the kids from the three digit subtraction with borrowing that they had been working on before the holiday break. I didn’t have the teacher’s manual, but I figured I could work off of Rye’s textbook.
That Monday morning, I was feeling pretty anxious. I was nervous about teaching my own English class, so facing a room of 13 hyperactive second graders after their recess, after a month off, was really intimidating. To counteract my nerves, I planned ahead, determined to make the lesson fun. That morning I scoured the house for fun things to measure that would be less than 100 grams. I grabbed a little plastic army man and tested it — 2 grams. Nice. I grabbed a Nerf mega dart — 3 grams. A miniature cone that came with an RC vehicle — 8 grams. A plastic shark that belongs to Knox — 68 grams. A plastic elephant of denser plastic — 80 grams. And for the piece de resistance: a metal Deere mini-digger that Rye had received from my parents for Christmas. When he opened it he gave a spirited, “This is my favorite toy, how did you know?” My parents had no idea, but it was already his favorite because he had one just like it. During the summer he had saved his allowance for it and purchased it on Amazon. It’s built to scale of a true Deere mini-digger, meant for a collector more than a child, but Rye is pretty careful with his things, and since I would only be letting one child at a time put the toys on the scale, I knew it would be safe. And honestly, he had two, so worst-case scenario, he would have a back-up!
As I had expected, the class was immediately excited about the idea of weighing toys. I’d say they were hanging on the edges of their seats, but they weren’t really in their seats at all. Three-quarters of them had run up to the front of the room to see the scale’s display screen for themselves rather than waiting and listening for the student I had chosen to be the “verifier” to tell them what each toy weighed. The cone was the third object to come out of the bag, and immediately, Rye got a sort of nervous laughter edginess to him. “That’s my cone,” I heard him telling someone, but I believe it was the other parent helper in the class, not one of his peers. Within a few seconds he was up at the front of the room with most of the other students, but while they still gave me some distance, my son went straight to my plastic bag of toys to root through it and see what other toys of his I might have brought. He seized upon the mini-digger, held it up in my face, and he probably said something, but I was too distracted by the other students. I was trying to get them to back away from my little digital kitchen scale and stop weighing everything in sight, stacking things on top of each other on the scale, and testing how high they could get the numbers to go by pushing down on the scale with their little fists. I tried explaining to them that they were no longer measuring “mass,” a new word for the day, but “force,” but they didn’t care. It was just a scramble to see how high that little gram counter could climb.
I looked up again and saw my son talking to the other mom, showing her the digger, again, with that nervous smile on his face. The rest of the class and I were up to the toy elephant, the one that should have been before the grand finale of the mini-digger, but I saw the possessive obsession in Rye’s eyes and knew I wasn’t going to get that digger back. Then suddenly Rye was back in my face again, though no longer smiling. He was shaking with rage, as if he was addressing a bully who has picked on him for years and he had finally reached his tipping point and was about to let loose on his tormenter. “This is the worst math class ever,” he said in whispers of rage, clinging to my arm. I, not wanting to lose control of the whole class, chose not to engage. After all, we were done with the measuring portion of the class and now it was time to start talking about comparisons of weights and how you could find out the difference between the weight of two objects if you only knew their total and the weight of one of them. But Rye wouldn’t move on, and so his full time teacher came over and attempted to guide him back to his seat. At this point Rye shook her off and stepped toward me again. I wondered, what was he going to do, hit me?
“Oh no, we’re not having this,” the teacher said as she grabbed him by both shoulders and led him out of the room. And I just kept moving on with the teaching. “OK class, now we’re on page 119.”
In between math problems, I kept looking to the door, expecting him to walk back in, either with his teacher or without, as she finally got to her lunch break. But the next 30 minutes went by and he didn’t return. “Where’s Rye?” several of the other boys asked me. I deflected with “he just needed some time to get settled down.” “If he went to the principal’s office, why isn’t he back yet?” I wondered the same myself.
By the end of that half hour, I had run out of material and was grateful to see the second grade teacher come back, though Rye wasn’t with her. “He’s not coming back into this room until you’re gone,” she said. I froze in place and another shot of adrenaline went down my spine. I realized he was still mad and not over his tantrum. Unbelievable, I thought. And how unfair — he had missed the entire lesson, and now I would be punished by having to teach it to him all over again at home. The teacher told me, “I told him people are more important than things,” and I smiled, because this is the same exact language we use at home when Rye gets mad at Knox for using, and sometimes maybe breaking, their toys. I was glad she had noticed the basis of his meltdown from her objective position in the same way that I see his possessive, hoarder-like tendencies.
I packed up my scale and the toys Rye hadn’t confiscated from me, grabbed my puffy coat and headed for the door. Rye slipped in through the back door of the classroom. He avoided eye contact, but not in a penitent way. His was more of a “I will not acknowledge your existence” kind of way, often displayed by high schoolers. My heart was pounding again. I got out of there and wanted to call somebody, anybody, to plead my side of the case and get those “oh my word” responses I felt I deserved. But I had to take Knox home in 20 minutes, and I had to make photocopies of my English class handouts before I left, so I stayed in the copy room and waited my turn with the copier, making small talk about the holidays with the other teachers and volunteers who passed through.
At the end of the day, I walked to the elementary school exit and waited for Rye. He struggled to carry his heavy backpack while trying to keep a paper plate with the Rice Krispy treat castle they had built in class level. I took the plate from him and said, “I think there’s something we need to talk about.” And he quickly spit out, “I’m sorry I overreacted but you shouldn’t have taken my toys without asking.” All in one sentence, no comma, no pause, and no remorse at all. I took a deep breath and held my tongue. I wasn’t expecting this reaction, and I didn’t know how to react. Clearly he was not far enough away from the moment to be able to look at objectively. Or maybe seven year olds aren’t capable of that yet. I decided to bide my time and get Josh’s opinion on it.
“I think we need to take the digger away, give it to GoodWill or something,” Josh said after arriving at home, the kids already in bed, and finally getting to hear my full version of the story. Rye was already in a deep sleep, and it would have been easy to sneak into his room and grab the two mini diggers that I had noticed were sitting on the top of his bookshelf headboard at bedtime. The vengeful side of me wanted to do it, but I knew that Rye would see it for what it was, being spiteful — a characteristic I struggled with and see genetically wired in our children, which we are working hard to diffuse and train out of them. I considered taking the trucks and having him lose them for a week, but I realized he was also in shock, going back to his first day of school after such a long break. It had been a really long day, and it would have been exhausting for him even if his mom hadn’t been his math teacher and “taken his toys without asking.” The kid wakes up between 4 and 5 a.m. each day. By noon when math starts, he’s practically put in a full day of holding his emotions in check. In the end I decided Josh needed to talk to him about it, which he did via video message from work the next morning, and then Rye did officially apologize, with sentiment, and gave me a hug.
As for my long-term success as a substitute math teacher, I ended up teaching Rye’s class five times in those three weeks, and while we never had another meltdown, there was at least one other occasion where I had to say, “I'm your teacher right now, not your mom.”
And when I was Sunday school teacher last week and needed to bring in some props for the lesson, you can be sure I stuck to just Knox’s stuff.
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| The truck in question, posing on the rug Rye still insists is his, even though we owned it before he was born and moved it to the playroom 2 years ago. |
