Subbing- Feb 4th- Science

Today I subbed for a science teacher that I had observed previously while subbing for a 1-on-1 para.

I am noticing that the students are well behaved the first hour, probably because they are too tired to care to misbehave, and then as the day wears on they act out more and more.

The students were working on a “lab” where they had to identify the different stages of mitosis in a selection of cells, then find out how long the cells spend in each stage by calculating how many cells are in each stage. To do this they had to have 6 different colored markers. The first class worked on their project fine, they had some questions and I answered them to the best of my ability. The second class was not so well behaved they talked a lot. The coloring part of what they were doing didn’t take a lot of thought so the talking was fine for the most part, but it got out of hand a couple of times.

I was going to chalk this up to the fact that they had had three snowdays and it was Friday, but the classroom para told me not to worry, that they regular teacher couldn’t get them to behave, and that this was their normal behavior. This made me feel better, but it reminded me of my early days with my 7^th hour. I would have been embarrassed if I had had a sub and my students had acted out, but I would have been more embarrassed if the para had said this was how they behaved normally. I understand It can take some time to get a class under control, but now I understand how important it is to get them under control.

After this class the teacher next door came in and told me that the next class was really bad. She pointed out some students that misbehaved on a regular basis and told me that I could send students to her class if need be.  This was very helpful, but I don’t know that it changed anything. There were students who were throwing markers when my back was turned helping another student. I told the class that this was not acceptable behavior and that if markers were thrown again I would take them away. As soon as I turned by back three markers were hurled in my direction. I said fine, and went to collect the markers. I told them that we would have to find a way that they could earn the markers back. While I was collecting the markers, I noticed that many of the students weren’t even to the coloring section yet, so I told them that they could get one marker at a time once they showed me that they had finished the first section. This worked much better. This was probably the worst behaved class I have subbed for in my, admittedly short, subbing career.