Snow Days, Snow Daze

Well, this is my third week of student teaching, and I still haven't gone to school for a full week due to snow. In fact, the number of snow days we've had almost equals the number of days I've actually gone to my first placement school. It's a little frustrating because I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of good experience, and it keeps pushing the project the kids are working on farther and farther behind, but today I'm kind of glad for it.

The kids have been working on PPT presentations and building hot air balloons since I began. Well, on Monday my cooperating teacher got VERY sick and had to leave early. She was out yesterday, which left me teaching the class with a sub (I'll explain more about that in a minute). Almost ALL of the kids finished their presentations yesterday, leaving me with nothing to do with them for today.

Actually, most of the kids finished their presentations early in the class period. My cooperating teacher had only left instructions for us to work on the PPTs. Luckily, I knew many of them would be finished, so I took the liberty of copying a few word ladder games and a few easy sudoku puzzles for them to work on afterwards. I'm glad today was a snow day, though, because I wasn't looking forward to having nothing to do with them today if my cooperating teacher didn't give me some ideas. I couldn't start anything new with them because the classes are still combined with the math classes.

So, my experience with the sub...I've heard many teachers grumble that they wished the student teachers could be the "sub" if they were ever absent. "It doesn't seem fair that we pay a sub to sit there while you do all the work," they say. This was true in my case. My sub was a nice girl, but she didn't help me at all.  Not that I'm complaining - I actually liked getting to see how the kids worked for me without my cooperating teacher there. But, it made me inclined to agree with those teachers who complain. Student teachers should be compensated for their time when their cooperating teacher is absent since they are the ones doing the actual work. That's not the case, though, and some lady got paid $80 to sit and play sudoku all day. Oh well...that's the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose.