Thursday, September 13, 2007

One Small Thing

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" I saved the most comfortable chair for you. Hope you like it!

Since last week I've been working (hard) as a substitute teacher in a vo-tech. I have two sections of "shop" lasting three class periods each (120 minutes). That's freshmen. And it ain't agriculture, which is my particular specialty, goat judging being my area of concentration.

My other class is a one-period senior elective called Workplace Readiness.

Seniors tend to be ready with pungent sneers when you try to teach them. Doesn't matter where they go to school.

One such young man in my Workplace Readiness class has expressed his disdain in this way since the opening of school.

Today I led the class on filling out the college "common application" online. If you're a geezer like me, you've never heard of such a thing. But what it is, it's a time-saving general application with all your pertinent information that you can submit online to any college that will take it. And lots of colleges take it.

What's great about this app is that you don't have to add the tricky stuff like your social security number or your credit card data until you're ready to apply somewhere.

But you do need an email address.

Today I helped a high school senior to get an email address. His home computer doesn't have Internet. It was great to see how pleased he was to have a Yahoo email account of his own. All of a sudden he was like a gentle little kid. (Not the goat kind, the human kind.)

It will be interesting to see if he sneers at me tomorrow. I'll let you know.

PS - If any of you reading this are teachers, how the heck do you do it? By the end of the day I'm toast.

3 comments:

Davoh said...

Once upon a while ago i ended up as a "volunteer" (long story) Math/Literacy tutor at a TAFE (Adult Education) college. Whoo hoo. Could cope with the Lit. bit .. but Math?

From my point of view 1+1= possible problematical progeny, 2+2= a dinner party.

Was initially amazed and astounded that there were 20-30 Adults (young and old) in the class who were illiterate, could not read nor write at all, but eventually enjoyed self (even though i was only about 30seconds ahead of the student with the answer to the Math questions). Must have been good at it as they kept giving me the "difficult" students .. until they gave me one with severe Aspergers (including "self harm"). That one freaked me out a bit.

Anne Johnson said...

Good to hear from you, Davo!

Athana said...

anne, I did teaching for three years, about 20 years ago. I still haven't recovered. Bless you, what would the world do without us?