Today I was a P.E. teacher, at least eventually I was.  As it turned out, today was also a special testing day with a special testing schedule.  My first task as a P.E. teacher was to administer a two hour long practice reading and writing exam for the new Common Core standards.  The students would spent two hours on this test tomorrow as well.  According to the rather vaguely worded instructions, I was to read something to the students as they read along, except it didn’t state what that actually was.  After a phone call to the office, it was confirmed that I was to read all 10 pages of this packet!  Other teachers were calling to ask the same question, but they kept calling my phone because I was using the English teacher’s classroom for this test – He was in charge of this test, and he had a first period prep, so he was in the office coordinating this thing.  I wish the other teachers had known that!  Anyway, it took me about 45 minutes to read this, coughing much of the time because I had allergy issues and because my throat was dry from reading out loud so much.  I was also trying not to be dyslexic, which is increasingly difficult as I read.  It didn’t help that there were several impossible-to-pronounce people names and a few vocabulary words I have never seen before (other teachers at lunch made the same comment).  There was no direction about what to do after I had read all the content, so I put them to work re-reading it and highlighting as they went in preparation for tomorrow’s essay.  I discovered later that this was the correct thing to do.  While being bored, I looked through all the pamphlets that I hadn’t distributed; on the very bottom were the instructions for the test that the teacher was supposed to read to the class!  What a stupid place to put this!  I had to read this to the students.  It had all kinds of background that would have been helpful BEFORE we read everything.  It also stated that the last hour today was for brainstorming, mapping, pulling supporting quotes and creating an outline, all the things I had told them to do, since these are the things I would be doing if I were taking this test.   Tomorrow, they’ll have two hours to create a rough draft and a final draft of their essay.

After that initial two hours, plus a break, it was time for first period.  With a two hour chunk of time gone, each class period would now be 40 minutes long.  This worked out great for me because the lesson plan called for girls, then boys to run a one mile run today.  The P.E. teacher had arranged it this way for a normal 50 minute class period.  I would simply “dawdle” to get to the track and then have the boys and girls all run at the same time.  It sort of worked; though counting laps was a lot harder with 40 people running by instead of 20 at a time.  I had the kids then tell me their final time after everyone was done, which took about 10 minutes.  If I took my time in doing all this, we’d be back in the locker room at the perfect time.  Alas, I was too efficient for three of my classes and they had to hang around for about 10 minutes… and many of them didn’t, they just left to go get water, which seemed reasonable except that the other P.E. classes would see my kids going to the locker room and assume that it was time for them to go, so they’d go as well.  The normal P.E. teachers were able to stop their groups, but there was another sub who wasn’t able to, and she got mad at me for releasing my kids early.

By the end of the day, I was sun-burnt (even with sunblock!) and tired.