A Breath of Fresh Air.

Who would have thought substitute teaching would be fun?

Maybe it's cause I'm older but stuff doesn't seem to stress me out as much. I've learned to identify what's most important to me and focus on that. You want to eat candy. Fine, although it's bad for your teeth, I don't personally have an issue with that. You want to listen to your ipod/cd player? Great, that means you're going to do your work quietly and leave the other kids alone. You don't care about physics and want to read a book about slugs in South America? Awesome, I was also bored with the silly worksheets when I was in middle school. In fact during the three years of middle school I read about 2,000 books. I basically considered school 6 hours of free reading time. Things that are not ok, dirty talk (which students are very knowledge about- I'm convinced that they know more than I do about that area), running around, screaming, touching other people (no matter where, arm, midriff, leg whatever- always a big no-no) and throwing objects. This has made my life very simple. No longer do I try to instill military order within 5 minutes of meeting 35 teenagers. Now I just make it clear that the rules will be a little relaxed (teacher is absent), but I expect a certain level of behavior to recieve those priveleges.