second day of subbing: alternative education

My first (and two months into it, still only) full day of subbing, for an English teacher at an alternative high school.

I did a lot of homework for this job, which turned out to be unnecessary... the teacher had prepped all the students to just work quietly on various assignments while I essentially baby-sat.

But, as it was only my second day, I didn't realize that this is what I should expect, so I looked up the teacher's schedule and then looked up the courses in the course catalog to see what was being taught.

Although I didn't need the info I gleaned from this research, I did learn something, or at least, I did develop the impression (rudimentary and still uninformed of course) that the alternative high school where I subbed that day was much better organized to meet students' needs than the alternative high school where I did my student teaching.

For one thing, all students take specific courses to develop their social skills and life management skills.

The teacher I subbed for taught one of these courses, which was based entirely on a Stephen Covey book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens." Some of us make fun of this kind of pop-culture motivational-speaker franchise book, but honestly, the seven habits (things like "be proactive" and "don't procrastinate" and "take responsibility for your actions") are not a bad way to organize your life. And certainly this would be the first time some of the students had heared anything like this.

Another thing that impressed me was that the teacher actually used methods that are good for multi-age multi-ability classes. In the English classes the students were reading "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and the teacher had divided the story into short segments, which pairs of students were "translating" into language that sounded "natural" to them. This is a classic, standard, well-known (but time-consuming and work-intensive) way to help students thoroughly understand difficult, non-modern English writing.

I don't think I ever encountered this at the other alternative high school.... there, it seemed that teachers were more likely to either assign difficult material and not support students in reading it (beyond making audio tapes available, which is useful if dyslexia is the primary problem, but not if vocabulary & language are the obstalces), OR, to not assign any reading material at all and have students complete meaningless "response" pieces (drawing pictures etc.). I was happy to see the students really sinking their teeth into the old but lovely language of the story.

Down side: they hadn't seen the whole story assembled yet, so when we played hangman using characters and things from the story, none of them could guess the word I used: "pumpkin."

Just my impressions....