Sunday Night Blues

I want very badly to call in sick tomorrow morning. I still have a sore throat and aches. But my partner is going to be at an inservice all day, and we just can't afford losing a day's instruction to a sub. As it is, I'll have to deal with my partner's sub tomorrow, and that sucks. The one that they keep calling in is a pain in my ass. While I certainly respect the thirty years teaching experience she keeps telling me she has, I don't like how she uses that to tell me over and over that I'm doing everything wrong. What I really want a subsitute to do, especially in a team teaching situation, is to support me. Help me keep the kids on task, pass out papers, walk them down to the lunch room, help monitor bathroom breaks. General support. I know they want to flex their teaching muscles, but it just isn't appropriate in this situation. This particular sub also demands the respect of the students. And when I say demands, I mean that literally. She gets in the face of a couple of our black female students, especially. She doesn't seem to get it that my students in particular are English language learners and don't always understand her commands or directions right away. She interprets their confusion or failure to comply as disrespect and then I'm thrust into the position of having to either contradict her (which she interprets as undermining her AUTHORITEH) or to just quietly let her browbeat my kids. I prefer having no assistance to having a sub like her.

On a completely unrelated note, only one of my 4th graders knows who Hitler is. I guess it wasn't a testing objective for 3rd grade.