The Sub Life

1/9/09

Grant Does P.E.

If I have learned anything from my time as a teacher, it is that you have to be flexible and you have to be resourceful. This was certainly the case when the director of my school sent me an email over winter break that said: "Grant, when you come back from winter break I think I am going to have you teach 4th grade P.E. (gym) for a week." This news neither fazed me nor did it present an insurmountable challenge. Yet I have to admit I did not know quite what to expect dipping my feet into the gym teacher pool for the first time.

I would imagine the first question you are thinking to yourself is why I, a 5th/6th grade classroom teacher, would be teaching a class (gym) I have never taught before in a grade (4th) I have never worked with before. Good question. I should further qualify this scenario by saying that up until Thanksgiving break, I did not even know I would be teaching at the school in 2009. My contract only ran through December, as the teacher I was filling in for was to return from maternity leave on a PT basis after the holiday break. As it turned out there was a need for an additional teacher in the 4th grade, so I was brought back and now split time in the 5/6 and 4th grades and will do so through the end of the school year.

I know, this still does not explain why I would be teaching physical education for a week in January. Well, the first week after winter break is traditionally when the 5th/6th graders go on a weeklong school trip to Yosemite. The gym teacher, Christine, is one of the coordinators of the trip and thus would be gone all week. I did not go to Yosemite myself only because when the trip was being planned in the fall it was not known if I would even be teaching at the school in January. Sure it would have been nice to go to Yosemite, but seeing as I got to go on 2 fields trips plus attend a conference in Flagstaff, AZ this fall I really could not complain too much about being left out.

So, on Monday the 5th I reported for duty. In addition to 4th grade P.E. I would also cover some 7th/8th grade classes depending on the director's availability to cover them himself. The latter ended up being fairly easy, as the first morning I let each 7/8 group play dodgeball the whole time after I had some issues getting into the equipment locker we share with another middle school (there are 2 schools on same campus). The other times I saw them it was just a matter of supervising them swing dancing with the P.E. class from the other middle school, whose own P.E. teachers ran the class. For the record I did not swing dance myself, citing medical issues relating to my ski trip in Lake Tahoe over break.

As for the 4th graders, I must say that it was a trip down memory lane with some of the games we played. We played a variety of tag games including "Blob Tag," where you start with one person "it" and then they grow like an amoeba as they tag others; "Rainbow Tag" where the "it" people stand in the middle of the gym, call out a color and anybody wearing that color must run from one side of the gym to the other; "Sharks and Minnows" where you have everyone inside the 3 point line of the basketball court and they chase people on foot (shark) or while crawling (minnow) depending on whether they are a shark or a minnow. Then there was "Adventure," which is basically a variation on "Capture the Flag."

With all the advances in techology like the Internet, iPods, cellphones, Blackberrys, Nintendo Wii , virtual reality games and the like, it was certainly refreshing to see that the kids still appreciate and enjoy old school games that I played as a kid. The days of the kids sitting in a chair a la "Total Recall" or "The Matrix" and having a chip put in their brain that simulates physical activity are not here...yet. Let's face it, no matter what era we live in kids are always going to want to run around, crawl on the ground, climb in trees and just generally get the led out. And thank God for that.