an exercise in patience

For the past month or so, I’ve been substitute teaching for schools all around Connecticut in classrooms ranging from grades 2-12.  If it weren’t for the constant assurances I got from other teachers that subbing is inordinately difficult, I would be seriously concerned about my upcoming year as a full-time teacher.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved getting a steady paycheck.  But now that the school year is coming to a close, I will gladly forgo the extra cash in exchange for staying at home in the safety of my living room.  It’s not that I was bad at subbing (although I might have been a little too lenient), it’s just that as a sub, you start off with very little authority in the eyes of students who are looking for any way to avoid work.  On top of that, it’s the end of the school year, lesson plans consisting of “students may read silently” are widespread (and preposterous), and many students are held to so little personal responsibility at home that you almost can’t blame them for their behavior at school.

From past volunteer accounts, I’ve read that Pohnpeian students are reluctant to participate or engage themselves in classroom discussions.  Really??  That sounds like an awesome problem to have.  My personality is so much more conducive to getting kids to speak up than getting them to quiet down.  During my first 90 minutes with one of my middle school classes, I had learned the name of almost every single student.  One student asked me, “Hey Mister, how did you know my name??”  I don’t think he was aware of how often I had to yell his name to get him to sit down or stop talking.  Apparently, misbehavior is a great cure to my difficulty in learning new names.

Now that I’ve had a couple valuable lessons in classroom management, I feel a lot better about teaching in Pohnpei.  I’m also interested to witness the differences between American students and Micronesian students when I start teaching in a couple months.  I was appalled by the abundance of my middle schoolers who were diagnosed with bipolar disorder, ADHD, and OCD.  I don’t mean to suggest that these were false positive misdiagnoses, but I don’t remember there being such an omnipresence of these disorders when I was in middle school.  I had one student casually say to me after I asked him to sit down, “I can’t sit in my seat because I have ADHD.”  He then proceeded to steal his classmates’ work, run to the back of the class, and throw pieces of paper at other students.  Maybe he really does have ADHD, but it seems like an all too convenient justification for his misbehavior to me.  I have to believe that “medicalization” has not affected Micronesia to the same extent that it has for the United States, but the perception and handling of these behavioral disorders is something I’ll definitely be curious to observe once I reach the classroom.