Was I in the wrong? Do you teach diphthongs (MS)?
TL;DR - high school teacher who tried subbing grade 6 gets ripped into by classroom teacher for not knowing how to teach a grade 1-3 skill that no one else at said middle school does either.
My contract for this year wasn’t full year due to health issues, so I’m back to subbing for May and June. I normally work in high schools. I picked up a lower middle school job to see what it was like. Ive had my own classroom of 7-8 before, and they were great. But 6s are a whole different thing. I’m English trained and have my own classrooms for 7s all the way to 12s. I’m very comfortable with English classrooms. It’s my entire career for the last 9 years, plus 3 more of subbing prior to contracts.
The teacher I was in for left an 11 page lesson plan for English and SS. She left 4 of those pages for diphthongs. I have no idea how to teach diphthongs. The neighbouring teachers also did not know how to teach diphthongs. The other 7 pages were instructions on how to read a social studies booklet (when to pause, when to annotate), and how to use the document camera. No notes about students or behaviours. Fidgets like NeeDohs are allowed.
I tried my best. I was confused. The kids were confused. It was a gong show. I ended up having to pivot to something else to kill the remainder of the morning (all ELA). One kid decided to bite his NeeDoh and got it inside his mouth. That was an (unfortunate) time killer, but helped get us to lunch when I finally “lost” them to lunch and then French, before coming back for SS and math.
When I left her a sub note about the day, she was very rude and snotty about the fact that I didn’t do diphthongs to her liking. I basically said “hey ____, thanks for today. We worked on this and that, we ended here. I have never done diphthongs before - so that was a new lesson for myself! The worksheet went well for most of the class - name and name will need a check in tomorrow. I think the majority will have a couple questions on the formatting since I’ve never done this type of lesson/activity before. Name said that you wanted it done a certain way in their journals. So and so were incredibly helpful, and these 3 helped tidy up before they left for recess. Yada yada, thanks, bye”.
She didn’t email me the email even when I booked the job (a few weeks in advance) nor when I reached out saying basically hey I picked up your job, excited to be in for you! Please let me know if there’s anything I should know or prep for beforehand. She let me know I have breakfast duty so to arrive early. That’s all. I showed up to 11 pages of sub plan, a document camera, diphthongs, and a projector that is in inverted colour and blurry due to being replaced (so we had to get the tech guy to fix it which added another blip to that day). I left a very positive sub note outlining the day, what we did, where we ended so she could easily pick it up the next day, etc.
Girl what the hell, you can’t expect someone who has never taught that to come in and easily teach that? Especially when the neighbouring teachers ALSO don’t teach that because it’s a grade 1-3 skill???? She was so rude and basically told me if I wasn’t comfortable teaching ELA, I should not have picked up her job. I’ve taught ELA from grade 7-12. I’m comfortable with ELA lol. Just not elementary. But since this was a middle school, and I’ve taught middle school, I figured I’d be fine. Not have it implied that I should stick to high school subbing as I won’t have to “teach” and just let them have busy work.
Am I in the wrong here? Is she just doing different stuff with her 6s? I’m secondary endorsed so 6-12 in our region, but I’ve never done this before in my student placements or in my own classroom. I didn’t reply to her email nor do I intend to. I was going to pick up another job at that school later this week, but she’s ruining it for me lol.