a couple sub stories

 2020 is now four days away.  It appears that far from fading Trump has gone nova.  There will be the speech in Georgia tonight.  Will he try to boost the candidates, or will he air grievances and foul the republican waters?  Most likely.  Then there is the circus on January 6.  Will the dirty dozen, no make that twenty, senators carry on with their caterwauling after Trump's recent phone call?  And then there will still be two weeks after that until the Trump scraps are hauled out of the white house.  

But until then we will continue to die of the Covid.  Remember Trump's very fine program for distributing the vaccine that no details of ever surfaced so the suspicion was high that there was no such plan, and of course it turned out there wasn't.  How many more will die because of this?  A lot.  

Well I just had to get that out.  I don't have much in the tank otherwise.  Here are a couple sub stories I recently emailed to a friend.

When I was subbing there was a school for the profoundly disabled.  Some could not walk and some could not talk and some could not do either.  Some came in on these elaborate wheel chairs and just stared at the ceiling all class long.  A couple of these had elaborately coifed hair and were dressed in the latest, sharpest, kid fashion clean and unwrinkled because how could it ever get to be otherwise.

I was kind of devastated, oh those poor kids, those poor parents.  But then I thought maybe it just seemed that way to me because I had just walked in on them.  To their parents it was just another day.  This was how their kid was every day and if they felt good knowing their kid was looking good, well that was something, and maybe somewhere in the process of getting them dressed up a smile had crossed their face, maybe they had mumbled something that sounded like Mama or Daddy.  And for the more advanced kids, well if this school could teach them how to eat from a bowl using a spoon, why that would make their parents' lives considerably easier.  So maybe it wasn't so bad.

And then we had a fire.  They were having some kind of diversity pageant, something Latin I think.  They had dressed some of the kids up as figures from Latin American history and they were pulling them along on wagons or carts in front of other kids who were just sitting and staring.  I am thinking to myself this is really strange.

And then the alarm rang.  Alarms rang all the time while I was subbing, some of them were preplanned and the rest of them were false alarms.  But in the confusion after the alarms I passed by the kitchen door and there were actual flames.  Shit.  Somebody gave me a kid in a wheelchair to push and the hand of a kid who could walk but not talk and I was headed out the door.

I have to say that in my mind I felt like I cut quite the heroic figure, flames roaring (hardly) as the bold sub leads two helpless kids to safety.  I rather wished that the Channel Seven News Truck would pull up and train their camera on me and lead the 5:00 show with the heroic sub story. but it turned out that it was not much of a fire at all and soon we were all going back to the school.

When you sub you teach whatever the missing teacher taught.  If they taught math, you teach math, first grade you teach first grade, ESL for Ukrainians you teach that (they all looked like Nazi youth, but they were the sweetest, most obedient kids I ever taught).  Then one particular day I was the art teacher.

Art teacher, how swell, was I not an artist myself?  Look at all this equipment, oh I can't wait.  But all I had that day were special ed kids of the more severe sorts.  They would just sit and stare as the teachers' aides used the crayons and the scissors in front of them.  Well this was no fun at all, and then at the end of the day I got a class of (forgive me) normal first graders.  I looked into their wide and wild laughing eyes and asked "Who wants to paint?"

I never had kids myself, and I never had been around people who had them very much and I didn't know what their various capabilities were.  Maybe five minutes into the class I realized that you don't just hand out paint and brushes to a bunch of first graders, but it was too late then, the barndoors were wide open.

I had noticed briefly when their teacher had brought them in that they were especially well dressed, likely it had been a photo day, but at the end of the class they were smiling (they did have a good time) and spattered.  Their teacher looked aghast, "This will all wash out won't it?  It seems likely that grade schools would be supplied with paint that washes out, but of course I had no idea.  Oh yes, I assured her, this will all wash out completely.