WANTED: Full-time assistant needed in busy first grade classroom.
Skills required: keep pencils sharpened, solve mystery of where all those pink erasers disappear to, be a human shield for teacher when sneezing and/or coughing occurs, keep fresh coffee in the coffee pot at all times, help teacher keep track of where she puts stuff down, have a steady hand for cutting out the 7,000 shapes that the crazy teacher laminates for use every week, peruse Amazon and Ebay hourly for good deals on books, go to meetings in place of the teacher and take really good notes so everyone THINKS I (oops, I mean SHE) was there, keep sharpening those pencils..., identify owners of all mismatched/unclaimed hats, gloves, and jackets, you’re not done sharpening yet… all of leads broke again??? Huh… that’s so unusual around here….
BENEFITS: The eternal gratitude of a certain middle-aged teacher.
And you are thinking the obvious. For eight stinkin’ kids? Are you KIDDING ME?? I can hear the guffawing of teachers with real enrollments from my sofa. I don’t really need to hire help, but who says I can’t dream? Think of the thematic units I could put together! Think of the artistic touches I could add! Think of the grant writing and pre-planning I could do. Why, I might actually make it home before 5 p.m. on a school afternoon.
Truly, between hunting for decent pencils in the middle of class and sharpening during “free” time, I could have taught these kids nuclear physics (assuming, of course, I understood it myself. And I do. You believe me, right??). Three weeks ago, on a weekend day, I sharpened fifty-seven pencils. I swear I did. I counted them. Long pencils, stubby pencils, Disney motif pencils, grain elevator pencils; you name it, I sharpened it. Non had the original erasers intact. (Are those teeth marks? Do these kids suffer from Pica, or what? Do we need to up the fiber content in the school lunch program?). Fifty-seven. It took awhile. Take a guess as to how long it was before they were all broken again. Did someone say five days? (Game show buzzer here). Wrong. Four days? Wrong again. Three? Two? You are all so pathetically wrong. It took 1.5 days. By mid-afternoon on Tuesday, we were scrounging for a decent pencil in our room again. Why don’t the kids just go sharpen them themselves? Well, they try. They really do. Our sharpener has Oppositional Defiance Disorder, I’m thinking. If it doesn’t want to sharpen, it just doesn’t. I’ve seen Little Jonnie stand there whirling the handle for eight minutes and fourteen seconds and the snapped off pencil is no closer to revealing its lead than it was at the beginning.
So I think the obvious answer to this crisis is a full time aide to help with our usable pencil shortage. I would settle for an old guy sitting in the corner with a whittling knife. I’d even buy him a rocking chair and all the moonshine he could ever want. He could stop for a spell now and again and spin a yarn for the young ‘uns. “… and that’s how Nascar was born, Sonny. Pass me another Mason jar filled with my rheumatiz medicine. You kids shore do break a lot of pencils every durn day.”
So where DO sharpened pencils and big pink erasers disappear to? I dunno’. I think they’re hanging out in the same place as socks from the dryer. There’s some big party island out there for single socks and pink erasers. Our first grade classroom is the Bermuda Triangle where the unexplained happens. They are there sitting in the pencil caddie one minute, then POOF, (whispering now), they are just gone, never to be seen again….
So if you are interested in the position, give me a call. We’ll set up an interview, but you won’t need it. If you call about the position, you’re HIRED!
Between you and the old guy in the corner, I just might get something done.
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