I try to volunteer, but end up getting paid.

I pulled into my mom’s driveway last night and tried to go straight to sleep. But sleep at 10pm just doesn’t happen for me.

I woke up at six in the morning. It was cold. Really cold. All my water froze solid all the way through. I started the van and let it warm up and run for a while, just so it stays happy, before we went to school. School is walking distance. Actually, everything is walking distance here: the town is only about six blocks.

At school, my mom introduced me to everyone and told them to feel free to hand me any projects or tasks. When we got to the secretary she said, “actually, we need a sub for the morning.”

In the state of Alaska you only need a bachelors degree to be a substitute teacher. Background checks and child abuse clearances are, apparently, not required.

Next thing I knew I was wrangling a bunch of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders in an earth science class. I’m all about the earth science. I thought I was all about the 4-6th graders too, but wow. They are, like men, a lot different in groups. The instructions left for me were simply, “label maps.” When I got to the classroom I discovered that there were several maps-in-progress, and they had numbered lists of places and landmarks to be labelled. When the kids came in they sat in groups around the maps. Suddenly it was all clear.

But one group had already finished their map, several groups were halfway through, and two groups were just hopeless. I redistributed the people from the succesfull groups to the hopeless groups. This did not have the immediate effect that I’d hoped, because 4-6th graders are apparently lacking in motivational social skills. So I interjected some organization and motivation and structure.

Meanwhile some of the finished kids started pushing each other around on wheely chairs, and some other kids started tattling on them. Holy wow. We proved my rudimentary version of chaos theory by watching them and then I told them to knock it off. They played chess and poked each other with pencils for the rest of the period, while I tried to motivate other kids to stop coloring in little dips in the mountains and label rivers.

Later, in high school chemistry, sex work came up. Luckily I didn’t have to actually teach chemistry or we would have all been in trouble. Instead I just kind of helped them read a section in their book, answer some questions, and make flashcards of the periodic table. Fortunately I am somewhat acquainted with the periodic table. So we were peacefully and craftfully making flashcards, when some boy called some girl a whore.

“Hey,” I said, “no whore-calling in chemistry. Focus on the Boron.”

“Okay,” the alleged whore said, “I’ll leave if you don’t want whores.”

“But she really is a whore,” the boy said.

The alleged whore smiled. “I am, Ms. R, I’m playing one in the play.”

“Oh, are you Abby?” I asked. It is that book about the Salem witch burnings where Abby is the evil slut to blame for it all.

“Yep, see, I told you. I’m a whore.”

“Well,” I mused, “Abby was a harlot and an adulteress, not a whore. A whore is a person who has sex for money, and I don’t think they even had that word back then.”

“No at the end of the book Abby goes to Boston and she’s a prostitute, and a PROSTITUTE is a WHORE,” the alleged whore announced proudly.

“Do ya know what the oldest profession is? Huh? Do ya?” the whore-calling boy asked.

Holy fuck. I was a total sub-failure. Kids get around me and they start talking sex work. This isn’t good.

“Yeah,” another boy (a potential whore-caller?) piped up, “they even had prostitutes in Jesus’ time, Mary whatsername was a prostitute.”

“They had prostitutes way before they had Jesus. But this is chemistry class and it is not an appropriate place to discuss the history of prostitution. Now. Who knows the abbreviation for boron?”

Ha. I won.

It’s only been one day, but so far I think that the school system is not something I want to participate in. So far, it’s mostly been trying to make kids do work they don’t want to do, and it makes me really glad I didn’t go to a “real” high school.