School Daze

For thirty years I pretty much ignored elementary schools (except as some of our best customers at the bookstore!). Then Jack started kindergarten three and a half years ago, and I've slowly but surely gotten sucked into elementary school culture. Being a helper in the classroom once a month, doing the newsletter for PTA, taking my dutiful shifts at the book fair, helping out in the library, etc.

This past week has felt like full immersion!

Last Thursday Jack and I were in Massachusetts, and we had the privilege of meeting my sister Linda's third grade class at Central Elementary School in Stoneham. Linda thought it would be fun for her students to have pen pals in the wild west. Jack's teacher agreed, they paired up the students and now they're at least two rounds of letter writing into the project.

Jack was especially looking forward to meeting his pen pal Adrianna, who was very nice and who helped us pass out the salt water taffy treats that we brought from Salt Lake City. And we bought salt water taffy treats in Boston that we'll be sharing with Jack's class here!

While we were visiting Linda's class we all sat in a circle and the kids asked Jack questions about their pen pals, about his school and about living in Utah. The very first question someone asked was "Why did Sam [name changed] spell hockey wrong in his letter to me?" Linda quickly said, "We need to ask Jack questions that he knows the answer to." Later in the car Jack said, "I knew the answer to that question, you know. It's because Sam is an idiot!" It's important to note that Jack knows better than to call people idiots. He and Sam are actually friends. Jack was kidding, but I'm sure glad he didn't say it in Linda's class!

The day after we got back from our trip, I helped out with a third grade class field trip to the planetarium in Salt Lake City. The only reason I signed up to help was because Jack wanted me to. I'm just very relieved that after three hours of wrangling kids we didn't lose any of them.

Ah, but my adventures do not end there.

Last night I got my very first call to work as a substitute librarian at one of the elementary schools in town. I signed up well over a month ago, but only to work in the libraries at the half dozen schools in our area, so I'm only expecting to get a handful of jobs over the course of the school year.

Checking books in and out and reshelving is only a tiny portion of the job. I had to teach six different classes for 45 minutes each, and do recess duty for half an hour! The regular librarian had planned a reader's theater based on the book Who Will Pull Santa's Sleigh?--just the thing to wind kids up!

Except for all of the shushing part, I actually enjoyed myself. Which is good because I need to go back tomorrow and do it all over again with six more classes.

But it's definitely not something I want to do every day.