Home-Ec Teacher for a Day

My first ever chances to teach in the New Paltz school system, and I wind up teaching home-ec and Spanish. I've taught English, math, French, Spanish (not that I speak Spanish!), gym, science, and history, and I've taught all levels of students from K-12, but I'd never taught home-ec before.

I didn't even know home-economics was even taught any more, but I'm glad it is, and I enjoyed doing it. Rather than focusing on buying, baking, cooking, and cleaning, the class has diversified a bit and now focuses more on general health and nutrition.

Teachers usually leave videos or worksheets for their substitutes to inflict on their unsuspecting students. I was given videos in home-ec yesterday and worksheets in Spanish today. Matters were made more challenging by the fact that students were about to leave for their holiday breaks. Some of them had a hard time containing their enthusiasm, tho I got the feeling that for many of them, this was an ongoing obstacle.

I really like the kids in this middle school. Meeting them gave me an excellent chance to see just what kinds of people live in my new town. There was a lovely cross-section of religions, ethnicities, and socio-economic groups. Kids tended to segregate themselves by sex rather than any other factor, so there ended up being a boy side and a girl side to my home-ec classes. The Spanish teacher had given students assigned seats, and they mostly stuck to those.

Whenever I sub (and it's been 14 years since I did), I always find areas that I wish the kids had already mastered. I was distressed in 1992 when the kids in my Spanish class were less versant in the language than I was despite having studied it for several months (by coincidence, I'd picked up a Spanish Made Simple a few days before). The group in the New Paltz middle school was far savvier about the language, on the whole, but there were still a few who had little to show for the time they'd spent in class. Similarly, I was happy to learn that some of the Home-Ec kids knew about nutrition, but only one of them on the day was able to define 'calorie' or tell me what a 'serving' of food is.

I try to spice things up when I sub. This has been made easier by the Internet. For Spanish, I used the Web to turn the same paragraph into poorly translated versions, thanks to altavista.com and freetranslation.com. For health class yesterday, I printed out a funny entry from Wikipedia.com about the durian, a really peculiar fruit from southeast Asia. One great quote mentioned that it smells like a mixture of "pig-shit, turpentine, and onions, garnished with a gym sock." I changed "pig-shit" to "pig-excrement" because I think the e-word is far more descriptive.