5 Things about 5th Grade

Today started out as a normal day. I went to my school, thinking I would make a few copies, plan a few lessons, chat with my teacher friends, and then leave to do other things.

But that's not what happened, because the secretary came to my teacher prep room, where I was prepping.

"Heather," she said, then paused.

And beamed at me.

"Heather," she said again. "How are you?" she asked. There was more beaming.

I started to feel a little worried. I beamed back at her and said "Good, how are you?" 

"I'm good," she said. "How do you feel....about.....being an emergency sub in 5th grade for the rest of the day?"

Here's how I felt about it:

But here's what I did on the outside:

And that's how I ended up in the 5th grade portable, surrounded by a bunch of kids as old as my baby sister and as tall as me. From this experience, I have gained 5 pieces of wisdom I would like to impart:

1. 5th graders can't tell that they are as tall as (or taller than) you when you are sitting down behind a desk. Well actually, maybe they can. But no one said anything about it. So maybe they can't.

2. The new trend right now is zip-up hoodies that zip in the front and can zip all the way up onto the hood, so that when someone zips all those zippers together, they look something like this:

These things are all the rage. Trust me, you'll be cool if you have one.

3. 5th graders love cutting their own hair. They greatly prefer doing that to working on Language Arts, which is what everyone else in the class is doing.

4. There are some words that 5th graders think are funny in any and every context. Today when they were reading and finding words that they were unfamiliar with, this conversation happened:

Boy #1: Dude. Look what word I found.
[The word he's pointing at is "naked."As in "the naked blade."]
Boy #2: What is that word? *Guffaw* Oh, na-a-a-a-ked.
Boy #1: *Snicker* I'm writing it down.
Boy #2: Wait, what page is that on? Ha. Ha. (in a really high voice) Naked!

5. I used to think that teaching in a portable would be a little bit like teaching in Hell. I had this idea in my head that it would be all creaky sounding and the wind would come whistling through holes in the walls, and the desks would slide to one end of the room every time a particularly strong gust of wind came along. It is actually kind of like teaching in your own little island paradise. No one wants to walk outside, so they just ignore you and stay in their cozy offices inside. Little do they know that it is actually like 89* in the portable, and you can adjust that as you wish. It's not so bad :


Good luck to any real live fifth grade teachers! I was okay for one day, but I might hate it if I did it err day.