First Graders - Gotta Love 'em

"Have you had this class before?" The administrator who hires substitute teachers gives me a really earnest look, as if trying to judge how to best break the news.

"No," I admit while shaking my head and beginning to feel the faintest tinge of dread.

"Well," she sucks in her breath and her brow wrinkles as she searches for the politic adjective to describe this first grade from hell, "they're really... active."

She adds, "Very different. I mean a lot of different personalities."

Different means? Crazy? Belligerent? Weepy? Foul-mouthed? What I ask is, "Does she (the teacher) have a para?" I'm asking if there is going to be another adult in the room, a paraprofessional who can bail me out if things get wild. What little experience I have has taught me that a first grade classroom climate can swing from serenity to pandemonium in nanoseconds. It's like herding cats - you have to keep a firm grip on them.

"No."

"Oh. Okay," I reply.

"And there are two you should be aware of: Fric and Frac. And the teacher is there now writing down the lesson plan." This last bit is a godsend, because it means the person I am replacing is as driven as I am.

I've been warned. Game on.

One thing you need to know about all first-graders. They are the most helpful busybodies in the world. They're really compassionate - and easily offended, like they'll cry if you look at them wrong way. Horrific tattletales and great huggers, too. And active.

When I arrived at the classroom, the teacher had almost everything laid out. She seemed stricken because it was her first day of not-teaching, and the math lesson promised to be difficult. She even had a back up, if-the-class-goes-wild, activity sheet - and a behavior monitoring system that involved a lot of magnetic, student-named bees hovering around a hive with yellow, red, and blue zones (blue signifying a dreaded trip to the Office.) She handed me three pages of notes with a tight timeline of execution.

I don't want to bore you, so here are the high points of the day:

I barely averted a snack-time mutiny.

"It's snack time now," announces a chirpy little thing named for a fragrant flower.

"No, it's not." I reply, just as two other wee voices chime in, "Yes, it is!"

"No, it's not," I insist, waving the lesson plan I have clutched in my hand all morning because experience has taught me if you don't stay on track, you can kiss science at the end of the day goodbye. "It's right here in your teacher's handwriting. You have snack at 10:10 - after handwriting."

A chorus of little crestfallen "Ohhhs" erupted behind me. It was an astonishing, almost telepathic connection. A child across the room asked, "We have handwriting?" Total disbelief.

Later, I made the mistake of asking if we had "calendar" in the morning. I couldn't find it on my cheat sheet. Calendar is a sound and sight show involving the naming of days, recognition of shapes and patterns, monetary transactions, counting by common multiples, prediction of number sequences and translation of First-Grade-ese, a written language wit plntee ov invenshun.

"No, calendar is after lunch," said One.

"No, calendar is before lunch," said Two.

"I think it's after snack," said Three.

"It's before recess," said Four.

The Designated Helper (every good teacher has one or two to set substitutes straight) stated firmly, "It's before lunch." And I said "Amen." (I didn't really, but I thought it.)

When the handwriting teacher came in to do warm up exercises (toe-touching "base-line" and waist tapping "mid-line" stuff that would have sent my first grade teacher into cardiac arrest) I reread my plan. Deep on page 2, I found "calendar" before lunch. Whew! Another crisis passed.

Traumatic Recess Syndrome: It's when four six-year-olds rush into the classroom to announce that the sweetie pie with the downcast face hidden by dark, shiny locks who is at the center of a moving pod of consternation (I counted at least eight legs, ten arms, and a cluster of multicolor curls) is crying because:

1. She's afraid of bees.
2. Her classmates made fun of her.
3. She can't see and she's tripping over her classmates who are trying to console her.

The incident sparked an impromptu session on Bee-ology with a steady refrain of "I have a connection." Having a connection does not mean a guy down the street who's standing ready with hard cash, weed, or an entree to the Junior League. "I have a connection" means:

"My dad told me to wave my hands and hit them" Please no.

"I don't have a pen for bees but for peanut allergy." Have you ever had Epi-Pen training? I have. It amounted to giving myself a quick jab in the thigh with a dummy syringe. Seriously, people are trained to do this.

"My sister said to run away."

"My friend says don't run." Smart girl.

"I know. Bees chase you."

"I hit a bee between this finger - she spreads her palm - and this finger."

"Did it hurt?"

"No."

"I had a stinger in my hand, and my mother got ice cream." I perked up at this, always open to new home remedies. "When I ate the ice cream, I forgot about the stinger." Ohhh.

Uh-oh. I was beginning to sound like them. Enough. It was time for Difficult Math.

A moan went up in the classroom: "Nooooo - not MAAAATHHHHHH!" Add to that a document reader - not an adult who can read above an eighth grade level, but the all-seeing arm of a projection device - and at least three students who need one-on-one help, and you have a winning recipe for learning. The teacher wrote, "Do it together." And together we did. Everyone except Frac.

"I'm feeling dead." Okay, Frac. Don't do the math. Dead guys don't add.

"Oh, Frac! You've had such a good day! You even got a token.... "  Tokens are a bribe for good behavior. "And you're still in the GREEN ZONE." Green is the best. Sadly, Frac has a behavior chart that looks like Christmas.

Sorry. At the end of each school day, every student records his behavior based on that magnetic hive on the side of the teacher's desk. Remember the Yellow, Red and dreaded Blue? Each has a calendar with little squares that are colored to correspond with his or her behavior of the day, i.e. if a bee named Frac ends up in the Red Zone, Frac has to color his little square red. If the whole class is GREEN, the class gets FIVE FUZZY BALLS!! YEAH!!! (If the class gets enough fuzzly balls it earns a pizza party, or a Disney cruise, or excused from school for the rest of the year.)

I guess it was a winning argument because Frac was resurrected and finished problems 12 through 17.

Science fizzled next. My volcano was a dud. Luckily, none of the comments in the Predictions or Observations columns on the students' answer sheets read This teacher blows.

"I wanted an explosion."

"How do you spell bubbles?"

"How do you spell mushy... fizzly... hissing?"

"Why don't you do it again?" Beats me. Uhhh, because we're out of time.

"Okay, boys and girls. Time to clean up, and Dark Tinkerbell - who has become joined with me at the hip - is going to pass out your behavior folders."

That's when things started to fall apart. Little Pink No-teeth colored Frac's behavior square red. A posse of Do-Rights swarmed my desk and squealed, "Pink No-teeth colored Frac's square red!!"

I walked up to Pink as she buried her blond head in her arms, mouth puckered, eyes cast down and shooting daggers.

"Pink, I'm going to move you into the Yellow."

When I came back she was hiding under her desk. No doubt the anguished chorus of "We could have had five fuzzy balls" had driven her there, where she remained scowling for the next ten minutes.

"Okay, boys and girls......... You have end of the day jobs, don't you? Why don't you do them now."

That was it - the tipping point. All of a sudden, a clutch of pencil sharpeners were grinding pencils to nubs. Over the din, a lot of unhappy campers were duking it out.

"Fric is doing my job!"

"But she said I could!"

"No I didn't!"

The magnetic Fric bee moved into the Yellow, too.

First graders run amok - all of them suddenly crazed. Flipping chairs onto desk tops. Shrieking when they fell off. Rubbing their heads. Moving furniture. Crawling on the floor in search of the detritus of education. Mauling each other in their eagerness to be of help.

I turned off the lights and they all froze momentarily.

I immediately turned the lights back on and threatened, "If you don't settle down I am going to take away some fuzzy balls!!"

Did I really say that?

Didn't matter. In unison those defiant little darlings cried, "You can't take away our balls. Our teacher said so!"

I had to nail them to the rug until they were dismissed to their buses.

So much for my authority. If you can't take away fuzzy balls, you might as well give up the ship. The day ended in a truce, but I'm aching to go back.