Subtraction
So I subbed half a day for second graders. This is the youngest group I have ever subbed for. They were sooo cute, but they were also sort of babies. Tattletelling babies. This kid came up and complained to me about this other kid making fun of him because he couldn't say some word and blah blah blah. I was currently managing a reading group and needed to pay attention to him so I just told the student to just go on with life. Then he came back and I almost laughed at him with his petty complaints. It was just too funny.

When they asked me how old I was, I asked them how old they thought I was. Then they asked what year I was born. They started guessing at that too, and someone said 1964. And I said, wait a minute. How old would I be if I was born in 1964. I then asked them how we would figure that out. And we did. I wrote 2005-1964 on the board and then we had to go into the wicked world of borrowing. This got even worse when they asked what year my mom was born. Later we were doing this book on Abraham Lincoln so I said we should figure out how old he would be. For some reason the borrowing got really hard then. I don't know why. The students said they had never done the whole borrowing from a zero thing and now looking back on it I think I was doing it wrong. I got the right answer (the little brats got out some calculators and were screaming out the answer) but it took me a minute to figure out how to do it the correct way. I just sort of wrote out what the final product would be without going through the thought out way of borrowing. If they were watching me I'm sure they would be mixed up, but they were paying too much attention to their calculators and shouting out the answers to be listening.

- posted by Alicia @ 1:47 PM