His reputation precedes me!

This is my last ‘working’ day off for at least 6 weeks having gotten all my ducks in a row just in the nick of time! Yesterday was spent in the county’s orientation for substitute teachers and I got all my paperwork in and even managed to get a TB test that I didn’t know I had to. That was an unpleasant surprise since it takes 2 days to get the results and they have to be in the county’s hands before I can walk in on Friday morning! Phew! Lots of cartwheels this week! LOL!

So the orientation was 5 hours long. The first 2 hours were worth the time and effort since they gave alot of useful information and answered all our questions. The last 3 hours, however, were just alot of fluff and stuff to take up time in my opinion. I was really ready to get out of there by the time the instructor had us get into groups and discuss how to handle situations we may get into in the classroom. Our group had to discuss an extremely easy situation so I wasn’t too concerned that I couldn’t hear very well being on the end of the row. They were finished early and I sat back and was watching the clock as the group decided to go onto the next question just to have something to do.

The second situation was 2 girls arguing in a high school class that looked like it might get physical. Personally, I would have smacked them both upside the back of their heads and informed them I had done my time with my own 6 kids so knock it off and go to separate corners! LOL! This actually did happen to my husband one day and he handled it in his usual out of the ordinary way. He got in between them and told the other kids to clear the desks out of the way while someone went down to the gym to get some boxing gloves so the situation could get resolved quickly and he could get back to teaching the class!

That completely diffused the situation since he was serious and no one knew quite what to do…including the two girls fighting! Then he looked at the girls and told them they could fight or they could separate and he could get on with the class, their choice. The girls separated in a huff and the rest of the class went on without any more problems.

He’s a breed apart, that’s for sure! LOL! So here I was bored out of my mind and itching to get the hell out of there when I could have sworn I heard my last name mentioned in the group. I sat up and started to listen when the woman next to me asked if I was a teacher or something like that. I said I was just taking over as a favor for a colleague of my husband who teaches at WHS. She smiled and said she had a son there and who was my husband? When I told her, her eyes got big and she said "We were just talking about him!!" So I DID hear my name mentioned! LOL! They were talking about his unorthodox methods of handling the kids in these situations and how much the kids all love him! I just started laughing since I get that alot, but what are the odds that I would be sitting in an orientation 30 miles out of town and end up next to a mom of one of his kids and my own husband gets brought up in a discussion of how to handle volatile situations??! Like I said, his reputation precedes me!

And that’s not all. My husband had been on pins and needles all day because I have been known to get lost driving to new places. Heck! Once I ended up in Rhode Island driving from Boston to NH, and I had been driving that route for 10 years! So he had reason to worry I guess! Imagine his surprise when one of his kids in class checked his phone and announced that I had made it to the class and was on my way back to school! It turned out this woman’s kid was actually in my husband’s class at that time and she let him know she had met me! I mean REALLY! What ARE the odds?

Tomorrow I am observing in the class I am taking over and on Friday, I am on my own. Well, obviously I am never really on my own with my husband and his reputation around, am I? LOLOL!