Friday didn't end soon enough

Friday, October 4, 2013 My last assigned south side school. I was in a self-contained room with 5-6th graders, 8 of them. I was told there would be an aid to assist me but he was late. There were two teacher desks in the room, one neat and the other a hot mess. I just set my stuff on the side counter near one desk in the back of the room. The teacher had been out all week with multiple subs who picked through the once organized work left by the teacher...so basically, I was scrapping the barrel to figure out what to do with the students. There was one student that was supposed to be in class but he was suspended the day before for pulling the fire alarm. So as I am trying to do work with students and working on descriptive words, the aid for the class comes in and proceeds to take over the class. Was I happy about this? No. It felt like a tug of war, in a way, because he is not a teacher and even though I may need his help, it wasn't with the teaching aspect. At one point, I asked for an example of what they ate for dinner, thinking they could tell me something and we can add descriptive words to it. This is when the aid says to me, "These kids don't eat dinner like you do." ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? I said to him, "Last night I ate a peanutbutter sandwich. They should be able to describe anything that they ate or drank." He looked at me and said, "oh." This was ridiculous. Later in the day I asked the students why they were all in this class and they told me it was because they had anger management issues. And did they! They would argue with me about the color of the sky. It was exhausting to argue when they had no idea about what they were saying. It was frustrating to no end. I had one boy pulled out a few times, thinking he was going to be violent to me. He was violent by throwing a bucket of books across the room and hitting another child. He punched something and said he wanted to hit me. But the school kept bringing him back into my room. I tried not to say anything to him at all unless there was a danger to what he was doing. One boy, whom I believe had autistic tendencies but the aid said no, sat hand writing the words from a book he was reading and drawing pictures to go with it. Very neat and beautiful. He sat smiling...even when one of the boys took a foam cup of water and smashed him on the top of his head with it. I wanted to cry as they laughed. It was so disturbing. I only saw the aid for about an hour and in a way, I was glad. He asked me, when he came in, if I would move my stuff so he could put his stuff down. Seriously? If he cleaned off the crap everywhere on his desk, my little bag wouldn't have been in the way. At the end of the day, the very nice secretary told me it seemed like a better day than the other subs had because security was hardly called. I bet the other subs were ringing that bell all day long but I am a gluten for punishment. I only call in case of emergency...otherwise I deal with it. Was glad this day was over.