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Showing posts from February, 2012

What's your deal?

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For one very long semester, I worked as a substitute teacher. The phone would ring before the sun came up, and I got my assignment for the day. On a particularly cold morning, I found myself in a room with fifteen EBD (Emotionally and Behaviorally Disordered), elementary-aged students from around our school district. There was one other adult who served as an aide, but he left before attendance was taken to help find an EBD student who was a "runner." She had escaped immediately after arriving on the bus. All was not chaos. The regular teacher had left instructions on his desk. I passed around nametags and markers, then set out to collect them. One young man, a big sixth-grader, did not comply with my request to write his name. He watched as I neared him. "What's your deal?" he asked, spinning a thick book around the top of his desk. "I'm the substitute," I said brightly. "Yeah, I get that," he said. "What's your deal, though