The Job Stalker

I tease my wife because she sometimes seems a bit like that prototypical blogstalker that's becoming such a stereotype anymore.  I have a bit more sympathy for her now that I've actually got a facebook page, a couple blogs, and have clicked the "next blog" button over and over again on blogger.com.  I haven't yet reached the status of stalker however, as I'm yet to return to any of those blogs, become familiar with the writers' families and friends and politics and dining habits and gastrointestinal cycles.  She hasn't gone quite that far.  But I am now a part of the social network, so to speak.

While I'm not yet a blogstalker, however, I experienced something kind of funny today.  I think I may be a job stalker.

Today was my second day, not in a row and not for the same teacher, at a same grade school from earlier in the week, which (though this has nothing to do with anything) happens to be right across the street from the house I bought and lived in when I first met my wife.  Anyway, today I was covering for one of the art/gym teachers (yes: art/gym teacher).  I looked over the plans.  Simple enough.  I met the first period of kids.  Good enough.  And I made it to lunch.  Easy enough.  However, when I watched the second group of post-lunch first graders come into the gym, I had this weird twist of deja vous.  It took me a second to realize, particularly amidst the first-grader shrieks, "Hi, Teacher!"s, and general first-grade ruckus, that this was the same group I subbed for the other day.

They were thrilled, which was mildly flattering, of course, but it remained somehow strange.  Something about their teacher being back in the building (though not in the gym) or having the kids in a different situation or the fact that, well-behaved though they were Tuesday, they were monsters today, I don't know.  It felt like I was skipping from job to job to job (which, over the last three weeks is very true), came back to this one, and suddenly it was the same but not the same: I knew the kids--or something about them--which ones to watch, which ones to baby, which ones I could joke with, which ones to just leave alone. 

I don't know if I'm telling this clearly.  It was familiar, yet strange.  Comforting to see them, yet disconcerting in the status of the situation....

That's it, anyway.  I'm sure I'll be at that school again in the relatively near future, and then, after having taught eight times as many students, grades one through six, will likely have eight times the weirdness.  Awesome.

(I want my own classroom back....)