High school teachers are usually assigned five classes a day.
About 220 minutes of instruction.
Contracts stipulate that they receive about 40 minutes for lunch, and 40 minutes of “free time”, which they are supposed to use for grading, lesson plans… et al.
That leaves about 40 minutes for some type of duty: cafeteria duty, hall duty…
Or my personal favorite – study hall.
I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a study hall where a majority of the students actually studied.
Some slept.
Some read.
Others talked quietly to friends.
And I rarely made an effort to require the kids to work. I mean, I was once a student.
Too often, however, I led the study hall astray.
I had a 4th period study hall in 2002, and a number of the students were in my history classes as well. We had a good rapport, and it was an easy going study hall. Sometime in the spring, a student mentioned how we should have board games to play, and I loved the idea.
I brought in some chess boards.
It amazes me at how quickly students got into chess.
Kids would gather around, watch others play, discuss strategy quietly and guess what moves should be made, and formed leagues so that everyone interested would play one another. Occasionally I’d start cracking up because one automotive tech student yelled out, “YOU CALL THAT A MOVE??!!” before taking another kid’s rook. I stayed out of it generally, but the students knew that I was an average chess player.
And on my own, I began to practice.
I went online for chess tests, studied up on my Sicilian Defense, and when the end of the year was close, I made an announcement:
There would be a 4th period study hall tournament. And I would be playing.
The matches were intense, but one student had moved ahead of everyone else, and it was pretty obvious that he and I were going to face off in the final.
Students talked smack, and word spread.
The student, who was very good, had a girlfriend in my last period class. On the day before we were to square off, she piped up.
“C, my boyfriend is going to kick your butt!” I didn’t trash talk, but she did talk a good game. And she was looking forward to having my ass handed to me.
To be fair, I was nervous – he was a good player.
On the day of the final, the entire class of 20 students gathered around our chess board. I may have been nervous, but the student was more nervous than I, and it showed. Within the first six moves, he’d lost his queen, and it was over quickly.
Dejected, the students returned to their seats where some discussed what he could’ve done differently, and some carried on with their own games.
The bell rang, and Bobby Fischer’s girlfriend was waiting for him outside our room, and waiting to rub my nose in it.
“Well, how did you do??!” she asked hopefully.
He looked down at the ground.
She yelled at him, “YOU SUCK!!” then stormed off.
The last class of the day was very quiet that afternoon.
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I’ve often thought how a book of our at-work lives would sound. You’re doing a great job of making it come true, chapter by chapter. Thanks for the chuckle.
I worked on the production side at my daily. I watch a lot of sports. But my blind spots are boxing and MMA. When the workforce is predominantly SE Asian, this is not a particularly good way to get off on the right foot. They were talking about boxing.
“Who is Manny Pacquiao?”
On MMA. I didn’t know where I was. I had recently watched a segment about mixed-martial arts on Sportscenter. This is close to what I said.
“You know, in some countries, children as young as eight support their families by being mixed-martial arts fighters. I think that’s borderline child abuse.”
That’s what Bob Ley was implying. MMA at the youth level, without decent coaching, looks a whole lot like sanctioned schoolyard brawls.
Poor guy sure did lose his queen, and it was over quickly.
But this one seemed to conflate chess-beating with chest-beating, so young Bobby Fischer was probably better off getting a piece elsewhere.
A chess piece, you pervs.
Tell me you didn’t humiliate your own students with chess. I am so jealous!!! 😂 That’s classic!
I loved the et al.
Gue’s image editing game is on point today.
congratulate mt58, who is my imaging editor.
Really deserves a co-writer credit.
🙏
Nice touch too with bringing along the eye-rolling girl from thegue’s previous entry, mt!!
I just love me a good running gag, dutch.
We may not have seen the last of her!
Oof, that’s a hard lesson for the kid to learn when his girlfriend is terribly disappointed in his ineptitude to kick chess….
Do schools even have study hall anymore? Our HS in PA would give us library passes as rewards for getting Honor Roll, so I never spent more than 30 seconds in the lecture hall for 3 years before the teachers would wave me out to go to the library. (Chairs were much more comfortable there, lol) We had 8 classes a day though, now schools seem to have gone to 6 classes and cut out study hall completely- at least that was the case in Florida.
We do not have study halls. But we only have 4 classes a day, 90 minutes each. Most schools in our district are “4×4” (that is, 4 classes in the fall, 4 others in the spring). Our school has an A/B schedule, which means 8 classes all year long, alternating day by day.
Do the kids seem to like that kind of schedule, chuck? 90 minutes is an awfully long time to hold a teenagers attention on one subject.
Poor things are missing out on all that panicked running from class to locker to next class on the other side of the school in 5 minutes too, what a shame. 🙃
When I first started teaching at our school, we had a mod rotation of 45 minutes but after several years we had a new principle who switched to the
block system of 90 minutes (1,2,3,4 one day, 5,6,7,8 the next with a 1-8 day on Friday). It became a departmental warfare with the sciences saying they needed that much time to set up and take down experiments but the English and Social Studies saying that was too long a time to keep students interested.
When our recent principle came on board ( a graduate of our school), he compromised and we basically have had the same schedule for the past six years and everyone seems on board with it.
Monday 1-4
Tuesday 5-8
Wednesday 1-5
Thursday 8-6 (it’s the day students miss the most time for sports and other extra curricular activities)
Friday 1-8
But the first thing I learned about being a teacher is flexability!
As a matter of fact, I would bring a Slinky (look that up on Google, youngsters)
to class and tell the students the best way to live life was to be flexable!
Bobby Fischer’s girlfriend must have been a card-carrying member of Mensa.