And like that… *poof* … February is gone. This was a big month for me in my progression as a substitute teacher. I experienced my first few “repeat trips” back to classrooms I had been in before. Subbing consistently in the same few schools also led to getting to know students a bit better. Oh, and it was a blast – each day is a unique little adventure.
I’ve been fortunate enough to sub in a handful of 3rd grade classes recently. During Number Corner, the kids have been discovering how to read and interpret various data visualizations. In my prior career as a software developer, I worked on many different analytics applications over the years – so its been fun to teach a topic that I’m passionate about. So I figured for this month’s retro, I’m just going to share some visualizations of all the places I went in the last month.
📊 By The Numbers
During February, I logged 64 hours in a variety of classrooms over eleven days.
Hours by Level
I did meet my goal of finding more time in Elementary classrooms. This was due to some generous help of family and friends to get Kaydee to school for me so I could make those 7am start times. Thank you everybody for the help!
Hours by Classroom
If you double click on the above chat, you can see the total time spent by class type/grade level. Note the first E.A. series is for Elementary, the one on the far right for Middle School.
I still have yet to visit a Kinder or 5th grade class… hopefully I’ll get to experience those both sometime soon.
First Visit and Returns
February was also the first time where I got to go back to a few classrooms for a return visit. The dynamic of already having been to a class before is really quite great. I tend to be a bit rubbish at remembering names, but these repeat visits really help with that. I also got to experience my first consecutive day visit to the same class. It was over a Friday-Monday time span, but it still was a really cool experience. I hope to have more return visits in the coming months!
📈 Onward!
March is already off to a brisk start – and spoiler alert! – I’ve spent my first few days in a High School classroom! March is looking to be my busiest month yet for days in the classroom, so I’ll have to try hard to set aside some time to share some more stories here as the month unfolds.