Life is like a box of chocolates

As a substitute teacher, I truly never know what I'm going to get in a day's work. Yesterday, I was scheduled to teach German in the morning, then be done for the rest of the day.

When I turned in my key after teaching German, the secretary asked me if I could fill in for an English teacher. Her father had fallen ill and needed to be taken to The Big City for treatment. So I taught English in the afternoon.

Teaching certainly does test my memory. I took two years of German in high school and a semester of it in college, but that was nearly 30 years ago. Fortunately, Frau Deutschelehrerin has me show videos, "Anna, Schmidt und Oskar" when I take her place. Wikipedia says that "A, S & O" is the German equivalent of "Sesame Street" in the US.

They are the cheesiest videos imaginable and I cannot get their tune out of my brain!

"Ich heise Anna. Ich heise Schmidt. Der Hund ist Oskar!" [I am called Anna. I am called Schmidt. The dog is Oskar.]

Anna is a teenage girl who befriends her neighbor, the 70ish Herr Schmidt. Schmidt adopts the stray dog Oskar in the first video. Schmidt possesses some magical abilities, but doesn't always use them. He broke his chair and ruined his sweater in one episode yesterday and had to go buy replacements. In the next, he lost his glasses.

This man had enough magic to repair a junker Volkswagen in an earlier episode, but he can't fix his chair and sweater and he can't find his glasses.

Makes no sense to me.

After each episode, I go through some questions about the episodes with the students. I am surprised how many of these words I remember. I learned a new one yesterday, "lecker", meaning "delicious".



In English, I had to lead discussions about "Lord of the Flies" in one class, then "The Great Gatsby" in another. I remembered "Lord of the Flies" rather well, probably because I was fascinated by the boys' quick loss of all civilized veneer. We read "The Great Gatsby" in high school, too, but I mostly remember being frustrated by that book. I just hated the shallow characters and wanted to learn nothing about them.



I crammed with the Cliff Notes Mrs. English Teacher had left on her desk and hurriedly read the chapters, but I'm not sure how much real teaching I did.

At least I wasn't trying to teach math. Now that would be hopeless.