Voluntary Teaching Assistant

It recently dawned on me that teaching is an ideal job for women.  Toying with giving up my bed and breakfast empire and finding some other more lucretive/less repetetive employment, I applied for a couple of jobs (one was with a firm of undertakers, which I was really quite keen on).  Then I remembered my 12 year old son.  I also remembered school holidays.  As I don't have a degree or the ability to get one I had to lower my sights and  found out about teaching assistants.  Not much money but I'm used to that.  It's also easier than being the real thing.   So, to set me on the path to my new career, I have started volunteering.

My first class were Primary 6 and I was helping the lowest group of the lowest class in maths. In my day this was called Arithmetic and it was never my strong point.   I had no preparation and the first thing I was asked by one of them was eight times six.  Eight times six?  Bloody hell, wait til I think.  Honestly, I had to work it out by remembering my favourite which was six times six and then adding on... how much?  Managed to come up with the answer but had to check it on their tables ready reckoner thing.  I stumbled along in much the same way and at the end of each class the teacher was so grateful for all my "help". 

It continued in this vein with frequent mistakes on my part.  One little boy asked for help with a graph showing plant sales during a fictional school fayre.  How many plants were sold between 1000-1015?  When were the least/most number of plants sold?  I stared at that question, my mind totally blank.  I read it and re-read it trying to pretend I was understanding it as I went.  Then I asked the girl opposite how she was doing it.  At the end of that term they gave me a bunch of flowers and an embarrassingly grateful card. They even asked me back after the holidays. 

Now I'm in my son's old primary school helping in Primary 3.  Unfortunately it's maths again but much more my level.  Some kiddies are quite good at it, in fact there's a wonderboy who's at primary 7 stage, but there are several who, like myself, struggle.  Yesterday it was division and multiplication, thankfully using the two times table.  No problem for me but some of them were completely stumped by ten divided by two followed by five multiplied by two.  I've discovered that's quite hard to explain (especially to a very sweet little boy who the other day couldn't take 9 away from 10 without counting extremely slowly on his fingers.)  I heard myself blathering on, "what's 10 divided by 2?  What's half of 10?  If I have 10 cakes and I divide them into 2 how many is that?  Look at my fingers... ten, take half away, how many now?"  Talk about confusing.  At the end of all that I'd forgotten the original question and the child looked like his spirit had left his body.  It was a blessed relief for both of us when they moved onto writing their diaries.  At least I can spell "Fruit Shoot" and "trampoline" but I did panic for a moment about the apostrophe in "Shepherd's Pie".

After that I looked distinctly haggard.   The Revitalift really has got its work cut out.