Yesterday, I taught 2 math classes at the Spence School as a substitute teacher. It was pretty fun, actually! I was very nervous the night before -- the real teacher had sent me a lesson plan (wtf is a lesson plan??) and said to try to get through it in the period. So I went over it several times- it was on how to graph rational functions. And I braced for my first teaching experience in front of a real live class. But, keep in mind this is no ordinary class. Spence is an all-girls school and is one of the top private schools in the city.

But the classes weren't bad and I had a lot of fun with them. The first class was only 10 students, so it was very small and easy to handle. The girls kept passing notes on their graphing calculators (you can write text on them) until I pointed out that I wasn't born yesterday, and in fact when I was in high school WE used to do the exact same thing. They were embarrassed and had a laugh.

The second class was a little bigger and had a little more of that "I don't get it so you must be a crappy teacher because I don't understand" attitude. It felt very different from the first class. But it was definitely a fun experience.

And now I can say I taught at the school that Gwyneth Paltrow graduated from!