dancepulse

It’s a good thing to have it!  In all my years as a private dance educator, contracting to teach dance in preschools, I never had it, so I usually worked through the bad days… no work, no pay. In 7 years, the days I canceled were rare to none.

It’s great to have a day off, but you’re sick.  So much to do, and all you do is huddle in a blanket.

Carefully-planned lessons go totally awry. This week I lost Friday.  3rd-5th graders lost their last day of body percussion (their creative work after the exploration and practice of new techniques). 1st-2nd graders lost 2 continents in our unit on “People dance on 6 continents,” and we didn’t have time to get to the imaginary penguin dance from Antarctica!  Kindergarteners didn’t get to finalize their exploration of the alphabet via straight & curvy pathways. Monday I have all new students, and you can never get back to where you were.

There’s no one who can actually take over. This time, my lessons were so clearly planned, I thought it might be possible, so after calling the sub, I spent my time from 6:30-7:00 am writing plans. After driving my plans and materials to school, however, and writing up minutes for our building leadership team meeting, it was 9:40, 20 minutes short of my first scheduled class, and no sub! I left DVDs for someone to pop in the player and escaped home to my blanket. I’ll find out on Monday how bad it really was — did they find someone to even show the DVDs?

It’s a good thing to have it.  Hopefully, I won’t need it again anytime soon.