Ann Martin - Baby-Sitters Club 122

Gary must have sensed that we were talking about him. He looked up from the form he was filling out and grinned.

"Why does he always act like he's got some private embarrassing secret he knows about you?" I fumed.

"That's just how he is," Mallory said.

We waited for him to clear out (which he did with an irritating wave in our direction) and then we approached the table. "Here you go, girls," Mrs. Amer said, handing us each a form.

Mallory and I sat on some nearby folding chairs and began to work on the form. There wasn't too much to fill out - name, address, stuff like that. Then a question followed: why are you interested in the TOT program?

I wrote what I honestly felt. During my time here at SMS I've seen some teaching I thought could be improved. I'd like to show how I think classes should be run.

I glanced over at Mallory's sheet to see what she'd written. 7 hope to share my great love of books, reading, and literature with my fellow students.

That made sense. What did I want to share? I wondered. My love of ... what? Sports, I guessed. SMS didn't offer a business management class or a course in baby-sitting. So sports would have to be it.

I would especially love to teach in the athletic department, I added to my form, since that is an area that I particularly enjoy.

Mallory and I handed in our sheets, then raced to homeroom. At the end of the corridor, we went our separate ways. As I hurried toward my locker, I noticed that the hall seemed unusually empty. Everyone must already be in homeroom. I knew I had only a minute to get to mine, so I began to run.

"Ms. Thomas!" a voice behind me bellowed like an army drill sergeant. I froze and slowly turned to face Ms. Walden, one of the gym teachers. "Why are you running in the hall?" She made it sound as if she'd caught me stealing a car.

I smiled anxiously. "I'm late." She folded her arms. "Why is that?" "Oh, because I was signing up for the TOT program," I said enthusiastically.

"That is no excuse for running in the hallway," she barked.

"Sorry," I said, even though I was more annoyed than sorry. What was the big deal? There wasn't even anyone else in the hall. All right, it was the rule - no running - and I'd broken it. She was right. I knew that. Still...

My annoyance must have been apparent because Ms. Walden shot me a hard, angry look. "Get to class," she said. "And walk!" I walked away, feeling her cold stare digging into the back of my head. What I resented most was being treated like a baby. A baby and a criminal - at the same time.

Once I turned the hallway corner, I was tempted to run again. But I didn't dare. Instead, I race-walked to my locker, grabbed my books, and race-walked to homeroom.

As I hurried along, I thought about how great it would be to teach. Then I'd be the one calling the shots, not the one being bossed around by people like Ms. Walden.

Last year she'd been my gym teacher and I'd thought I liked her. I defended her to the kids who hated her. And there were a lot of them, believe me.

Now I thought that those kids might have had a point. Maybe she really was overbearing and tyrannical. Maybe it was just my love of sports that had made me try to like her.

In truth, she picked on the kids who weren't athletic. She yelled all the time. And sometimes she expected us to perform impossible feats, such as sinking five free-throw baskets in a row during the basketball unit.

I resolved then and there that if I were assigned a gym class, Ms. Walden would be my model for how not to teach.

Chapter 4.

"Ms. Walden!" I gasped that Thursday when we received our teaching assignments. I was with the other volunteers in the auditorium, waiting for our first session of student teacher training to begin.

I'd just been handed a slip of paper saying I would be student teaching for Ms. Walden during her seventh-grade gym class. Yikes! Stacey was in the second row seat to my right. "Ms. Walden? That crab? Oh, well. You can show her it's possible to run a gym class and still be a nice person." That's true, I thought. A picture flashed in my mind - kids smiling and having fun in my gym class; Ms. Walden in the background, watching carefully, vowing to herself to be nicer to the kids in the future.

"Who do you have?" I asked Stacey.

"Seventh-grade math," she reported with a pleased expression. "Mr. Peters's class." "He's okay," I commented. "I had him last year." Mary Anne leaned forward from a seat in the row behind Stacey. "I got seventh-grade social studies, Mr. Redmont," she said.

"That's good," Stacey remarked. "Is it what you wanted?" "Yup." I noticed Mallory sitting beside Mary Anne. She was slumped in her seat and scowling at the paper in her lap. "Didn't you get English?" I asked.

She nodded but didn't look up from her paper. "I got it," she mumbled.

"Then what's the - "I was interrupted by Mr. Zizmore, who had walked to the front of the auditorium and stood in the center aisle.

'Attention, everyone, and welcome to the Teachers of Tomorrow Training Seminar," he announced. "The first thing we will talk about is how to create a lesson plan." I didn't think this would apply to me. How much of a lesson plan would you need to teach a gym class? While Mr. Zizmore spoke, I gazed around at the other volunteers to see who had signed up. Nearly fifty kids had.

At first I was impressed by the number. I was surprised so many students were interested. But, as I continued to watch them, I grew a lot more skeptical.

While Mr. Zizmore explained the lesson plan, Alan Gray was sailing paper airplanes across the room. Cokie Mason was applying makeup. Gary was using a piece of paper to create static electricity in the hair of the girl in front of him, Kara Mauricio. She kept giggling and batting him away, but not as if she really meant it.

Hopeless, I thought, looking around. If these kids were the Teachers of Tomorrow, then I felt sorry for the students of tomorrow.

"You will have to stay on the topic the teacher for your particular class is teaching," Mr. Zizmore said.

"You mean I can't teach creative paper folding?" Alan Gray called out, holding up his paper airplane.

"Not unless you are teaching an art class on origami," Mr. Zizmore replied. Stacey smiled at that one. She loves Mr. Z. "But that brings up an excellent point, Alan," he continued.

I laughed to myself. Alan was trying to be a wise guy, and Mr. Zizmore had turned things around so that it seemed as if Alan were making excellent points.

"You will have a great deal of flexibility within your given unit," Mr. Zizmore continued. "For example, if you are assigned a literature class, you can decide what story or poem you will teach." I glanced over my shoulder at Mallory, thinking she'd be happy to hear this news. I tried to make eye contact, but she was still staring down at her assignment paper as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

Mr. Zizmore asked someone to turn down the lights. On a screen on the stage, he projected a slide showing an enlarged lesson plan. Different slides highlighted the various aspects of the lesson plan.

The amount of time spent on each part of the subject was broken into fifteen-minute segments. The plan he showed indicated fifteen minutes for teaching a lesson on the history of World War I, then ten minutes for class discussion, five minutes for the class to write a quick response to the question "What was the immediate cause of World War I?", then a final fifteen minutes discussing the difference between immediate causes and background causes of a war. A fast-moving forty-five-minute class.

"With this kind of plan you don't fall behind," Mr. Zizmore explained in the darkened auditorium. He flipped to the next slide, which showed how this plan was laid out in a lesson-plan book - a special notebook designed especially for teachers. The slide after that showed a blank lesson-plan page.