My first hour is prep which is a little rough because anytime a teacher calls in sick at the last second and the office can't find a sub immediately, I get asked to cover their first hour. Yesterday I was covering for a girls PE class, which was something new for me for sure.
It started out okay, I took roll, they did their warm ups, I split them into teams, they started playing basketball. About half way through class a girl slips on her shoelaces and crashes to the floor. It was obviously not a bad fall, but still an embarrassing one (because everything is mortifying in junior high) so I watched her to be sure she would shake it off okay.
She didn't.
She let out this ear piercing WAIL and then launched into full blown sobbing. As I run over to her I am thinking in my head "Great job, you sub for the PE class and you break a girl." She is literally thrashing on the ground when I reach her and I ask her what hurts. "My back! I think I broke my back!" I quickly check her, no signs of broken things, and at this point I'm pretty sure that anyone who is actually injured isn't going to be thrashing around that much anyway. I look around at the other girls trying to gauge if this is the usual in their PE class or if they're concerned. Most of the girls paused for just a second and then carried on with their games so I'm guessing this girl "breaks her back" on the regular. I help her up and she limps her way over to the bleachers (so, it was her leg that hurt?). I tell her that I'm pretty sure people with broken backs can't walk and ask her if the pain is going away. She is still literally wailing and she says no and tells me (between sobs) "My hip is broken!". Again I reassure her that people with broken hips can't walk, but we'll call her mom anyway.
The "broken" girl wouldn't walk to the office ("I need a wheel chair.") so I had to send another girl down to the office to tell someone there that a girl got hurt in PE. (While she was gone broken girl started massaging her arm and telling me "I know my arm is broken, I heard a crack.") I don't know what the girl said to the office, but the secretary came running down to the gym in a panic. When she got there she must have recognized the girl from previous injuries because she just said "Oh". She got the girl to (fake)hobble to the office and the rest of the class went on without incident.
Sometimes I wonder why I am a math teacher, but now I can say "At least I don't teach PE".
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