Got to do two things today that I hadn't before.

The first was sub in front of a regular class, as I got to fill in for a middle school foreign language teacher. This could have been dicey, given that it's been 20 years since my last French class and I've never taken Spanish. Given that I showed a video in three of the five classes, and there was in-class group work for another, the amount of damage I could have done was limited.

The first period did use a Jeopardy-style game to review several chapters. Having done this with various age groups, I would ask that anyone choosing to do this in the future:

a. Realize that a game-based review will naturally stir up competitive instincts. Have at least some detailed rules and maybe don't use gender-based teams. That just seems to make the competitive part of things worse.

b. Don't have the students make up the questions. Let's just say there was some widely divergent difficulties for questions worth the same amount of points. It'd also probably be a better review if the person making up the test created the questions, as they could then better reflect possible test questions.

c. Think twice about having students run the game. I understand the empowering aspects of this, but I found the students were more interested in getting their teams to win than actually reviewing material.

Continuing on the scandalous line, I also learned from another teacher that one of the regular subs from last year was dating a high school student in a neighboring town (she was 18, but still in school) and selling pharmaceuticals without a licence, if you get my drift. I could have Sub of the Year wrapped up already!

The other first was that I got to stand on Causeway Street in Boston in front of what used to be a McDonalds and enjoy the sunlight. For those of you familiar with the area, you know that that spot has been cloaked in darkness since sometime during Teddy Roosevelt's presidency. This section of the Green Line - from North Station to Lechemere - was the last section of elevated railway in the city.

Not that it'll be missed - in time. For now, I'm sure everyone who has to take a bus from North Station to complete the trip into north Cambridge wishes it were back.

Speaking of North Station, I appreciate the synergy and ease that one terminal for both Green and Orange Lines represents, but would it kill them to put in automatic token machines? Every time I've been through there, regardless of time, there's been a line to get tokens. I'm sure there's a perfectly bureaucratic reason for the lack of such machines.