Assistant or Kid Issue or Both?

[Play Care]

I LOVE my assistant as she is really sweet and all about the kids. BUT at times she tends to be *too* sweet and not strict enough. I do have some "testing" school agers this summer and I find I need to be on them all.the.time. I have her coming from 9-1 so that for the first hour of quiet time, she can supervise the older kids outside and I can get the littles down and have an actual break (that part does not stink at all!!happyface )

Anyhoo - the other week she was taking the older kids out for sprinklers. I was trying to get the littles down, so I told the school agers "get in your bathing suits and then SIT ON THE COUCH until Mrs. C is ready to take you out." My assistant was just doing some last minute pick up. I'm trying to put the littles down and I can hear the two school aged boys wrestling/play fighting. I had to stop what I was doing to come down stairs to reprimand them. My assistant was already downstairs. Now the boys got into trouble and lost out on sprinkler time.

But I was thinking about it this weekend and thinking I need to address it with my assistant as well. This isn't the first time I've felt as though I'll tell the kids something and then try to get something else done, only to have her not back me up or be "M.I.A." when they are not following through (in her defense she is usually doing something work related, but I feel the primary job is to supervise the kids, not clean, etc.)

Am I'm being too hard on her? If not, how do I address this? I can not take a summer of me not being able to do what I need to do because I have to run interference. It's too expensive to have an assistant here if I have to do it all anyway...

[MsLaura529]

I've been there - on your assistant's side - with my student teaching. It was tough to hear from my cooperating teacher that I needed to toughen up (I'm a very sensitive person) and stuff like that, but it ended up making my experience go much smoother.

Maybe you could sit down with her and work out a new "schedule" together ... where she might be in charge of the school agers for certain times and know that she doesn't have to worry about the cleaning at that point. Don't make it seem like it's because of HER, you could mention this story from the other day as an example, but say that because of how these SA are tough, they need more control and that when she is in charge of them, like when she's going to take them out in the sprinklers, she needs to be just in charge of them. And maybe if the cleanliness is really bothering her, schedule in some cleaning time after? I don't know, just a suggestion.