The Substitute Teacher Files

You walk into a new school, lunchbox in hand. You check in at the office and state your name. The secretary gives you a room number and explains how to get there.

She also tells you where the teacher’s lounge is. Which is where you’ll be eating lunch later, because you are a substitute.

Strolling down the heavily lacquered hallway, you eventually find the room. And within a few seconds, you have a pretty good idea of how the day is going to go.

Scenario A: The room is tidy. Desks are arranged in an interesting but not chaotic fashion. The wall is full of stuff to look at, but it’s not cluttered. The teacher’s desk is clear except for a neat stack of textbooks and a single sheet of paper (or two) detailing the plan for the day.

Outcome A: Your day will go smoothly.

Scenario B: The room is messy. Desks are littered with papers, water bottles, and sweatshirts that students left behind. Chairs aren’t pushed in. A “Reading is Fun” poster featuring Larry Bird is hanging on the wall and one of the top corners is hanging down because the sticky tack stopped sticking. You cannot see the top surface of the teacher’s desk because it’s full of piles of stuff. You don’t see a lesson plan anywhere. You later find out the plans were written on various post-it notes bookmarking pages of textbooks that are piled beneath a box of “Emergen-C” (vitamin C supplement mix).

Outcome B: You will be doing free-drawing, read-aloud, Heads-Up 7-Up, and other hyphenated activities throughout the day, hoping the kids don’t get too out of hand.

You don’t always know what you’re getting into as a sub, but over time you become familiar with districts, schools, and classrooms. And if a teacher likes you, before you know it you will be on their short list of subs to call.

I learned a lot about teaching from subbing. You see how teachers set up their classrooms, structure their days, and manage behavior.

Now several years removed from my subbing days, here are a few tidbits that I think back on from time to time.

Teacher’s Lounge

I could have eaten my lunch in the classroom in most cases, but I usually headed to the teacher’s lounge instead. Getting to know people there gave me an opportunity to get asked to sub in other rooms, and also I was hoping to get hired full time as a teacher at some point. Plus, I was unmarried, in my twenties, and didn’t have much of a social life. Why not go talk to whoever was there?

You might think lunchtime in the teacher’s lounge at an unfamiliar school would be a mixed bag for me. It wasn’t. It was like clockwork.

Every time, no matter the school, someone (usually a woman) who had a son about my age would either join me or invite me to sit.

I would be asked one or two things about myself and then I would spend the rest of lunch time listening to them tell all about their boy who’s more or less around my age (could be 16, 26, or 36). He went to this-and-that school, and now is doing this-and-that with so-and-so. And if he was a football player (which I’m not), 90 percent of the conversation would be about his football career. Something about being a football parent brings out that extra gusto.

Physical Education

P.E. was a good situation for me. A lot of subs turned down P.E. jobs and I was happy to claim them. If you don’t mind noise, large classes, and the possibility of witnessing noogies and other shenanigans and horseplay, P.E. is a good place to be.

No papers to collect or grade, pretty straightforward lesson plans, the possibility of going outside and getting fresh air. If I had to demonstrate some athletic concept, I had no problem with that.

I subbed in P.E. many times at elementary schools. But one particular day in high school P.E. was the most memorable (and also the reason I shied away from high school jobs afterward).

We were doing a volleyball unit in grades 9-12. Every class, all day long. Teams were already made, they knew who they were playing against, they knew where to go, they knew how to keep score. And this huge gym had 5 or 6 volleyball games going on at the same time.

The movie “Meet the Parents” was relatively new at the time. In “Meet the Parents,” a guy named Greg Focker meets his future in-laws for the first time and they compete in a rousing game of volleyball in a swimming pool. Greg is trying to impress everyone, but he’s no good and is making his team lose. Robert DeNiro’s character gets in his face at one point and shouts, “You gotta spike those, Focker!”

Imagine school starts at 7:45 and ends at 2:30, and pretty much that whole time you are in a gym full of teenagers where half of them (the boys) are yelling time after time after time, “You gotta spike those, Focker!” It’s just echoing around the gym all day long, ringing in your ears.

I briefly considered nipping it in the bud. But they weren’t technically cussing. I’m sure the regular teacher wouldn’t have stood for it, but with a sub, it’s different. I knew the reference, it wasn’t really malicious in nature, so I just let it slide. All day long.

And also I figured, “I probably just won’t come back to sub at the high school again.”

I didn’t.

Study Hall

The second part of the “one day subbing in high school” story involves study hall. I had to spend the last period of the day in someone else’s classroom, supervising a study hall of 20 or so students. Very little studying was happening, which is no surprise. I just wanted to keep a semblance of order and keep the noise down to a respectable level. And it was going fine.

Toward the end, I was walking around the room seeing if anyone had questions about any homework they had. I almost tripped on a Chicago Tribune that was spread out all over the floor next to one kid’s desk. I believe he had the paper in order to look up current events for a class.

But I looked down and saw he had two big pages all spread out, and they were black and white lingerie ads for Sears and J.C. Penney or some such. It wasn’t really risqué or too unusual, as anyone who reads the paper sees this stuff all the time. But nevertheless, I realized a 15 year-old under my supervision had been spending the last half hour staring at ladies in their bras and panties, and I didn’t really enjoy having to think up a solution to that.

I picked up the paper, folded it, and handed it to him. Thankfully, the study hall ended soon and I headed out the door, never to sub high school again.

Science Lab

My final anecdote is about subbing in fifth and sixth grade science. This teacher had a big lab set up for the day and all of her classes had to do the lab. It was about erosion, so there was a big pan in the middle of each lab table, and on the pan was a big pile of dirt. The students were supposed to see what “wind” and “rain” would do to the dirt by blowing on it and spraying it with water.

They were supposed to draw pictures and write paragraphs showing what effects wind and rain had on the “mountain” over time.

Everything went fine except in one class in the middle of the day, one of the groups was getting carried away and making a big mess. They were laughing and not really doing the assignment. So, I exercised my authority as a sub and took the materials away from them, cleaned up their mess off the table and floor, and told them to sit there the rest of the time and allow others to continue working.

It wasn’t a big deal in my mind, as I’d seen worse as a sub. After being corrected, the students didn’t act out or anything.

Overall, the day had gone well and I left the usual note with my name and number in case I was needed back in the future.

That evening, I got a call and the person on the line identified herself as the teacher I had subbed for that day. I wasn’t too surprised because sometimes teachers want to know if you’re free the next day.

She said her students hadn’t all finished the lab. I said that’s correct. I mentioned it in the note, and yes, their papers are incomplete because they were making a mess and I had to take away their materials.

She said it was a huge problem that the students didn’t finish the lab. When are they going to do the lab now? I said I don’t know.

She took a couple minutes to let me know I would never be asked back to sub for her class again. I said I understood and got off the phone as quickly as possible, trying not to be rude.

And I never went back to that school.

Like I said, you never know what you’re going to get into each day as a sub. Sometimes you opt out of future visits, sometimes they opt you out. Maybe I should’ve asked her if she has a son who plays football.