My First Day Substitute Teaching

I started in the teachers' lounge.

After getting my sub packet from the front office I learned I wasn’t subbing until 2nd period. The classroom I was assigned to was apparently taken, so I awkwardly wandered the halls until I found a teacher who pointed me to a teacher’s lounge to stage.

There was a dean in there peering out the window with a hip radio crackling. Apparently a former student came to campus the day prior and broke into someone’s car and another person reported a Snapchat video of him shooting a gun outside a window while driving and thus the school was on perimeter lockdown. Great start.

The lounge printer constantly spit out paper. I asked why and a teacher said that since the software is unreliable they print out physical copies in case it doesn’t work. This resulted in someone printing out 25 copies of the 4 page test I was giving. Only one student ended up needing it so the rest of the 96 pages were wasted.

The teacher’s lounge bathroom had a printout saying “Don’t 💩 in here”. I did not get a photo of that unfortunately.

The hallways felt prison-like. Students aren’t allowed to walk around unless they have a pass and even if you have a pass the deans patrolling the halls ask where you are going. I’m not saying I have a better idea for their situation but it was eerie. Multiple bathrooms were closed. Apparently this is for various reasons like girls catfighting, people doing drugs, or people destroying the bathroom.

The classroom was a time warp.

Talk about stepping back in time. Low lighting. Musty. Sweaty. Beaten down. It felt identical to my time in school except for a TV that was awkwardly bolted on top of the whiteboard and the desks were cobbled together in groups of 4. There’s a software analogy for this that I can’t find where instead of building fully new you keep plopping new code on top of legacy systems and expect it to work.

Taking attendance made no sense.

It was a physical piece of paper and somehow confusing. Half the class showed up. People mumbled their name. I struggled with the diverse names and felt dumb. I was supposed to check P for present, A for Absent, T for Tardy. However, I also had instructions that it was critical that the attendance sheet needed to be returned to the front office within the first 10 minutes of class for safety reasons so I'm not sure how you could mark a T. Additionally, I had clear instructions to never leave the classroom and also to never allow a student to take the attendance down to the front office since they’d mark off their friends as present. So ... yeah my mind went into an infinite loop trying to figure it out.

The test was classic.

The kids were taking a test that day about exponential equations. Half the test was on their Chromebooks but there was one printout section that created some relevance. It was graphing how many acres a forest fire would spread if it grew 30% each day. You had to write the equation and create a table. Several students turned in graphs with a negative curve which signaled that they had no clue what they were doing.

I honestly couldn’t fill out most of the test without first brushing up on exponential equations on my computer. I could draw an estimation of the curve and ball park the numbers but to remember the “exact equations” I had to refresh. I excelled in math in school so this made me laugh that I forgot it. Use it or lose it.

Cell phone use was incessant.

Wow. The kids were always on their phones. Always. The few who respected my requests put theirs down and completed their test but the second they were done they had them out along with headphones. Some kids wore headphones the whole time. I asked them to take them off and they looked dumbfounded and said they always listen to music. I discretely messaged my friend who was an assistant principle at the school and asked what do to. He said as a sub to not bother attempting to take them since post COVID they’re trying to focus on basic attendance. I assume as a sub they were taking advantage to me to some degree but it was wild. I’m not sure how people could focus during a test with me needing to walk around so much and people talking, and headphones, and phones.

One kid just played games on his phone and didn’t do the test until I came by a third time and said “Just attempt it. Attempt something.” He looked like he tried a bit and then handed it in semi-finished.

After everyone was done, one table started playing a group phone game, the rest pretty much just looked at their phones in silence. It was really strange. They played games or scrolled TikTok or Snapchat. A couple watched TV shows. One girl was writing an essay for English. Only 4 out of the 20 in the class spoke aloud to each other and it was while playing games on their phone. I found that sad.

I took this time to talk to each person 1 on 1. Kids acted like completely different people when I gave them undivided attention. They appeared surprised I took the time to do so. They were more polite. When I showed interest in what they were looking at or doing the walls came down.

It was really diverse.

The class had ~25 kids in it and maybe 4 were white kids. Overwhelmingly students of the same race sat together. All the white boys sat together. All the black girls sat together. The latinos sat together with the exception of one sitting alone who looked upsettingly unwell. Several kids I talked with had to be ELL (English Language Learners).

Behavior was brutal.

One girl I could instantly tell was the most mischievous. The look on her face was that mental manipulation was imminent. I also will objectively state the girl was black and I was terrified of saying anything socially incorrect by today’s cancel culture standards. I think the girl knew it. Three times she said she lost her pencil and asked me to bring her a new one. I felt dumb and did it. I finally brought over a chest of pencils and said that should tide her over.

My guess is >50% of the class cheated. In this context I’m defining cheating as looking at the internet or their phone or their friend’s paper for the answers.

Anytime I tried to talk to the whole class, no one really listened. I had little control of the classroom. I was totally inexperienced and blatantly lacked confidence in classroom management. I hated that I was distracting the kids trying to complete work.

My first conversation with a student was wild.

One girl sat alone in the corner. At first glance she gave off the impression of a rural farm girl with two long blond braids. I decided to start my prowess as a life-changing substitute teacher with her. Here’s how my conversation went:

“How do you like the teacher for this class?”

“He’s always riding my dick.”

“Whoa. Wow. Umm. Okay that’s probably an unnecessary expression but what’s the issue?”

“He suspended me because I said the F-word.”

“You said fuck?” (This was some sort of Robin Williams or Jack Black attempt to be cool. It wasn't great.)

A kid turns around. "No, she said the gay one. The gay f-word.”

“Yeah I mean, I’m fucking gay so whatever, right!?”

“Ooof, umm… yikes it’s definitely not a word that’s necessary you know? Maybe skip using that in the future and just get on with life? Anyways, do you like math?”

“I like anything but math.”

“Ahh how about science?”

“Well I’m in an astronomy class but I’m failing.”

“Why?”

“I don’t turn any work in.”

“Well that’s a great way to fail. Why aren’t you turning work in.”

“I don’t like the teacher.”

… and then I need to move away since someone is done with their test. Safe to say this conversation was not what I expected. Later as she left the class she looked me in the eye and said goodbye though. 🤷‍♀️

Overheard Teacher Quotes

Ahh yes another day of getting paid for who knows what.

What do we do here again?

You can sit in my office if you like, it’s not like I ever have time to be there anyway.

Here is some candy. It’s a last resort but will save you if needed. (← I needed it.)

Oh God. This is a tough roster. Good luck.

Takeaways

• One-on-one conversations were great.
• I wanted to give the kids a reason to see purpose. I wanted to say something like “picture what you’d think would happen with a forest fire, now ballpark a line that shows the growth, then make it exact with an equation.” I wanted to show them examples and create relevance.
• I hated seeing kids sitting there for most of the class bored since they finished the test so easily while I was attempting to wrangle the others. I wished I could give full attention to these kids to help them keep improving and learning and just tell the others to sit in the corner and keep not trying since they weren’t going to anyways. Obviously this isn’t great but it’s how I felt at the time.
• There’s a near-zero percent chance of someone focusing if they have their phone.
• The majority of the time was wasted. It was spent babysitting.
• Technology provided negative value in the classroom in nearly every way.
• It was really hard but I’d like to do it again.