Tales from a substitute teacher

I graduated with a Bachelor's in English back in 2008, with the intention of becoming a teacher. I had a job lined up, but that ended up falling through during the summer, and I had to do part-time work until the next school year (most school openings are posted in May or June). By the time May 2009 rolled around, the schools in my area were consolidating buildings and firing teachers to deal with the massive number of students leaving the area. I did apply in May, but I had a ton of competition (we're talking 20-30 teachers applying per teaching position open, when 5 for every spot is still considered a lot) and didn't get hired.

I ended up working in other fields for a few years, but decided to get back into education during the 2011-2012 school year. That's when I started subbing, which is what I do now.

This teacher was absolutely shitty at writing lesson plans, and the plans they left me did not fill up the time for each class (high school). I called the office and asked what to do with the remaining time, and the secretary said they would handle it. Apparently the teacher had been warned about it before, and this was a 'straw that broke the camel's back' kind of thing? Whatever the case, the next time I went to that school, that teacher was no longer there.

In my area, substitutes are hired by a company, which has a website for subbing. Teachers post absences to it, and subs read through the absences list and pick whatever one they want.

Usually when there are a lot of postings it means that there is a Professional Development day, but in this case the teachers were doing a 'sick out' (where everyone calls in sick in an attempt to get the school closed for the day from a lack of teachers/subs to fill in for teachers) to protest a lack of a new contract. I only got clued into this when I showed up, because parents were nearby complaining about it.

This school was a 6-8 grade charter school (ages 12-14,ish), and it was notorious for taking in any kid. I would say about 90% of the kids at that school had been expelled from at least one of the three public middle schools. All of the teachers had been there 3 years or less. It was also severely underfunded, and the school did not give a shit about the teachers, or any other adult working in the building. It was very blatantly a for-profit charter school, so it was an absolute shithole.

I subbed there exactly one time, and I will never go back there again. That seems to be the general consensus among the subs in my area too.

By company policy, if a teacher has to travel between buildings, they have to put that in the 'notes' area of their absence on the website. Not all subs have cars, and while the public transportation in my city is pretty good, there still might not be enough time to travel between schools by bus. Most teachers do not do this, though, so it is always a fun surprise when I show up at a school and find out I have to travel during the day.

Fortunately I do have my own car, but one time I didn't, and they had to put a support staff member in for me at the second school. IIRC the teacher got in trouble for that too.

At my company, three writeups in one school year is an automatic dismissal. I got two within two weeks one November (once for 'failure to control the classroom', because two kids destroyed a computer while I was there, and once for 'failure to fulfill duties' when I had to go home sick halfway through the day), so the rest of that school year was very nerve-wracking. It was my first year, too, so for a while I was questioning if I was really any good at teaching.

I have so many vomit stories that it could take up hours to tell them all. Kids, especially little kids, throw up all the damn time, and especially at the worst possible moments.

The best vomit story I have is from when I was subbing for a group of 1st graders. They were playing outside after lunch. I had recess duty that day, and I saw one kid who looked a little green in the face. I was going over to him to tell him to get off the playground equipment and take a break, and he erupted into a fountain of vomit. Since he was up on a tall bridge, it spilled over onto all of the kids below him. One little girl got it all over her clothes, and she ended up throwing up from the smell of it. We had to clear out the playground for the rest of the day so that it could be cleaned.

This was a second grade class. The kid had one of those insulin pumps, so there was a special nurse I had to call any time she complained about feeling dizzy or tired. This kid happened to be a huge joker too, so she flopped down on the ground and acted like she had passed out.

I panicked and called the office saying what had happened, and they immediately sent down the nurse and called for an ambulance. The girl was up and laughing by the time the nurse got to the classroom, but we didn't get the call out to the ambulance until it was already there. The girl had to spend that day's recess writing a letter of apology to both me and the nurse for what had happened.

I am a lesbian. My state does not have protections based on sexual orientation, and the schools are notoriously terrible about firing teachers for 'immoral behaviors' like drinking at bars and such. Teachers had been fired for being gay before, so I have always been really quiet about my orientation.

My cousin (high-school-aged) knew all of this, and he is also a huge shithead. So when I subbed for one of his teachers, he came up to me and told me that I should order him a pizza, because 'when he gets hungry he starts talking about his family.' Unfortunately for him, I called his mother (my aunt) and told her what was going on, and she came up to the school and dragged his ass out for the day.

I don't worry about that too much now (this happened back in early 2012, when I couldn't afford to get another strike that school year) since I have been doing a good job and have made a lot of friends in the schools I work at, but at the time it was very serious.

There are two kinds of paraprofessionals in education: those who support a whole class, and those who work one-on-one with a student. I don't mind subbing for the 'whole class' parapros, because it's basically me being a teacher's assistant for the whole day. But when it's a one-on-one parapro, it's almost always with a kid who is a biter or a runner.

Every time I see a one-on-one parapro position show up on the subbing website, I say to myself "maybe this time will be different." And every time I either come home with bite marks or exhausted from chasing the kid all day.

By the way, this primarily applies to elementary school. While there are parapros in middle and high school, and some do work one-on-one with a student, the students have usually outgrown their running/biting urges by then. Usually.

Even though I'm not that much older than the kids I work with (I'm turning 30 this year), the kids see me as some boring old adult. So when they find out that I share an interest with them, they are usually amazed by it.

In this case, it was at a middle school, and the group of kids involved were ones that usually gave me problems. As soon as they found out I like video games, they started behaving for me. I didn't have any problems with them for the rest of the year after that, though they did try to waste class time talking about whatever game had come out recently.

Kids are surprisingly resilient. I've heard some absolutely horrifying stories from some of them, and they always tell it like it's no big deal. By the end of their stories I always feel like I should give them a hug or something, just because they have been through so much.

This particular story came from a 3rd grader. Her father had been murdered 2 years prior, and she told the class all about the process of the police coming to her house and how they had to go to the trial and stuff. She actually sounded pretty excited about telling everyone about it, and when I asked her if it made her feel sad, she told me "Yeah, I miss my dad, but I've still got my mom and my brother so I'm okay." I'll never stop being amazed by the positive attitude these kids have.

In most schools, teachers get planning periods of some sort, ranging from 30 minutes up to an hour and a half. During that time, substitutes are supposed to report to the office to do whatever work the office needs us to do. Sometimes this means covering a class for another teacher, sometimes this means doing filing/general busywork that the office needs done.

I don't mind going in to other classrooms when I am needed, and I will volunteer for it if I hear a teacher or the secretary talking about it. And for office work, if the secretary asks me to do something, then I will do it. But I never volunteer myself for doing office busywork. Fuck that shit.

Most of the time, if I am not told to go somewhere else, I just hide out in the classroom and read a book or something. I'm not going to go looking for extra work if the secretary doesn't already have something for me.

Subs get to eat in the teacher's lounge, and it can get awkward sometimes. A lot of teachers look down on subs, and I get it, there's a lot of shitty subs out there. But at the same time, it's annoying, because without us teachers wouldn't be able to take sick days or vacation days. It feels like I'm unappreciated at times.

Schools are super-strict about the contact that teachers, subs, and support staff get to have with students. Even though I know the kid and his family, I wasn't on his release form, so technically I wasn't allowed to take him home. Someone overheard me asking if he needed a ride (he normally walked home), and they told the office about it. The office could have reported me to the company, but thankfully I'm friends with the secretary, so instead they just called me and the kid down to the office and told me I couldn't do that unless I was on the kid's release forms.

My mom is a lunch lady at one of the high schools in my area. The first time I subbed at her school, I was subbing in English and we were reading a book with swearing in it. Even though I had told the kids that it is ok to swear if you are reading it from a book, there were still a couple that went and told my mom about it. Of course, they only said, "Mrs. maplepancakes, Ms. maplepancakes was swearing at us!" My mom has a good sense of humor, so during the last hour of the day, she came up to the classroom I was in and 'grounded' me in front of the whole class.

Because of the depressingly large number of school shootings that happen in this country, substitutes are usually given keys to their classroom, so they can lock the door in the event of a lockdown. Usually I lock the door anyway, since kids like to wander in and cause trouble in other classrooms when there is a sub (middle and high school primarily, elementary kids almost never do this). One time I forgot, and a student from another class walked in and suddenly punched another kid in the face before running right out again.

I didn't know who the kid was, and the kid who got punched refused to talk about it, so I don't think anything happened about it. But ever since then, I always double-check to make sure the doors to the classes are locked.

Seriously, fuck them.

I hate charter schools, especially the ones in my city. The majority of them are for-profit, so they operate on as little money as they can so that the sponsors of the charter school can pocket the money. They also heavily push the idea of charter schools being better for kids because they're not restricted by the same rules public schools have, and parents buy into this shit all the time.

I know that there is a lot of bullshit to put up with in public schools, but I guarantee you that 90% of charter schools are worse than public schools. Every single kid that I know has been to a charter school is always behind their grade level academically, and teachers who work at charter schools usually burn out fast or take a job at a public school the moment they are offered one. Unless you are 100% certain that the charter school you are looking at is one of the very few that actually cares about the kids and does a good job educating kids, do not send your kids to a charter school. Ever.

If there is one bit of advice I could give to anyone, it would be this: secretaries rule the world. Be nice to secretaries. Make friends with secretaries. If you are good to the secretaries, they will be good to you.

In subbing, usually sub jobs are posted to the website first, and subs pick them from there. But if a sub if buddy-buddy with a secretary, then that secretary has the power to call a sub and ask them to sub in a specific class on a specific day, and then bypass posting the job to everyone and instead assign it to the one specific sub they want. This is an absolute godsend, because the secretaries I have made friends with know the types of classes I like subbing in (English, art, 'specials' classes in elementary school) and will usually contact me first before posting it for anyone to take. Additionally, secretaries will only assign 'field trip subs' this way, so I've gotten to go on a few field trips because of it.

Runners are the worst. Really small kids (under-7, usually) have absolutely no concept of danger, and while the playgrounds are fenced in there are small gaps here and there for safety reasons (gotta be able to escape the playground without a key if something happens at the school). Usually at the gaps they have those 'offset entrance'-things, were you have to go back and forth around the ends of the fences a few times to get in. Sometimes it's just a person-sized gap in the fence.

More than once I have had to sprint across the playground to grab a kid before they escaped out one of those gaps. One time, when I caught the kid, we were literally five feet away from a busy road. Thankfully the cars on the road had seen the kid and had stopped, but things could have ended so terribly that day. Having a class with runners in it is always the worst, because I have to keep an extra-close eye on them during recess.

Since 2011, I have been exposed to so many diseases, thanks to idiot parents who think their kids don't need vaccinations. Thankfully I haven't caught anything worse than the flu, since I am up-to-date on my vaccines, but it's still shitty to get that "a kid came to school on [DATE] while infected with a highly infectious disease, if you are showing these symptoms then go see your doctor immediately" call.

The impetigo one was particularly annoying, because that came from a family that had gone to the Bahamas during spring break. They apparently hadn't gotten the recommended vaccines before going, and acted totally surprised when their kid caught it and passed it on to like 20 other kids at the school. They weren't anti-vaxxers, they were just terrible at preparing for their vacation, and a bunch of kids got sick because of it. Normally I don't find out anything about the exposures, but this particular case was so stupid and preventable that the secretaries and teachers bitched about it for ages afterwards, so I ended up hearing about it eventually.

But seriously, vaccinate your kids.

Also if you guys like this I'll make some more at some point.