by Rebecca Piirto Heath
She looks like she could be trouble. As I make my way around the classroom I notice her eyeing me.
She’s tall for a junior. Her long black hair is streaked with magenta and white pulled up in a high side ponytail tied with black leather feathered laces. From the neck up I count at least a dozen piercings ringing ears, nose and lip. Her black spandex leggings are straining the boundaries to accommodate her pear-shaped body.
Her face is angular, not unattractive but with features too heavy to be pretty. Her eyes are so heavily lined with black liner and mascara that they look pasted on. She and her friend, a slight boy in a work shirt with the name Miguel stitched on the pocket, are not writing. They are talking and laughing about something on an iPhone.
Teachers are always supposed to confiscate all phones, but since their regular teacher the basketball coach has left for his game without passing the baton to me, I am strategizing about how to regain authority without alienating the 40 teens in the room.
“Look Drew got in an accident,” she says showing the screen to the class.
I grab the phone and look at the photo of a white Mustang with a crater in the plastic bumper.
“OK everyone,” I say, “Get out a piece of paper and write a sentence about a crumpled Mustang bumper. How is that a metaphor for this kid’s life?”
They all shut up for a second stunned. Then erupt in laughter as they realize I’m joking. I am, after all, a sub. Not a real teacher. How could I be assigning them something to do that involves metaphors? For the last half I stood in the back of the room while their regular teacher, Coach Cool, told them in an ironic monotone sprinkled with “dude” about the story from the book that they would be reading for the rest of the period.
I came in early to take his last period and saw a note on his computer. “I’ll be here when class starts,” was all it said. I waited for 20 minutes hoping he would at least show up. He strolls in with one minute until bell and doesn’t introduce himself. Just sits down at his laptop and starts tapping away.
“You won’t have to do anything,” he says.
“But I like to have something to do,” I respond.
So I wait in the back of the room while he continues his laconic drone. As he gathers his things to leave he finally looks my way. “This is Mrs…. What is it? “ I tell them my name. “Yeah,” he says. Nothing else. Not show her how great this class is. Not so much as a thank you to me. Just, I’m out of here. What a dick.
Up until moving here for my husband’s job a year ago I had tenure with a district upstate. I have a master’s from a top-10 university. I have written and published books. I have lists of professional accomplishments. But here in this room right now I am a “the sub” – a sub-human species suspected of laziness, without power who elicits student sympathy or boredom at best and at worst, ridicule. It’s not a job that many would suffer. I wonder right now why I am doing this to myself. An ill-concieved desire to spread the love of lifelong learning?
From the high school student perspective subs are a treat or an opportunity for sadism. When it is announced that there is a sub in class students take it as license for catching up on gossip, sending a snapchat, surfing the web, sleeping or making disruptive comments. Even kids who are angels for their regular teacher can adopt a snarl or a snarky smirk with a sub. Most of them want to do anything but get down to the business of learning anything.
What is even more discouraging is that sometimes the teachers you substitute for don’t value your contribution either. Some dash off a hasty paragraph of what they want. The big surprise when I started doing this was that many either won’t or can’t provide you with the details you need to achieve classroom control and teaching competency. Once a teacher who was supposed to provide me with desirable items like a seating chart, class list and lesson plan refused to believe I could collect the test scantrons and store them in the proper place without help. She insisted on coming into the class (from her in-service meeting) and doing it herself. Both students and other teachers can treat you like you’re missing a functional prefrontal lobe. Subs are generally not believed to be competent.
Often you enter the classroom ten minutes before 40 kids rush in not knowing what level of English or social science this is, what they are studying, what they just finished or what comes next. You know nothing. All your years of graduate study and classroom experience are of no use. You have no relationship with the kids rushing in and you know nothing about what they need or how they respond. They are going to eat you alive. For the next 90 minutes it will be survival of the fittest.
If I actually want to teach them anything I will have to be sneaky. Being a substitute teacher is a slippery slope. If you can establish the right tone of humor and don’t-mess-with-me credibility in the first 15 minutes of class, you can usually make it through the next hour and 15 minutes without any major incidents. If you don’t or if the class has one too many 16-year-olds who snuck in vodka or had a few tokes during lunch, then there is nothing you can do at this point but try to survive until the day is over.
Always you will have one or two top students who try to appease your calls for quiet by telling the rest to shush. And don’t overlook the dead-eyed kid in the fatigue jacket who watches you as if daring you to try to get him to respond to anything. In this district the appearances don’t always jive with the level of malevolence. In this affluent California district I had a kid who looked like a straight arrow Toby McGuire and who puffed on a vaporizer full of pot in the corner of class with two friends as the bell was ringing. He tried to get me to believe it was just a harmless vape, which is still illegal in high school. In another district I had a student who had murdered his girlfriend, disposed of her dismembered body in the Sierra foothills, then led the police in the search for her playing the heartbroken boyfriend.
They will humor you for a while but real success means becoming an entertainer. You’re competing with the screen in everyone’s pocket. Whatever you do stay away from the actual curriculum. Win them over first with sarcasm, irony or interesting factoids. No matter how good you are at this, eventually the noise levels will rise, your ironic jokes and fascinating anecdotes will fall flat and all you can do to stop the rising sense of impending chaos is to say something shocking or funny.
Sometimes it works and you can teach them something. Yes, they do care about getting into college if you find a way to make it relevant. Once I had a social studies class that was forced to watch a video on the cotton gin by their football coach teacher. They were so disengaged in material that was clearly 5th grade level that in desperation I made up a current events game on the spot. Identify that current historic figure. No one could identify the governor or vice president, but everyone got Pikachu and Mario immediately.
I’m ashamed to say that on this Friday with the basketball coach’s language arts class, I stopped trying. I just want to get through the period.
So when this kohl-eyed Amazon tries to trifle with me, I just let her have her phone back.
“Put it away,” I say.
Almost as a consolation, she decides to ask me a question that requires me to play teacher.
She is confused about the short story the teacher has assigned the class to read. They are supposed to write a timeline for events in the story and she’s not sure which happened first. Did the woman in the story hit a motorcyclist and then the main guy stops and helps her? Or did the guy hit the motorcyclist and then the other car hit him?
The story by Andre Dubus is about the moment that changed his life forever. He stopped to help motorist in trouble and was sideswiped by another car, crushing his left leg beyond all hope of reconstruction. Dubus had to have his leg cut off below the knee, but before this happened he managed to push the woman he stopped for out of the way. This story, told in a confusing series of turns and switchbacks is presented in the wayward manner of one who is trying to draw up murky details of a barely remembered traumatic incident.
I explain to her that the blood he thought he saw was just crankcase oil and the women had only run over an abandoned motorcycle.
She looks at me. She didn’t expect me to know the answer. I had read the essay when I was standing in the back of the class.
“No one was hurt,” I say. “The writer stopped to be a Good Samaritan and then was hit himself. It’s the unanswered question behind the whole story.”
“Wait, what about the woman?” she says. “He pushed her out of the way and saved her life?”
“Yes, he did that before the car hit him. What do you think? Do you think he would have stopped if he had known that it would change his life forever?” I ask her.
She stops and thinks.
“What’s your name?” I ask. Kat. Her name is Kat. I decide to try for a teaching moment.
“Hey everyone. Kat has a great question. In the story you’re reading Andre has stopped to help this woman and gets hit by a car and loses his leg because of his act of kindness.”
One by one they stop talking and look at me.
“Do you think he would have stopped if he had known that that one action would change his life forever?”
“ No way.” “ I wouldn’t .” “You’d have to be crazy.” People are nodding their heads thinking about it.
“Well, I don’t know. He also saves the woman’s life.” It’s Kat. She’s looking at me.
“How many of you would have stopped if you were Dubus?” I ask. A couple of them raise their hands. One of them is Kat.
“I think I would have still done it. He still went on to be a famous writer. And it gave him something to write about.”
I’m amazed. I look at her impressed. “That’s true. What a great observation.”
Still in teacher mode I decide to go for the big finish. “You guys are going to be writing a story on Wednesday about your own brush with fate. Think about this idea when you do that. Has there ever been a moment that changed your life?”
They all go back to reading, talking. I return to walking around the classroom looking at their work. Getting them back on track here and there. Back in policing mode. Nothing more than a babysitter.
Fifteen minutes later everyone is gathered around the door waiting for the final bell to ring. Someone tries to slip out the door unseen.
“C’mom “ I say. “ Don’t do that to me. You’ve got to know that being a sub is the worst.”
Murmers all around. Someone pulls back the kid who tried to leave.
“”Yeah. You’re OK,” It’s Kat. “I hate subs who try to be our teacher,” she says.
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