Substitute Tales

Last night I took several calls before I accepted a middle-school art classroom. The machine voice said the students would be doing basket weaving and paper mache. Perfect, I thought, how hard can that be? Some days the hardest part of the day is walking those long hallways and climbing all the flights of stairs with the arthritic knee. Good exercise though.

My favorite sub jobs this year have turned out to be in the Immersion Schools, and in my sister's middle school ELL classroom. In the Immersion Schools, students begin their language studies in kindergarten and continue through 5th grade having most subjects taught in Spanish or French. My sister's classes have students from all over the world who are learning English.

The Immersion Schools have young, energetic native speakers from the French- and Spanish-speaking worlds who work as teaching assistants in most classes. At French Immersion last week I worked with a pair of adorable teaching assistants from a city in the north of France. I sat at the teacher's desk correcting some math papers while the students were at lunch and I heard what I thought to be smacking lips. I looked up and saw the two assistants stealing a kiss at the door. Those French, so romantic! Most of the time these young people are very excited to have their supervising teacher gone for a day (probably because you can get away with a little kissing if you want to). These temporary immigrants get their chance to be in charge and do things the way they want to do things, the French way or the Colombian way, not the American way. Culturally, there are big differences in teaching styles. I, of course, encourage their professional growth in every way. "Don't mind me," I tell them. "I'll just sit here and read the New Yorker on my Kindle while you teach. Let me know if you need anything or if I can help you in any way."

Some days in the life of a substitute are more challenging. An eighth grade Spanish class I had last Friday really took it all out of me. I had two class-clown types, one wearing huge glasses and one with a fake cast on his finger which he would move from one digit to the next, and several blondes in those silly boots the girls all wear, who were freshening up their makeup. All this would have been fine, but I had a bucket-load of curriculum I was supposed to cover. Did I mention it was also the last day of Winterfest Frenzy Week and all any of them wanted to do was get out of class early so they could get good seats at the assembly? I took a three day weekend to recover.

I have leaned that your dealings with office staff, teachers, and para-professionals are usually very friendly, helpful encounters. Sometimes you will find people in these roles, however, who suffer from borderline personality disorders and who enjoy being verbally abusive to you. You have to be able to go with the flow. It helps if you pretend you have no problems with all the new technology teachers use nowadays, at least in the school districts I sub in. You do not mention you are from the ditto machine and film projector era, although your wrinkles probably give you away. Since I usually go to a new place each day, I prepare myself to meet up with the unexpected and/or ridiculous. To maintain your sanity, you have to take the job seriously and not seriously all at the same time. After all, tomorrow is another day and there are no papers to correct at home that evening, no meetings to go to, no report cards. You just need to get to bed early, as mature ladies should anyway.

Last week, while on a two-day stint at the Spanish Immersion School across the street from us, I found myself falling in love with my second-grade class. The regular teacher had been absent many days, the school secretary told me, because her pregnancy was not going well. The kids, instead of turning into demanding whiny brats, had become fiercely independent, saying that their teacher had told them why she was gone and they, though they knew, could not tell anyone what was wrong with her. They insisted they could take themselves to lunch, to gym, etc. They took their own attendance and lunch count. They spoke Spanish to each other without any encouragement and they politely corrected my bad grammar when I spoke to them in Spanish. They furiously focused on their academic tasks with enthusiasm and got along with each other without any fuss. Teaching assistants from Venezuela and Colombia came in to teach math, art, and social studies lessons both days. These kids were so adorable that I wanted to stay on, but they found a really fluent sub and I was told to hit the road.

So, Pueblo basket weaving went well this morning, all ten of the ninth graders stayed on task and now I have a nice long break. Coming up this afternoon are three back-to-back classes of paper mache. Students are making Shawabti dolls. These artifacts were found in the tombs of Egyptian mummies. The gods would call upon the dolls to do the work the mummy did not want to do on it's way to the afterlife. King Tut had 401 such dolls in his tomb, one for each day of the Egyptian year. Not a bad concept, too bad you had to wait to be dead for them to go to work for you.

Maybe I will sneak out for a calming capuccino at Starbucks before the flour and water and newspaper starts flying.

PS. It turned out to be a really fun afternoon. I had a student who had just returned from three years in Egypt. His family were in Cairo and they camped out at the airport for a week before they could get out. He had some good stories to tell.