A Classroom Appropriate Rant

The BBQ Pit
1

In the state of California, the clearance to work as a substitute teacher requires only a fingerprint/background check intended to winnow out convicted pedophiles and passage of the CBEST, a standardized test unable to stump lobotomized sea monkeys.

You, Madam, should have your clearance rescinded, torn up, set on fire, and flushed down the nearest excrement encrusted toiled. You may be a credentialed librarian, but the campus supervisors should be equipped with cattle prods to keep you away from the school.

I should have realized when my students warned me that you were “weird”. They’re smart kids and know when an adult’s mental Dewey Decimal doesn’t quite make it to the 100s. The bail job you pulled on me might have saved the Titanic, but it caused me the better part of six hours’ headache. To call you a flake, cretin, would be an insult too all the little clumps of dead skin cells being shed by the world’s scalps.

Was I not clear on the phone that the job was for two days? Most kindergarteners are clear on the concept of two. It would appear that you need some remedial instruction. Promising to work two days and then only working one day would get you fired from a real job, but then substitute teaching is usually the realm of those who can tie their shoes, but are incapable of simple addition.

And your reason? Your laughable, incoherent reason for failing to come the second day? My students were too GOOD? Let me get this straight: my students were polite, helpful, hard working, and followed directions for the entire four hours of Thursday’s summer school session, and this was so appalling, so confoundedly unexpected that you find yourself incapable of returning for more? Because they might lose respect for you?

Madam Librarian, whatever you’re smoking, they need to include it in the DARE lectures given in health class.

Your second reason, while not quite as flabbergasting, is still a piece of work. You didn’t have anything to do on Friday. Now, if you had actually seen the lesson plan and made that statement, I might have been willing to credit you with possession of a prefrontal lobe. However, as you hadn’t seen Friday’s lesson plan and didn’t ask me about the activities, I am forced to draw the conclusion that your cerebral assets end with your brain stem. I can only assume the brain stem because you do draw breath on a regular basis.

I feel the need to explain a few points to you: my students were threatened with messy death and then asked as a favor to me to treat you with respect and courtesy. That’s why they behaved so well. Even the problem child knew that one toe out of line would earn him a call home and a very unsatisfactory citizenship grade. That didn’t end with just one day. They knew the deal going in - two full days. The fact that your workload was light is completely attributable to my preperation efforts. Silly me, I thought that as you were so kind as to agree to the job, I would do as much as possible beforehand, so that you would have an easy day. The fact that you didn’t have to yell and scream at them or wave your arms in an attempt to get them to work means that I have done my job as a teacher, and they have done their jobs as students. Would that you had come close to doing your job as a substitute.

Here’s another point: I actually checked with those that you talked to. The English teacher who helped cover what you left exposed said that you explained to her you weren’t coming back because you were bored. The students said you talked all day long about how I “needed” to be there, and that you wouldn’t be back. So, if you’re laboring under the delusion that I bought your half-witted pack of lies, labor no more.

Given that the concept of “professional responsiblity and courtesy” is completely foreign to you, let me illuminate:

If you agree to take a substitution job, you need to fulfill it. If there is some reason to rescind your commitment, such as students misbehaving (which they didn’t) or poor teacher preparation (which it wasn’t), you need to let the teacher know. Emergencies are excusable. Finding a replacement for a job you know longer wish to finish is acceptable. Leaving a note for the teacher that says only “I can’t come back tomorrow” is not.

In the grand scheme of things teacher-related, bailing on a teacher - whose school district has paid for her attendance at a workshop - with no warning, no reasonable explanation, and no replacement substitute arranged should earn you a beating with all three volumes of The Oxford Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. Thanks, however, to school politics and tenure, not even a harshly worded letter of complaint to the principal will grant me any vengeance.

That being the case, I heartily wish that during your next visit to the library, you unbalanced, quill-sharpening, periodical-shelving ribbon clerk, the reference stack topples over directly onto your head and your body is not found until it has become carrion, Madam Librarian.

2

Good rant, but I can tell you’re not a librarian, because the OED is published in only two volumes (compact edition) or the standard edition of 20 volumes.

3

If you wanted to be absolutely certain about this question, you might have asked the biology lab teachers whether they needed a specimen. :smiley:

Seriously, a lot of substitute teachers are just messed up. One from my high school would just tell awful dirty jokes the whole hour. And then there were the ones who tried to indoctrinate us with their political philosophy by finding a way to tie it in with the subject matter at hand.

4

In general I’ve had good luck with substitutes (as has phouka, I’m sure). But every now and then, a terrible one shows up and takes my classes. Attention: substitutes. Please don’t talk about marijuana smoking and sex with my students. They love to go home and tell mom & dad how cool their day was.

5

Yeesh. In my district we can choose substitutes for days we know we will be out, such as for a conference, etc., so I never have any problem with these days. But call in sick and it’s a crapshoot. I have a stack of extra activities set aside for substitutes to use if they need extra activities. I once had a substitute use two weeks worth of reading comprehension worksheets in a single day. Another substitute left me a summary note that would have earned one of my 5[sup]th[/sup] graders a D had they turned it in for a grade. Fortunately, these have been in the minority.

My non-teacher friends don’t understand when I tell them it is actually less work going in myself than having a substitute.

As of the first day of school, I have 184 sick days accumulated. I’ve been thinking about calling in sick for the whole year and backpacking around Europe.

6

As a former student, I’d just like to say: teachers, you may hate having a substitute teach your classes. But trust me, your students hate it more. The teachers threaten you with prolonged and painful torture if the sub makes a bad report - something the students often can’t entirely control, since some subs are just plain crazy; the revenge of a teacher whose sub didn’t like the class is awful to behold. And the subs themselves are like playing Russian Roulette, against your knee rather than your brain, with every chamber loaded but one. You might get a good one, but the odds are in favor of utter misery. My four worst sub memories:[ol][li]The sub who had an apparent nervous breakdown during sustained silent reading in my second grade class. We were all being very good; we were still at that age when all adults are fearsome things, and teachers are worse. We were being quiet and reading, and then he started to cry and shout at us. None of us knew what to do - this was well outside the bounds of our knowledge of adult behavior - so we just watched him; several of the students started crying, too. The next door teacher eventually sent a kid over to investigate the noise, and we ended up having the principal as our sub the rest of the day.[/li]
[li]The guy who subbed for my 6th grade PE teacher for a week and hit us - no joke - with a meter stick if we weren’t what he considered good, or if he didn’t think we were trying hard enough. Looking back, I should’ve told my parents after the first day with this jerk, but we all just assumed that for some reason the very nice regular PE teacher wanted us to be hit with a stick.[/li]
[li]The woman who subbed for my 7th grade social studies teacher and gave us, instead of the normal Friday reading quiz (ten questions, super easy, you only had to read the chapter to get 100%), the final exam. (The teacher photocopied everything she’d need at the beginning of the year. This strategy really backfired on her in this particular case, since the sub used up almost all her copies of the final and every kid in every class saw the test. Oh, was she mad when she got back.) The sub insisted this was the test our teacher had left, and that we had to do it. Of course, we couldn’t, since we hadn’t had most of the material yet. We were panic-stricken, or at least I was.[/li]
[li]The guy who subbed for my drama teacher when I was in 7th grade. He decided that public humiliation was the way to gain control of the class. He had each member of the class go up one at a time to the front and just stand there, while the other students shouted personal remarks. You didn’t get to sit down until the sub felt you were properly embarrassed. I was (and still am) extremely shy. It was the perfect torture.[/ol]I’ll say it again: students hate sub days. My favorite teacher (8th grade) on the planet knew this, and had a strategy to deal with it, which resulted in my best sub experience ever. Mrs. Wonderful (not her real name) was out for four days (her kid had surgery) during the year I had her. She:[ol]Hand-picked her sub. The sub was a former student of hers then studying to be a teacher.[/li]
[li]Made no threats at all. She simply told us the situation, and then said: “I know you will all make me proud.” And that was that. We understood.[/li]
[li]Left a special lesson plan that involved no tests or quizzes, which otherwise were a daily thing in her class, and that covered only half the material she would normally have covered during the same time. Any extra time was to be devoted to private reading or games.[/li]
[li]Held a party (with pizza, cookies, and soda, plus a really good movie) upon her return, to reward us for our exemplary goodness.[/li][/ol]Now, bear in mind that this particular class was a three-period-long “gifted and talented” language arts class with only 9 students. We had a great deal of freedom that went hand in hand with the incredibly challenging material and workload. We thought nothing of interrupting Mrs. Wonderful, arguing with her or with each other, wandering around the room while she lectured, choosing to do something other than what the rest of the class was doing, writing our own hall passes and just leaving for five minutes - it was accepted and even expected. (We did not abuse the priveleges.)

Our absolute, rigid obedience under the sub’s regime was thus even more unusual than it would be from a regular class. Mrs. Wonderful knew this, appreciated it, and rewarded it. Our sub, as a graduate of the same class, also knew - she kept saying “You don’t have to be this good, I can handle a little more of a challenge than this, I know this isn’t how you normally act” - and she was a barrel of fun besides. So we got lucky two ways on this particular deal. All in all, it was a great four days, though we were all happy when the regular teacher came back.

7

deepbluesea: It’s nice to hear about it from the other side. I have a system for reporting on behavior while I’m gone (which is very rare). I have my students write up a sub report the day I come back, where they get to grade the sub. Any sub that doesn’t pass the test gets put on my “exclude” list. It also gives me the chance to hear about inappropriate behavior from the students themselves, to see if it jibes with the sub’s report.

By the way, I think the lady in your #3 subbed for my class a few years back.

This is beginning to sound like a “post your bad sub story here” thread.

8

I haven’t had any REALLY bad sub experiences, although I remember when I was a senior in high school, one of the social studies teachers had a student teacher. His classes were mainly freshman. Well, the Student Teacher was EXTREMELY good looking, and worse off-he knew it. He was cocky, he showed everyone pictures of him in a male beauty contest, and flirted with every female student from 9th grade to 12th. The freshman girls all had crushes on him-us seniors laughed at him behind his back-we thought he was totally pathetic. The teacher he was working with, a really great guy, Mr. Tobin, was so fed up with him that he vowed never to have another student teacher ever again.

9

Huh. When I was in school we loved it when we had a sub. Usually it meant an easy day, or at least some variety.

10

I second Opal. It rocks. Particularly if we get shown a movie or something.

In math class this year, our teacher was rarely absent (she’s an uber-teacher…I guess), but when she was, it was like red flag day. Mass celebration and all that. Truly it was one of the most boring, useless classes, so we were all ecastatic. Of course, it’s even worse if they leave busy work for us to do.

Personally, my fave modus operendi is just plain cancelling the class. In tenth grade, my English teacher did this several times, as did my bio teacher. I think all of my teachers did this at least once…that year. It completely rocked. :slight_smile:

11

Oh, do I have a bad sub story.

Chior. Now, my chior had nearly a hundred kids in it. (sound scary?) However, the teacher insisted he was a director who’s only job was to wave a pencil. He created music, we did the dirty work. We had elected officials who had all the jobs like taking attendence, passing out music, teaching the slow kids, organizing the money, caring for the robes, hiring the accompianist, punishing miscreants… the whole bit. Sub days were triple dock days meaning if you did anything that normally got you docked (including forgetting your music as well as acting up) you got busted for three times the points. Subs were told to sit in the corner and listen to the pretty music. Subs who could sing were invited to join in if they wanted. We ran ourselves quite well, with or with out our director.

So most subs loved us. And then we got this woman. she was big on kicking people out and sending them to detention. Liek the secretary who tried to take attendence the first day. (Out for the rest of the week) And the librarians who pass out music (“Get back in your seats! I didn’t say you could get up! I said follow the lesson plan! Do work!” out for three days.) She wouldn’t let us rehearse. She knew nothing baout music and kept trying to get us to do worksheets from lit classes. We were on the phone with the teacher every night for about three days saying, “this woman is not allowing us to work, we need her gone.”

When she gave the president a referral and kicked her out of school for three days, the section leaders stood up and did the normal hand sign for “rise” (a quick uplift of fingers on both hands) and the remainder of us walked out. In our usual near military marching silence.

She went nuts, grabbing the grade book and driving home with it as well as the keys.

It was crazy…but then we got this nice young guy doing his very first sub job. We just about licked his feet when he let us work as a choir like we were used to.

12

First of all, allow me to echo–loudly–this statement:

**

Holy crap is that true. When I’ve been able to request a sub, and gotten them, it’s not been a problem. However, when the district is short-staffed sub-wise on a particular day, and I have a fever and no voice, you get whatever crawls out of the sewer that day. Then, the preparation–as well as clean up–is just one big mess.

I was very sick on a Friday this past year, and even though I know Fridays are bad sub pool days, I had to take the sick day. I had requested one sub the kids love, and thought I had him, only to find out Milton (from Office Space) had subbed in my class all day.

  1. None of the work was done.
  2. The kids had charged over to a chart in the morning, which was positioned above an aquarium. They hit it so hard it spilled about 1/5 of its contents.
  3. He spoke very, very softly and mumbly–in other words, Milton-like. He also apparently didn’t make eye contact.

When the kids figured this out, anarchy broke out. My wonderful 5th graders, my pride and joy, began pulling stunts like:

  • steal Jolly Ranchers from the reward jar, then pass them around the room
  • deface their desks by writing on them, then smearing whole bottles of glue on their own and neighbor’s desks, and then each other
  • play Tag around the room
  • play-wrestling
  • punching each other (playing or otherwise, we’re not sure)
  • and other varieties of mayhem

We know all this because the sub wrote it all down. He may not have done anything about it, but he was sure to tattle. Astonishingly enough, all of the kids’ behavior cards were still on green (they change it green to yellow, warning, yellow to blue, lose recess, etc. on down the line)–even though students were telling him he could have the misbehaving kids change their cards, he said “I don’t want to; I don’t understand it.” :::blink blink::: WHAT IS THERE TO UNDERSTAND!? GREEN=GOOD. YELLOW=WARNING. BLUE=BAD RED=VERY BAD. BLACK=EVIL SPAWN, GET OUT OF MY CLASS. It’s over the frickin’ card chart to begin with! (maybe not in that wording…)

What came of this? Nine–count 'em, NINE–of my “angels” received in-school suspensions for the anarchy they themselves had admitted to. Although they had all made bad choices, I was irked that nothing was done with the sub who was ultimately responsible for this.

A few weeks later, I saw this fruitcake subbing in another class, and the next day heard a similar story of complaints (although no suspensions resulted; these were wide-eyed first graders) from the teacher who’d been absent. The two of us then went to our principal and requested the socially delayed oddball be blackballed from the sub list. No sub at all–and that does happen–is better than that fiasco.

Ugh.

13

You know, it was a weird situation for everyone concerned on this one, which is why I took such care to get everything set up. It’s summer school, which means the class lasts for four hours, with one fifteen minute break in the middle. It was also the end of the session - the last two days - and that was, I think, the hardest part of it.

As it was, the high school had no alternative teachers to teach that session (I was one of the first hired, but by the time they filled out the roster, there were no alternates left), my school district for next year had already paid for the workshop, and the high school assistant principal had warmly okay’d my plans for a substitute. If there had been an alternative - rescheduling for another workshop, giving up the summer school job - I would have taken it rather than leave my kids with a sub the last couple of days.

I had hoped to get one of the regular English teachers to cover me, but apparently, August is when they’re all off to Europe, getting married, staying home to have the plumber replace every single pipe in the house, or something else that precludes coming working those two days.

All kidding aside, I didn’t have to threaten my kids. Not even the problem child. I told them what was up. I told them how reluctant I was to leave them the last couple of days. I told them I would try to get a really cool substitute, and then I asked them to please treat the sub nicely and behave. They came through with flying colors.

Their report about the sub made it sound as though there was something weird going on, which they couldn’t put their fingers on - which is exactly how they described her before she subbed on Thursday. “She’s weird, Ms. Phouka.” Apparently, Madam Librarian complained to them that they were too quiet and well behaved (WTF?), and then took them on a forced march around the campus to “boost their energy levels”. Uh huh.

Even that I would have shrugged off if she hadn’t bailed on me in such a spectacular maner.

. . . .

Heh. I’ve subbed more than I’ve had subbed, AlbertRose. I am a brand new teacher. This was my first real live teaching job. I kid you not, though, even my beginner efforts as a substitute won praise from students and teachers. And for what? I followed the lesson plan, I let the kids go to the bathroom, I acted like a human being. I even had one group of kids tell me that they’d learned more in the class period that I subbed than they had the whole semester before. They’d never had a class discussion. They’d never had the teacher give a lecture. What the hell were they doing all that time? Copying notes off the board.

. . .

You’re right! I checked the books I was thinking of, the ones that have moldered in my parents library since I was a phoukling and discovered it was Webster’s Third International Dictionary published by Britannica and included in their 30-odd volume Britannica Encyclopaedia, published way the heck back in the early 70s. Approximately 12 inches by 18 inches by 3 inches and weighing around 7 pounds each, they are the perfect literary bludgeoning device.

14

As for bad subs, there was a story in the news a while back of a local sub (I think it was out here in San Diego county) who let anarchy rein. Trouble was, one of the students was videotaping the whole thing. Boy and girl getting in a fight, using yardsticks to whallop each other, girls exposing their breasts to the camera, books being thrown around, and other madness, and the sub just standing there, occasionally telling them to take their seats.

I remember a couple of bad subs in my time as a student. One stood by in art class as the kids threw balls of clay at each other. Another referred to himself as the purple master of pain and pleasure. :rolleyes: Yeah, that sure impressed the gifted/talented senior kids.

15

I’m wondering if the people who loved it when they had a sub grew up in states with better sub regulations than where I grew up. Where I went to school, a sub could be a raving, frothing psycho - and, in my experience, often was - as long as he’d never been convicted of mass rapings of little children. (This is basically the literal truth. AFAIK, high school students can be subs here for elementary school, as long as they’re 18 and able to keep their knuckles from dragging on the ground when they walk. And, of course, as long as they’ve never molested a kid. Or at least, as long as they didn’t admit to it on their app - we had a case here a while back of a sub (or was it a teacher?) who did apparently have a history of child molesting, but no one bothered to check his record.) I mean, sometimes our teachers themselves weren’t too stable, and presumably they were the best the school system could find; what was left on the bottom of the barrel was profoundly unsettling.

(Another one: the guy who decided that he’d pick kids at random to teach the class. This happened in 2nd grade, when my teacher had “something wrong with her insides” - as she explained it to us - and was gone an awful lot. Hint to the teaching community: second graders are not really ready to teach the class, particularly without any guidance whatsoever. Particularly when the teacher is gone from the room much of the time. And particularly if the “student teacher,” as he called it - for years I misunderstood the meaning of the phrase thanks to this guy - has to read from lesson notes written in cursive, which no one in the class has begun to learn. Does it take a genius to know that mayhem is the inevitable result of this plan? I knew that AT THE TIME, and I was six! Anyway, among other disasters, several kids got very unorthodox haircuts that day, with art scissors, at the hands of a bored fellow student. I was one of 'em. My mom is still mad about this, twenty years later. It comes up at least once a year - “I can’t believe you let Joey Romero cut your hair in 2nd grade! You had such lovely hair! It had never been cut!”)

Also, I note you pro-sub people are talking about high school. It’s much, much worse in grade and middle school. In fact, I can hardly remember having a sub in high school - mostly because the teachers would do anything, including (it sometimes seemed) giving birth during a lecture on trapezoids, to avoid having a sub. (Also, of course, I rarely attended high school, so if we did have subs I probably missed most of them.) And even when they did give in and have a sub, the playing field was much more level; we weren’t defenseless and we weren’t impressed. I mean, yes, there was the day we had a sub in biology who let the class prankster thaw out all the sheep eyeballs and then take them with him when he left class early*. And there was the sub day that Brian pierced Shelly’s ear with a compass point during a test - sure, threats of lawsuits and so forth followed that little episode. But it wasn’t scarring in the way the early subs were, and it wasn’t horrible - just totally unpredictable, albeit sometimes amusing.

[sub]* = No, you don’t want to know what he did with them. Suffice to say that it is no surprise, looking back, that I ditched so many days, or that I quit high school after two years. I’m only surprised I stuck it out as long as I did. A place that lets a 15-year-old boy roam unsupervised with sheep eyeballs is no place for me.[/sub]

Good god, this thread is dredging up a lot of school memories for me. Mostly ones I’d forgotten for good reason, true, but still it’s interesting. Was I the only one who had such a screwed-up education?

16

now i won’t be able to sleep tonight- that story about the eyes is too interesting, and i will spend all night wondering what the heck happened.

if you wont tell, just let me guess:

did he do something “sexual” with them?

did he put them in someone’s locker?

did he put them somewhere else?

did he throw them at someone?

did he eat them in pulic, causing many people to vomit?

did he force someone else to eat them in public, causing many people to vomit?

what did he do? i am intregued!

17

The most memorable substitute teacher incident of my school career came in the sixth grade, when our home economics teacher was out and the legendary Ms. Sims took her place. Ms. Sims was approximately 6’ 6", approximately 160 years old, and looked not unlike the caricature of Janet Reno that used to appear on Saturday Night Live. Home ec was never a class we took seriously, and the fact that food and electrical appliances were involved meant a certain level of chaos on any day.

However, the real kicker came when my classmate Mark was caught dropping small clumps of cookie dough down girls’ shirts. Ms. Sims grabbed him by the ear and pulled him to the front of the class, where in booming tones she accused him of “pussyfooting around.”

The predictably sixth-grade reaction was instant pandemonium. The principal actually had to be called to the room.