I’ve been working for local schools in my hometown for about a year now. I’ve had a lot of great experiences in classrooms, with wide ranges of students and faculty. I have been called into one particular high school so frequently that some of the staff there are starting to recognize me. My job gives me a very interesting snapshot of the education system, and the elaborate beurocracy between teachers and the school district.
When you are in a first-grade classroom and the kids are running around screaming and fighting and you are screaming for them to sit down and shut up and they are totally ignoring you, what do you do?
Why, when I wuz in junier high sckool, did you guys alwayz take role call by passing arouund a peice of paper for all the kids to rite their names on, and then act serprised when I wrote the names Dick Hertz and Mike Hunt on it? Didn’t they teach you anything in substitute teacher sckool?
Sincerely yours,
Dick Hertz
On behalf of all substitute teachers, please accept my sincere apologies for the way my class treated “Sergeant” Nelson, back in junior high school . . .
Do you think of yourself more as a teacher or a babysitter?
This isn’t how our regular original posters do these “Ask the ___” threads, you know. How come you can’t do it the way we’re used to?
I subbed quite a bit.
Do you have kids just totally blowing off the work? I told them, “Your teacher is not an idiot, and she will know if it’s on her desk tomorrow”, but almost no one did it. I took that as a sign of the ineffectuality of the teacher.
Did you have kids in your kids who didn’t belong there? When I subbed at a semi-inner-city school, I had kids turn up in class who were ditching other classes.
“You, get out” (for being disturbing).
Kid leaves.
“Wait, who was that?”
I never found out, because he wasn’t on the roll, because he really belonged two buildings over.
AHunter3 is right.
Our regular SDMB members let us smoke in class, drink coffee, start message board wars and wish death on anyone we darned well please.
Don’t let those totals fool you. We’re nowhere near what those statistics say. In the many years the SDMB has been online, we’ve only had about a dozen threads started in each of the Board categories.
Oh and we’re never asked to cite our facts, show our work and we are strongly encouraged to ask other SDMB members for homework help.
Can Handle the Truth: It’s never been that bad (at least not yet…knock on wood…) but I tend to invent games/systems on the fly to get the students engaged. Actually, most elementary school students are pretty good- they’re still young enough to fear the teacher’s wrath and if I say something to the effect of, “Mr. Smith is going to hear about this” they clam up pretty quick. Sometimes teachers even give me their home phone numbers if things are too crazy, so no matter what I always use that trump card, even if its a bluff. You’d be surprised how quiet the classroom can get when the sub picks up the phone and starts pressing a few random buttons 
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Enter the Flagon: No, I never did that, for precisely the reason you stated. I usually just call out names or if available, use the seating chart after saying, “If I don’t see your body where the seating chart says you’re supposed to be, I’ll just have to mark you absent” which clears up any misplaced students quickly.
Eve: Don’t worry about it 
I actually really enjoy substitute teaching; I get a change of scenery just about every day and meet a ton of people. The fact that I enjoy a challenging classroom tends to take the fight out of a lot of problem students; often students look forward to making the sub lose his temper or start crying. I just take it in stride. I’ve actually had students amazed that I enjoyed putting up with them (I get a lot of ‘I so don’t envy you right now’ comments from students)
Rigamarole:I think of myself as a teacher most of the time. When I give assignments, I let the students use me as a resource for help on difficult problems, and even when students are working quietly I’ll walk around the classroom to make sure everything’s ok. The only time I kind of feel like a babysitter is when I sub for PE. Generally there are multiple PE teachers working at a time, and particularly during the beginning of school or rainy days my presence is rather redundant- but hey, if they want to pay me to take roll then stand around and help out the other PE teachers, no argument here! 
AHunter3: I’m sorry, your regular posters are on sick leave. No I don’t know when they’ll be back.
Cardinal: Yes and yes. Unfortunately, it seems as though a lot of students (and even some teachers) don’t expect a sub to know anything, much less run a meaningful day of class. The kids often see it as a ‘free day’, and I try really hard to make sure they get work done. As for students that don’t belong in class, I’ve had a big problem with that this past week, because school just started and a lot of students are still getting their schedules sorted out. I had one very difficult class where students would just leave- just get up and walk out the door. I’d call security, tell them a student just took off, they’d catch them, bring them back, and five minutes later…poof :smack: