Since the fall of 2014, I have been substitute teaching. All in all, it’s not altogether a bad job, but I can safely say that I won’t miss it. Not a bit.
This is not even to say that I haven’t enjoyed it, because I have. Of all the jobs that I have had over the years, this has by far been my favorite. A few months ago, I was talking to my friend Justyn Miller, who graduated with a fine arts degree, and I described my frustration as, “It’s like working in an art museum. Except that you’re not the curator and you don’t get to interact with the art at all. You’re the guy at the front desk that sells tickets and directs people to the bathroom.” This is the relationship that subbing has to teaching. You’re in the building – you’re tangent to the job you want, but what you do is hardly anything like what you want to do. So while subbing has been a beneficial experience, and while I have even enjoyed it, it does lack the things about education that I like and presents its own frustrations.
My irritations with subbing can be delineated into six basic points:
The Schedule
When I first starting subbing, I thought that I would be working five days a week, maybe four on a bad week. I quickly learned that this is not the case. I had done a lot of networking the county, talking to people, dropping off business cards, and I was sure that I would get more calls. However, that is not the case. Teachers don’t call off as often as you think they do. Complicating that, schools often have preferred subs that have been subbing at that school for years, so they’re higher on the list. I have since learned that working four days a week is a blessing.
This is not to say that there aren’t times of the year when you do get more work. For example, teachers schedule time off around holidays months in advance. I worked quite a bit around Thanksgiving and Christmas, because teachers were vacationing in droves. However, once those two major holidays are over, you don’t get much extra work. People don’t take off for Easter and MLK Day.
Snow Days
While full-time teachers rejoice when the county calls a snow day, subs do not. The difference is that full time teachers are salaried, and get paid based upon the academic year and, conversely, subs get paid by the day. This past spring, there was a span of three weeks where we may have had school twice. Both my paycheck and I were very upset about this development. Of course, the silver lining is that it has taught me to be frugal.
It’s Essentially Glorified Babysitting
One of my biggest frustrations is that subbing doesn’t often involve teaching. There are days, of course, when you’re subbing for a content area that you can teach and the host teacher leaves material beyond a worksheet or a movie. But these days are few and far between. More often than not, subs are simply glorified babysitters who follow prepared activities and discipline when necessary.
I could complain that if this was babysitting, I should get paid a whole lot more (if I have six classes of approximately thirty students, and I have to watch every student for an hour, even if I were to charge eight dollars an hour – a meager rate for baby-sitting – I would be making more than a thousand dollars a day). However, I think that’s a really silly argument, because while I think teachers should get paid more, it’s not exactly feasible to pay an educator thirty thousand a month. Especially not a sub, because really, we don’t do altogether than much other than follow basic instructions and deal with the occasional rebel.
Just a Little Respect
It has been long understood that students don’t respect substitutes. Subs lack the permanence of a classroom teacher. We don’t know the history of the class, the specific rules, the problem students, the liars, or any of it. While we have the ability to discipline, unless we are at the school frequently, we don’t have the authority. It’s a constant battle, then, to convince students that they need to listen. The best success I have had has been at the two schools where I work more frequently. Here, students know who I am and what my expectations are. They have learned to respect those, I think largely because they know that I know the administrators and that I’ll be back. When I go to a school that I rarely visit, students don’t know me, and they have no reason to care. These are the days that are absolutely exhausting, and that leave you reevaluating your plan for the next time you’re at that school.
Summer? What Summer?
As with snow days, subs are only paid for the school days that they work. The summer, obviously, doesn’t have school days, so subs aren’t paid. This requires that I get another job for the two months before school starts again. Two months, as it turns out, is an inconvenient amount of time for a full-time job, so the job hunt is limited to minimum wage, part-time jobs. On the plus side, summer really only lasts from early June to the middle of August, at which time, I’ll be able to work in the school system again.
I Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Many people go into education to help others, to foster a joy of learning. When subbing, this doesn’t happen. When you aren’t in a classroom consistently, you can’t develop the relationships necessary to inspire students. When you’re basically babysitting, making sure students don’t get into shenanigans while watching a video or filling out a worksheet, it’s difficult to demonstrate a love of knowledge. A shift occurs, changing your daily hopes from making a difference and teaching content to hoping for a test day or a movie so you can work on your own projects. As it stands now, I write this as a class of high school sophomores watch a documentary about ancient Mayans. At the end of today, I’m not likely to feel as though I have accomplished anything.
All of this is a means to an end. Subbing has strengthened my ability to discipline students, to respond to plan changes as administration has needed me to cover classes as teachers had had meetings, and it has taught me how to better plan lessons as I have seen some that other teachers have developed. As much as I have frustrations with the job, I have learned a tremendous amount from it and I do view it as being worthwhile. And I am grateful that I have subbed for a year, because now that I have acquired a job teaching 8th grade ELA for the upcoming school year, I can use the skills that I have learned subbing.
And I’m especially grateful for this job change, because it signifies stability, a difference, and a gateway into doing what I want. So while I am grateful for things I have learned while I’ve been subbing, I am more grateful that I will no longer have to do it.
ditchwater 