I, Substitute
While temporarily hanging my hat in Kansas and helping my mom take care of my dad, I needed some kind of impetus to get me out of their house and perhaps make a few bucks to boot. I have an ancient teaching degree from back when they etched the degrees on slate so I thought “Hey! Let’s squeeze a bit more out of that now useless college expense and substitute teach here!”
Substitute teaching is a weird beast of a gig. You dress appropriately (in accordance to the standards of practice of the district), bring a water bottle, load up a few snacks, a laptop and your official badge. The badge serves as a way to alert other staff that you are legit and not necessarily a child predator roaming the halls and as a magnetic swipe card for either the outside doors, the sign in process, or both.
The office assigns you a room or series of rooms. You wander around the building for about ten minutes trying to find the first room, maybe ask another staff member for directions with some sort of small talk version of “I’m a fucking idiot but I’m all you got!” You find your room and survey where you can hang your jacket, put your water bottle, look for the lesson plans for the day, and marvel in horror at the role sheet filled with unpronounceable names that you will surely mangle at the emotional peril of the underdeveloped, doughy recipients of your stumbling inability to read names from Poland to Mexico to Dubai.
The bar for performance is remarkably low. The job description should read “Must be able to hand out papers, sit bored out of your skull, make sure the lunatics don’t take over the asylum with no authority, no hope for respect from the inmates, and no real idea if they are lying to you when they tell you that their regular class work involves smartphones and flaming hot covered salt lick snacks.”
I immediately recognize that, as opposed to the hardened criminal class of Chicago’s freshman students, these Kansas kids are more dully laconic and don’t even bother to take a beat to notice me or make eye contact. No intent to rebel, these folks are like people sitting on the train hoping you don’t sit down next to them and if they pretend to be on the phone you won’t try to speak. Imagine a blind date with thirty women who see you at the door and knew instantly this was not the date they hoped for.
I’m a sucker for a challenge so I wade in. The class for this maiden voyage is a Film Appreciation class (the drama teacher has quit the job a few weeks prior because of a poorly executed active shooter situation that left him to restart therapy and ultimately decide this was not working for him) so I leap right in with questions about what movies they like. Christ, I love movies and even have a movie podcast so I’m certain I can engage this room of stinky zombies.
Kung Fu Panda.
Among the students willing to hold their cement-filled heads above neckline, it seems the only movie any of them can remember seeing is Kung Fu-fucking-Panda.
We talk about why they like it, what other movies they might say is in the same genre, and then the eureka moment. An overly tall white kid with long, unkempt hair and glasses looks up and asks “What do you think of A Clockwork Orange?”
“The 1971 film based on the Anthony Burgess novel? Droogies? Alec and ‘Singing in the Rain’?”
I nail that one. We are off. He and I start a mini-discussion of the themes of the film and how the experiment of forcing a kid to watch the horrors of the world on repeat to pacify him has been effectively performed on his contemporaries as they are flooded with images on their smartphones twenty-four hours a day and was the experiment from the film successful? The groupmind of the numb, Cheeto-infused monkeys notices one of their own being taken seriously by the monster adult and they start to wake up.
“Did you like Titanic?”
“Which is better—Get Out or Nope?”
“Have you seen Akira?”
The ninety-minute class flies by. By the time the bell rings, half the kids are still asking me questions and act almost as if they are fully functioning humans. Then I’m off to Room A313. The Special Education class. Six hours of two and three kids at a time with worksheets and dicking around and boredom. The wifi in the school is shit due to a billion smartphones sucking the juice for Tik Tok so I can barely access even Apple News. I’m exhausted by the end of the day but not the good kind of worn out. The exhaustion of the static.
The secretary in the office asks me if I can come back the next day and the day after that. This is the substitute teacher sweet spot. It isn’t difficult to get work but the perks of being known by the staff and students come with repeat visits. I’m in.
The next day, the secretary puts me in the drama room for the full day. She tells me the word is out, that the kids in the film class had spread the word that I was cool and interesting (an anomaly in the ranks of substitute teachers).
The first group is the Advanced Rep gang. These are the bona fide theater geeks. They have a project that stinks of busy work (pick a monologue and analyze it for theme and structure). No performance of the monologue. No grade because they don’t have a real teacher. So we talk about writing their own monologues. Where to find the material. War stories from my days in Chicago theater. The time flies by.
The second class is StageCraft. Also students interested in the work. More busy work so instead, I give them stagecraft challenges I encountered in the many years in Chicago. Actual challenges we encountered and let them work in groups to solve the issues. They were way into it.
Third class is Intro to Theater. Definitely not theater geeks. Freshman shoved into a class that was like English but wasn’t. We talk about stories and storytelling and then I give them half the time to fuck around.
Lunch Duty. Then another Intro to Theater group. Then Hall Monitoring. Then home. I’m so tired from being actually engaged for most of the day I grab a beer and practically pass out on the couch. This is the good kind of pooped. The type of exhaustion that comes at the end of a productive feeling. I’m finding my stride.
The third day, I’m on my game. All the things I remembered from being a teacher in Chicago, the decade when I had my own classroom and own rules, came back in force. I discard the work sheets and we have active discussions about theater, art, music, writing and the perils involved in doing anything truly creative in a society that rewards mediocrity and conformism over originality. In every class at least one student asks me if I’ll be their permanent drama teacher. I’m new and I’m different. I’m not from ‘round these parts and the New Age Hippie teacher I was in the 1990’s fascinates these idiots. I have a ball. After being lied to and discarded by my soulmate I start to regain the idea that I am worth something, that I do bring some value to the world.
The thing I remind myself is that I'm not looking to get back into teaching children again. I did it in the 90's, was damn good at it, wrote a book about it, and now have other things to do. That said, being a good substitute teacher is sort of like being a really good pick up basketball player in a back lot court. No one expects you to make the shots but you can and do. Fun. Innocuous. Temporary.
This week I'll swing out to a few different high schools and see what Wichita looks like from different angles. Funny, though. The movies made about teachers are legendary. As far as I know there are only a handful about substitute teachers and they aren't heartwarming, inspirational fare.
