Eeiny, Meeiny, Miney, Mo

Being absent from work requires teachers to turn over their classes to a substitute. You remember them, and how you used to try to have as much fun with them as you could. You had an advantage: you knew everything about the way that class was run, and the poor sub didn't, and you used this knowlede to try to pull something over on the sub. Don't you remember saying, "Mrs. Smith lets us…"

That's one reason I don't take much time off from work, even when I'm arguably sick enough to stay home. But another of the main reasons is that calling a sub from the pool of labor is a crap-shoot: you really don't know what you're going to get. In my experience, there are three general types of people who wind up working as subsitute teachers:

1. college kids who are earning a teaching credential, or a contract of their own, and are entering the profession.


2. retirees, either from teaching or from the private sector, supplementing their income in their platinum years.


3. people who have been able to earn a Bachelor's degree and pass the CBEST test, but who are, as a group, unemployable in the private sector for some reason or another. In short, misfits. Substitute teaching offers them one-day shots of filling a space, and then the opportunity of moving on: no responsibility, no accountability.

The system doesn't promote watching these people closely. The school is thankful to get someone, anyone "qualified," into that empty class. After that, their problem is solved. If the sub is a disaster, the teacher might fill out the form that exists for rating subs, but it's just filed away. I don't know of any case in which a sub's employment has been terminated for poor performance. We all know there are "background checks," but that's simply a search of legal records, not a personality/skills evaluation.

So if the sub cannot control a class of young people, or complete the lesson, or engages in inappropriate conversations with students, there's little in the system to catch it and screen them out. And there's little motivation to do it, anyway.

Again, it's only that one class of substitutes that I have a problem with. The first class, the young ones entering the profession, often have difficulty with classroom management as well. I know I did for a short while. So I understand that. And those in the second class usually make the best substitutes.

But the end result is the same: I try to find out who a good sub is, and request that person. That's no promise that I'll get her, but at least they will call her. But I still have to write a simple, explicit lesson plan that gets something accomplished and that just about anyone can apply, and that requires skill. And that's why it's work to take a day or two away from my class.