Week Two: Still going strong(-ish)

This week I started my temporary career as a day-to-day sub. Anecdotes/observations from the past three days:

• 2: Number of classrooms I was sent to which contained no students
  2: Number of classrooms I was sent to which already contained another sub
  1: Number of classrooms I was sent to which contained the actual teacher
  0: Number of times I have held a room key - any room key - in my hand
  
  
• Covering four periods of geometry, I initially thought kids were having trouble with their algebra review worksheets because they had forgotten the order of operations. They had, but that wasn't the whole problem. They had also forgotten their times tables. They did not seem to realize that they could just do the (admittedly tedious) addition; instead, they sat staring at their papers until I came around to each one individually and helped them through their problems. They were intially suspicious of this seemingly foreign practice, but by the end a few expressed regret that I was not staying in their class. Little do they know: I have entirely forgotten any geometry I ever knew.
  
  
• Covering one peiod of special ed, I had some students who read more fluently than my seniors, and others who could neither read nor write at all. One boy labored over his name for several minutes, then told me that his classes mostly consist of teachers "helping [him] spell." I intellectually knew it when I declined to check the "Special Ed" box on my application to The Program, but I really, really know it now: teaching SpEd is a whole other job than "regular" and ESL teaching (already two very different jobs.) It requires a whole other set of skills an an arsenal of personalized tactics and support strategies. I have the hugest respect for the good special ed workers out there. There are many - though of course, nowhere near enough.
  
  
• High school sports directors should not be allowed in the classroom. Today I covered for the sports director, who was on campus all day setting up for tonight's football game but who pounced on me the minute he overheard me asking who needed a sub. His students did not know what class they were in (all levels of English, incidentally, though the room betrays no hint of it) and told me he intends to "start teaching on Tuesday" when there's no first-game-of-the-season to worry about. I spent much of the morning flashing back to my own high school biology class, the bulk of which was spent sans teacher as he made equipment- and scheduling-related phone calls from the storeroom.
  
  
• The administration at my school is a joke. We have two principals and nine assistant principals. No one seems to know all their names or what they all do; the two principals are engaged in a protracted battle of one-upmanship and active undermining of the other camp. The schools is being divided into two campuses, North and South, which communicate by radio when at all and may be on different schedules next year. As the student who led me around campus on my first observation day astutely remarked, "There should only be one king for every kingdom." Not wanting to undermine my administrators before my first day of work, I told him that was true, if we automatically assumed we were dealing with a monarchic system. But even then, I knew he was right.
  
  
• All those people, and still, no one knows what the hell is going on. Who needs subs? Where is the person in charge of subs? How do I get to the top of the day-to-day list? No one has been able to answer any of these questions, with the exception, today, of "Where is the person in charge." (The answer, incidentally, was "Not here.") I have just been showing up every morning and asking who needs coverage. There is almost always someone, though I usually have to ask about four different people, and yesterday I got stuck in the principal's office for one period, helping the secretaries out with data entry. I debated refusing to do it, as it's about ten thousand leagues outside my job description, but they really needed the help, and besides, I was getting paid for the time. I also learned a lot about my school, not so much from the data I was entering as from all the gossip and backbiting you overhear when you're sitting in a high-traffic area in the chair of someone who most people routinely ignore anyway. It was a good experience to have, but I won't do it again - it felt too weird, like being back in middle school when I used to help my mom and the secretaries at her school make up student packets and end-of-summer mailings.
  
  
• Overcrowding is a real problem, and no one quite knows how to fix it. However, we also have the equally severe and completely solveable problem of uneven student distribution. First period geometry, for instance, had thirteen students; fifth period of the same exact class had about 50. They covered every available surface, including desk- and tabletops. A few refused to sit on the floor to do their work, as the floors have not been cleaned in months. I could not in good conscience force them to.
  
  
• I was intitially fearful of subbing, but in my incredibly limited experiences so far, other peoples' kids have been great. They have nothing to prove with me, there's that permanent Day One taboo against stepping too far out of line, and there's no grading involved at all. Of course, the experience is a thousand times better when there is a lesson plan waiting, which is not always the case. My plan this labor-dabor weekend is to make up a small Emergency Sub Kit which I can use in unprepared classrooms and leave for my own sub if I ever have a sudden emergency that's so big I can't spare ten minutes to scrawl a rough outline of the next day's activities.
  
  
• I finally went to the textbook room. As I suspected, it took over an hour to inspect and preview all my options. The selection is wonderful - I was hoping to find "a modern play or two," but instead found Jean-Paul Sartre, August Wilson, Eugene O'Neill, Lorraine Hainsberry, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, George Bernard Shaw, and Tom Stoppard. I was crossing my fingers for several specific novels, including 1984, The Bell Jar, Things Fall Apart, and Snow Falling on Cedars. All were present. I was pleasantly surprised by books like The Stranger, The Sound and the Fury, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, Heart of Darkness - all rich and complex works whose presence seemed too much to hope for. Maya Angelou and Barbara Kingsolver were both there - but so were Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Munro. And of course, let's not forget Sandra Cisneros.
  
  
• The textbook lady seems to like me a lot more now, presumably since I spent so much time poring over the stacks. I must say, I like her too - she does her job well and she's clearly there for the kids.
  
  
• I wrote a couple of big rants this week, one about undocumented students and one about Jonathan Kozol. Stay tuned.