Substitute Teacher - Substitute or Teacher?

As many of you may not know, during this time of unemployment, I have gone and gotten certified to substitute the children of Gwinnett County. This certification involved FIVE RIGOROUS!!!!! hours of mind-numbing training. If by training, you mean me bashing my brains out and learning nothing - the only benefit is now I can legally substitute teach grades K-12 for up to 15 days in a row.

I know that I’m far from brilliant but I believe that I have realistic expectations on what a substitute teacher is. Much more a substitute, less a teacher. My recollections on what a sub does involves, movies, tests, and sitting in the corner and keeping busy all the while we, as unruly children, misbehaved to our fullest. Now that I’m on the other side, I fully intend to be that cool sub. The one that gets things done but is not someone’s mom, is not power hungry – because let’s face it, we get paid $87 a day – the only hungry I am is in my stomach from being poor. This seminar led me to realize that many other people’s expectations as a substitute teacher are far from realistic. They want to teach. They want to touch these children. I laughed when I heard this comment. No one else seemed to understand the humor.

When I arrived this morning for my quickie seminar, I took a quick glance at the substitute population and my heart dropped. Have I really come this far in my schooling only to land so low? Last week I was riding high in Istanbul, this week, I’m sitting in a room being interviewed by a man with the last name Crapo (I’m NOT kidding.). I thought that I would see many of my peers, my unemployed new college graduated peers. To my dismay, I was treated to a cast of rejects, ranging from morbidly obese housemoms to barely literate angry women, and of course, the consummate morning brown-noser who is ALWAYS IN A GOOD MOOD. As a morning person myself, I wanted to slit his gay-voice throat. I discovered the only thing worse that a gay voice – is the Southern version, the know-it-all, slightly slow gay voice. Disgusting.

Then came the confusion on the dress code. The email I received mentioned something called business casual. I’m positive business casual is something that involves, skirt, close toed shoes, a blouse and hair brushing. Tell that to the haggard house mom who showed up in gardening jeans, flip flops and a t-shirt. I woke up early to blow dry my hair so that it was all flipping to the same side and I encounter THIS. This offends my sartorial sensibilities to the extreme as about ½ of the 16 people attending this seminar have disregarded dress code as merely a suggestion. My professional heart shudders.

Anyway, in this seminar, we were treated like 1^st graders, getting reward tickets for answering questions. Split in groups of 4, we read paragraphs and were expected to be able to summarize them to teach them to our group mates. Not so hard? Yeeeeeeah. Not so hard for those that can read. I haven’t encountered that much blustering in my life.

One woman, whose name is Janise – pronounced Ja-neice – was on THIS side of literate, she could read, but not really comprehend what she was saying. Other than being blinded by her aquamarine ruffled blouse, my head nearly exploded by trying to listen to her speak. She had 2 pages to summarize and couldn’t do it. I would say she was maybe, late 20s? She ended up reading a paragraph, trying to summarize the rest, giving up, skipping a paragraph, reading every third word of the next, going to the next page, before finally just reading everything out loud to the group. THIS IS MY SUB POOL. She demonstrated to me her inability to think on a higher plane beyond reading words. This probably means that she’s not that bad a driver, as she can comprehend the meaning of STOP. After a laborious 10 mins explanation of collaborative group work, she confessed that she was nervous – obvi explaining why she forgot how to summarize.

At one point, we’re writing on giant sticky notes stuck on the walls. I’m circling something and I accidentally draw on the wall with my Crayola, non-toxic, washable BOLD purple marker. My group members laugh nervously as I shrug. Washable for a reason, folks.

In the end, I signed up to sub in elementary, middle and high school. I figure I actually have a higher chance of getting hired since I still have contacts in these schools. I actually hope I get called in to sub an elementary Chinese language class. That might be awesome. My dreams are to go into an AP Euro class, perhaps AP World, or even AP English. Knowing my luck, I’ll get stuck with 7^th grade biology with girls who are nasty and like Miley Cyrus. If that’s the case, they don’t know what’s coming to them.

All I have to say is, if this is the substitute training, I can’t wait to actually get into a classroom.

The only question that remains is: who will pick me first?