The most horrible morning of my elementary school life was the day I walked into my third-grade classroom at Cragmont Elementary School in Berkeley following Christmas vacation to reconnect with my favorite teacher of all time, Ethel G. King. Miss King was the sweetest, funniest, most understanding teacher this pathetic, attention-disordered kid had ever had. Her classroom was my comfort zone away from home.
Only it wasn’t Miss King who stood primly before the chalkboard. We had a substitute teacher and she didn’t look very engaging.
“When will Miss King be back?” I asked.
She smiled wanly; it was sort of a grimace. I thought maybe she had stomach trouble. ”Miss King will not be back. We will be together for the rest of this year.”
“So is she sick, or what?”
“That is not for me to say.”
“Oh … My.. God,” I thought. “My most wonderful teacher in all the world is probably lying ill with some terminal disease and I’m gonna be stuck with this … troll.”
It was a dreadful spring semester, and it was my first memory of a substitute teacher.
And now I am one.
No longer is the substitute teacher a faceless creature plugged into the system one day at a time.
Substitute teachers are professionals. The expectations required of regular classroom teachers are also required of them.
I didn’t become a substitute teacher until after a lifetime of public school teaching and administration, but it’s where I am today, and I love it. This is the best of all worlds. Each day is different — exciting in some way — and you seldom know what the day is going to hold.
The excitement usually begins when the phone rings in the small hours of the morning when it’s still dark out.
It may be a school secretary: “Can you come in for Mrs. Jones this morning? It’s a second-grade class.”
Or it may be the automated system used by three school districts in the county — a system that places more than 8,000 substitute teachers a day, nationwide. If you’re lucky, you have an hour to present yourself at the school office, looking good, and happy to be there. You’re given a room key, you let yourself into a darkened classroom and fumble for the light switch. You now have 30 minutes until the troops arrive — a few coming in early to get out of the cold while you are studying the teacher’s notes and maybe getting something on the board for them to do when the bell rings.
And then, for six hours, you will be the most significant presence in the lives of some 25 to 30 boys and girls, each one vying for your attention and love. How could this not be exciting?
One might think substitute teaching can’t begin to compare with the stability and predictability of regular classroom teaching, sharing the lives of the same group of kids all year long — kids about whom you come to care deeply.
Well, yes, there is that. But I enjoy being a free agent, and although I seldom reject an assignment, I could if I wanted to. It’s kind of a nice feeling to know that you don’t have to go to work if you don’t feel like it. But usually I do feel like it. Teaching two or three days a week, I get to interact with more than a thousand kids, kindergarten through eighth grade, in the course of a school year.
And every morning that I enter a classroom, I think of that dreadful semester in the third grade, and make a silent pledge that this will be an important day — a day of value and fun. Because these kids deserve the best I can give.
Robin C. Harris, an 18-year resident of Lake County, is the author of “Journeys out of Darkness, Adventures in Foster Care.” A retired educator, he is a substitute teacher for Lake County schools and has recently completed two works of fiction for children and teens. He is available for tutoring in first through eighth grades. Harris can be contacted at harris.tke@att.net.
