Confessions of a Substitute Schoolteacher (me)
Teacher shortages have many school districts across the country scrambling for substitutes. I joined the ranks.
Four years ago, I became a substitute teacher at a public school in a small but urban school district about an hour away from New York City. A friend who had taught there had been promoted to a post in the school system's administration. He knew that I was about to retire from ABC News, so he asked if I would be interested in substitute teaching. I said yes. I submitted my application and my college transcript (I'd forgotten about that D I got in Statistics in my junior year. That was a shock to see.) I underwent fingerprinting and a criminal background check. About a month later, I was hired,
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It had been forty-plus years since I had last been a student and that was in grad school. So, it was much longer since I'd been in elementary or secondary high school. When I entered sixth grade, Kennedy was still president (he was assassinated that November) and we wrote our assignments on ruled paper with No. 2 pencils. My teachers were young white women. To "fink" on a classmate -- turn in another kid for doing something wrong in class -- was practically a felony. To be branded a tattle-tale was to risk serious ostracism.
I would learn quickly that many things had changed in nearly half a century. But a few things had not. Even the youngest schoolchildren had chromebooks -- personal computers -- for doing their work. Kids routinely finked on other kids. Most of the teachers were still young white women.
My first day as a substitute was with a third grade class. That morning, I worried about how to dress. I had no idea. On the theory that it is always better to err by overdressing than underdressing, I wore a suit and tie. After checking in with the office, I headed down the hallway to my assigned classroom. I passed a line of children who were probably second or third graders. They stood against the wall very obediently. A little white boy looked at me and stepped from the line.
"Are you the president?" he asked me. Was I being mocked? I peered at him. He was serious.
"No," I said, "I'm not the president." Obama had been out of office two years but maybe he somehow had the idea that a tall Black man in a suit must be the president. If nothing else, it certainly was a positive image. Later that same day, another little boy would look at me and exclaim incredulously, "Why are you dressed like that?" So much for the positive image. I would come to learn that teachers don't dress up. Casual attire is perfectly acceptable these days. No one wears a suit and tie.
For my first few assignments, I intentionally chose lower grades, Kindergarten, or first to third grades. My thinking was that younger children would be easier to manage than older children. I was wrong. The littlest kids may be cute but that was often deceiving. In a substitute, they could smell an opening to get away with things their regular teacher would never allow. They were practically bouncing out of their chairs and visiting one another in the middle of class, almost daring me to discipline them. When I did, they would blithely ignore me until I bellowed at them. That would buy maybe ten minutes of peace before the chaos would start to erupt again. To be sure, not everyone joined in the mayhem. Roughly half of the children in each class would sit at their desks, attentively doing their work or reading, oblivious to the outbursts erupting all around them. I deeply admired their capacity to remain focused.
But as rebellious as some of the children could be, I soon learned that they were all very attuned to and comfortable with their daily routines. They had their day's expected pattern of work, food and play, and to deviate from it could be jarring.
Before I'd take charge of the class, I would make a point of meeting with the teacher to go over the day's lesson plan, or, if the teacher wasn't there to walk me through it, I would read the instructions left for me. They tended to be detailed.
One day, during a second grade reading period, a little boy came to me and asked if he could sit on the rug in front of the classroom. I had noticed that almost all the lower grades had soft rugs for relaxed reading sessions (There was no such thing when I was a school kid. Then, you sat at your desk all day except lunch and recess). I said that was fine. A second student came up, asking the same question. Then a third.
A little girl approached me.
"Hi," I said.
She said very quietly, "Mrs. Harris doesn't let us sit on the rug during reading period."
I considered this for a moment.
I said, "Is Mrs. Harris here?"
Tentatively, as if not sure where this was going, she replied, "No."
"Well," I said, "today, we're going to do things a different way. What do you think about that?"
At first, the girl's eyes widened in horror. She stood there, seemingly working out the implications of this scandalous breach in protocol. The internal struggle was visible on her face -- the quiet comforts of the familiar versus the thrill of doing something new, maybe even a little outlaw. She smiled, went back to her desk, got her book, went to the rug and started reading.
Photo credit: Getty Images
I found it a little curious that the students never showed any particular interest in me -- who I was, why I was there. Only once, when a fourth grade class had gotten especially out of control, pushing me to the very brink of sanity, one of the troublemakers paused from his mischief to say to me, not without sympathy, "Have you ever been a substitute before?"
Few people pay much attention to substitute teachers and understandably so. We're not professional teachers. We don't design the curriculum. We don't know the students. We don't know the material well or at all. We're teaching it on the fly. We're literally here today, gone tomorrow. Even the students are often dismissive. They can smell a rookie sub from a mile away.
But in the past three years, they -- we -- have become increasingly important pieces of the American educational system. Public school districts in many states are now in desperate need for substitute teachers. Why? Because of a severe teacher shortage that was aggravated by the Covid pandemic.
The 2021-22 school year was especially difficult. A New York Times article last fall, under the headline Substitute Teachers Never Got Much Respect, but Now They Are in Demand, reported that Arizona began the school year with a deficit of 1,400 teachers. Florida had 5,000 teacher vacancies. Other states too. New Mexico, Oklahoma and North Carolina allowed -- and encouraged -- state employees to take a leave and fill in as substitute teachers.
"School districts are really relying on substitutes because there are many, many teachers who have left the field," said Kim Anderson, executive director of the National Education Association, according to the New York Times.
A survey by the national EdWeek Research Center last fall said, "More than 75% of school principals and district leaders said they were having trouble finding enough substitutes to cover teacher absences. More administrators reported challenges hiring substitutes than any other school position, including bus drivers, paraprofessionals, full-time teachers and custodians."
A survey of public school teachers by the Rand Corporation last January and February found that one in four teachers was considering quitting at the end of the 2020-21 school year. Pre-pandemic, that ratio was one in six. Stress was cited as the biggest factor.
The Rand report said Black teachers "were particularly likely to plan to leave" teaching. As it is, just 20 percent of public school teachers nationally are non-white. More than half of public school students are not white. And just 7 percent of teachers are Black. Black male teachers are exceedingly rare.
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With the pressing need for substitutes, some states lowered their standards. In Oregon, instead of having to pass several tests and have a college degree, the state changed the requirement to being 18 years old, be sponsored by a school district or school and have good moral character. Missouri changed its requirement that subs have at least an associate college degree to completing a 20-hour course on "professionalism, diversity and classroom management," according to the Times.
"The shortage has become so acute that substitute teachers, who have historically earned low pay, suddenly find themselves on the beneficial side of the supply-demand equation," the Times said. "In some cases, that has led to a rise in wages -- and steady work."
Last year, the school district where I substitute raised the per diem rate from $100 to $120. There are always enough openings that a sub who wanted to could work five days almost all school year.
Photo credit: Getty Images
Once I had gained some experience as a substitute, I decided to take an assignment in a sixth grade special education class.
I reported to the school early, as is my custom to allow me to meet with and get filled in by the regular teacher if she is there (that was usually the case). This time, the teacher met in the hallway a short distance from her classroom. She was in hurry to catch a taxi to the airport to begin a European vacation, but she said she wanted to prepare me for what I was about to experience. This had never happened before.
"Have you ever substituted in a special ed class?" she asked.
I said I had not.
She sighed loudly, looked away, then looked back at me as if assessing me.
"Special ed is different," she said. "You may see some strange things. The kids can be ... volatile. If there's any trouble, don't try to break it up yourself. Let their paraprofessional handle it."
"What do you mean trouble?"
"Well, sometimes one of them may attack another," she said. She named two who didn't get along. "Just be aware. Probably nothing will happen. Good luck."
The class started out quietly enough. There were only six students, all seated at least ten feet from one another. Each had a paraprofessional nearby. There was also a teacher aide. The students were polite to me but struck me as fidgety. At one point, the teacher aide read aloud a short story. The students listened intently. But when the top of the hour came -- when it was time to move on to something new -- he abruptly ended the reading. Two of the students protested and pleaded for him to go on. He was unmoved. It felt like a mistake.
After lunch, things began to unravel. The students were visibly distracted and some of them began to verbally snipe at one another. Their words became angrier, edgier, then suddenly profanity was flying. One girl suddenly rose from her chair and threatened to beat up another. Her adversary stood up to meet the challenge, hands clenched in fists of rage. Peace was restored, but the rest of the day passed tensely. After class, one of the paraprofessionals told me about a teacher who had been stabbed in the leg with a pencil ... by a first-grader. He also told me the teacher who'd just left for vacation was the third teacher of that class that year (this was still in the first semester). The first one had quit within a few weeks. The second lasted about a month.
The next year, I substituted for the first time at a junior high school. I was filling in as the second teacher in a two-teacher English as Second Language class. The students were 13 or 14 years old. They were all from Central America and had all arrived in the U.S. within the past year. Their English was pretty good but far from fluent. The teacher was a rare middle-aged woman. She had quiet authority and I sensed that the students liked her and respected her -- sometimes two very different things. One after the other, she had them reading Charlotte's Web, one of my own favorite books as a child. She would later tell me it was the first book most of the students had ever read -- in English or Spanish. When they struggled with pronunciation, she patiently and gently corrected them and explained the word if they did not know it. She asked them questions about passages they read. I was in awe. This was the art and the majesty of teaching in action. Here was a caring, compassionate teacher. Here were students who were learning. I had witnessed many other wonderful teachers -- and a few not so wonderful -- but this was special.
After class, I told the teacher, "You taught me how to teach."
Photo credit: Getty Images
Over the years, I have substitute taught maybe 20, at most 25 days. Not a lot. The exasperations, I no longer remember -- well, I try not to and mostly succeed. The highlights, they are indelible. There's no feeling quite like that when a student comes up to you to ask how to solve a math problem or to understand a word or text in a book. You explain it and maybe at first they wrinkle their forehead in concentration as they work it out in their head. And when it clicks, you can see it. They just learned a new concept or word or idea, and it's magical. You gave them that ... that gift. I am "just a sub" -- a caretaker, a fill-in, a temporary replacement -- but in those moments, I am a teacher.
Cover photo credit: Ron Claiborne