Up to Now

It's been several months since my last post. I actually like what I do. I like being around children. It reminds me of what it was like to be a child in a not-so innocent world. I like when a student asks me how to answer a problem that can't solve on their own.There are those days when I want to just swallow nails. I'm exaggerating of course. Every now and then there are those difficult students that make a day feel longer than what it really should be.
Sometimes its the things you don't expect to hear that open your eyes as a substitute. A kindergarten student voluntarily told me once about her father being in jail, a thirteen year-old told me how her mother's boyfriend was abusive, a second grader told me her family was moving to a shelter, and a third grader told me once about the gun shots at night that made it hard for him to get to sleep. As shocking as some of these things are to hear from a child these things aren't as shocking as the fact that they decided to share them with a stranger. There are times when I can relate to the students. Like the fourth grader who was living with her grandmother because her mother died. It made me realize that as depressed as I was over losing my mother, I could have lost when I was a child and that would have been even more heartbreaking.
I look at every day as an opportunity for me to learn something about myself and other people and to also grow as an individual.

Do you like your Job?

An eighth grader asked me, “Do you like your job?”  I guess she saw the dissatisfaction that was painfully apparent on my face. It’s very hard for me to lie, and (that particular day) I did not like my job. It was not something I aspired to be and instead it was something I found myself doing to avoid unemployment and the depression that would inevitably take place in between going to college and mourning the loss of one of my parents who recently died. I wasn’t going to pour out my heart to this 14 year old child.

Instead I said “sometimes”. The adolescent went further to say “why don’t you get another job?” I told her I was completing my college degree. She then went further to say, “is this like volunteer work?” She had no idea the way the world worked.

As a full-time college student you must take a minimum of 12 hours to maintain financial aid and scholarships if you have any with that requirement. I did. 12 hours is generally four classes. I was taking four classes and trying to make ends meet financially while emotionally I should have been allowed to take an hiatus because I was dealing with grief amongst other things. I had a degree to finish and needed a job, but I was not yet a holder of anything more than a college diploma and almost graduate with two almost Bachelor’s Degrees does not equal employable when compared against graduates with more experience.

Substitute teaching is a career opportunity that at the very least has flexible hours and if teaching is a prospective profession someone is considering then it can give you a window into the world of teaching. There are great conversations that can be had with teachers who have been teaching for ten, fifteen, or even twenty years.

I have spoken to teachers who have taught for a decade and are tired of doing it. I have spoken to teachers who find it hard to leave the profession when they have been doing it for fifteen years. Some educators have told me that they love to teach but what is most distressing is that they are told what they have to teach in order for students to moderately pass state wide tests instead of what the teachers want to teach.

This is the true issues public schools face in poor districts. Students are geared toward passing mandated tests but when the students don’t perform as well as expected the instruction in the classroom is geared entirely toward passing that mandated tests. Students find this tedious and miss out on learned some of the more advanced material they need to learn in an Language Arts class for example. This is why most teachers in the particular state I am in are against this state mandated test.

The state mandated tests at minimum tests the students on what they should know already but it in no way prepares them for other tests they need to get into college like the SATs. Truth is most students in public schools are being taught the minimum of what they should know. Some students have already decided that school disinterests them altogether.

I have been in classrooms where students who should be juniors in high school are still in the 9^th grade and don’t want to go to college. They pretend in front of their peers that they don’t want to go to college but even I see that what they really mean is that they don’t believe they have the potential to go to college and do well so they don’t think they should even try. Sadly it generally takes more than one person to let a student know they have the potential they just need the ambition.

I blame the parents. Some parents don’t care about their child’s education so even they can’t be surprised when their son/daughter drops out of school or becomes pregnant before finishing middle school.

The molding begins form childhood. You can’t talk to a 17 year old and tell him he needs to read more so he can pass high school when he never liked to read and his mother never once picked up a book and he never saw her pick up one either and read one herself. Children have looked me in the eyes and told me that they hate to read. We live in a society where the accessibility of a summary of almost any novel can be googled and that same novel has probably been adapted to film about three times in that last few years lacking true literary continuity.

The mass-produced instant delivery world we live in has taken so much from education. If you watch the news you would believe the economy is the greatest tragedy, but I believe the crisis in education is the greatest calamity of current times.

I’ve sat in classrooms where students who had an assignment sat there and ignored it. Students were willing to sit for an hour and vocalize how boring class was when they had an assignment but chose not to do it. Students sat at their desks toward at the end of the semester unable to complete a simple math quiz with very basic algebraic questions because they didn’t pay attention all year to their teachers’ lectures or was suspended most of the semester for disorderly behavior.

The same student who asked me if I liked my job went on to tell me about how students and teachers at private schools were arrogant. Having attended bother public and private schools she told me that at private school she was basically graded more critically and didn’t do as well compared to her A’s and B’s in public school. This she thought was a plus for public schools. What she failed to realize is that it is never about grades but about what you learn. In private schools students generally seem to learn because it is considered a privilege to be there. Parents either pay for their children to attend or apply for stipends so it isn’t just something you lapse into and parents who choose private education for their children know it and I am sure let them know it. Teachers are also held to a higher regard. In a public school kids generally don’t know how privileged they are to receive an education considering on the other side of the world learning is a novelty some cannot afford at all. Teachers cant teach what they want to because they are bound by a guideline of what they must teach to pass a mandated test and on top of it they have some students who are behind but were unfortunately passed to the next grade although they should have been left behind.

I have sympathy for teachers to a strong degree, but at the same time the teachers who ignore the student in the back who is asking for help is someone who I despise. Teachers who ask other students to grade each others' papers in an effort to cut down on their work load is ridiculous. I started to grade a classes quizzes, but after a long day of being talked back to or ignored and trying to keep a class in line that I did not sign up to teach (when I was moved from my original assignment after lack of subs) to a teacher who failed to leave behind lesson plans I decided this was their teachers’ job not mine.

There are good days like then substituting for kinder classes where children are eager to learn, and actually miss you when you leave. It is difficult to hear five or six if not more voices of small children calling your name asking you for help or permission to do something but it is rewarding when you can actually teach them something.

Sometimes there are events in life that force someone to actually get out into the world and maybe even into a line of work that would rather avoid. So this vaguely describes my present circumstances. I have NOT been forced out on to the streets in search of prospective work on any street corner in search of provocative and cheap labor which would compromise my morality and not to mention hygiene but I have ventured into a similar field. It is known to many as substitute teaching.

I always had conflicted feelings about this profession. I had even more conflicting opinions when the first step in the process of becoming a substitute after being hired is to have a background check that costs the employee $50 prior to their earning a dollar. I couldn’t understand the cost of going into a tiny office to have my picture taken and fingers printed for a total of five minutes. I felt in that instance like I was the whore that was left with pockets empty and the services rendered failing to meet expectations.

Since my primary reason for seeking out this job (that from my experience as a student) was going to be less than a cake walk in terms of pay and maybe even the experience I knew what I was expecting, however I also knew that it was one of those jobs that in this economy I could acquire with more ease.

Orientation was between three and four hours of interesting lecture that lead me to believe that anything less than professional attire was inacceptable. However when I saw teachers who dressed like that had been lounging around the sofa most of the day instead of in a professional setting this influenced the way I decided to dress. Of course this didn’t apply to everyone, but I made the decision I was not going to wear heels to every assignment especially if I would have to travel up and down stairs during the day. It was beyond logic to me. In fact the notion of wearing shoes with a heel that exceeds two inches evades reason to me.

In the unpaid orientation which was a collection of retired teachers seeking work (out of the pure joy of teaching or the need for work since retirement isn’t what it used to be), college students like me (seeking work that is convenient and maybe enlightening about teaching for those considering the route), and ordinary people who at minimum graduated high school and could use the extra money particularly when they want to jump from parent volunteer to PAID.

Power point presentations are the standard and one of the presenters an abundantly enthusiastic teacher explaining how she introduced herself to the classroom and gained authority and respect from her prospective students. As inventive and articulate her explanation was in explaining how to gain the respect of the students it also did not apply to every class. You can’t talk to a 7^th grader the way you would talk to a third grader. She didn’t seem genuine and this I picked up as an adult in her audience. I didn’t want to listen to her or believe her just sitting there and I was supposed to believe she was an expert.

Prior to substituting I had my own expectations about what I would be doing. In my mind I thought that I would always be substituting for the teacher I signed up for and that there would always be some kind of lesson plan. I may have had my own brief hopeful expectations of grandeur concerning my first opportunity to substitute for any English class.

I imagined being nervous of course I would be and having students enter the room quietly and me discovering the teacher failed to leave lesson plans for the middle school children so I begin writing out on the board an exercise that would make them gain perspective in life. At the very least I imagined helping them decide that they want to do something powerful with their lives instead of just allowing opportunity to pass them by. Of course even this effort of good virtue was beyond reason and rooted in naiveté.

 And of course of all these preconceptions were killed almost instantly and without effort. One I had this 7^th grader who thought she was Nikki Minaj rapping in what was supposed to be a history class. She had written her lyrics (which weren’t Grammy award winning by any standards) and proceeded to vocalize her work to her audience of about four or five in the back. As many times I told her to get started on her work she did not. Her friends looked at me as if I was harmless. They could see that I probably would not do anything or if I would, I would have acted by now. They were right. I measured the time on the clock against how much patience I had against the number of students who were actually doing their work and I chose not to make a big deal of it. The class period would be over in a short time and I had plenty of patience (at least enough to await the sound of that bell) and some of the students were doing their work and I did not want them to get behind because a handful of students did not want to do their work. The cost wasn’t worth it.

 I already took issue with the assignment. There was a handout with a list of historical definitions referencing slavery and women’s’ suffrage. It was the end of the school year and some of these 7^th and 8^th graders did not know what women’s suffrage meant. They didn’t know who Harriet Tubman was. It was more than disappointing. They had to fill in blanks by reading a power point that had the answers within it..and not cleverly disguised. I would have never taught a class this way. I worry for the students in many ways because I feel that in the particular district in which I work the students are not getting a good quality education and they don’t seem to care about learning. A student who seemed intelligent (for a sixth grader) and nice told me she did not want to go to college. I couldn’t understand it. College is not like middle school or high school and I think kids think that the thought of going to school four more years is too painful. Students are not being taught the importance of gaining knowledge. It is the key to everything (and not to risk sounding like a minister) it is the only way to get anywhere and out of the poverty many of the students thrive in.

I also began to realize that there was not a real expectation for me to teach. It’s more of a make sure the kids don’t set a fire, kill each other, or lord forbid go behind the teacher’s desk. It’s basically a behavioral management sort of deal for middle school and high school adolescents. So many substitutes spend their time yelling at the students to get them in line. So many teachers do the same thing, but then they forget to teach them anything. I don’t get paid enough to scream at anyone. In the end screaming serves no one well, not the teacher or the student. The student just gets the idea that they have unacceptable behavior but they also need an explanation. I also have found that there are numerous students who are hyper and it isn’t entirely their fault that they act in the way that they do but I also have noticed that this problem goes unaddressed or brought to the attention of the parent.