Sinking a sub is elementary

Editor's note: Students' names have been changed to protect confidentiality.

Day one

No one tells you if it's OK to go into the boys bathroom. Or how to make a group of 7-year-olds stop squawking like chickens.

In the hands of a capable substitute teacher, neither situation is likely to be a major issue. But the first-graders at Jackson's Orchard Elementary weren't in the hands of a capable substitute. They were in my hands.

Ah, first grade. I was in first grade once (good ol' Mrs. Barfield). My stepson is currently in first grade. I thought I was familiar with -- dared, even, to think I understood -- first-graders.

Thus, drowning in a pool of my own naivete, I looked forward to my day as a substitute teacher in Kay Vangilder's first-grade class at Orchard.

My editors asked me to write a story about substituting. What better way to do that, I thought, than actually go experience it for myself.

Most school districts are in short supply of subs. Finding someone to fill in for a sick teacher is one of the hardest parts of a principal's job, Jackson assistant superintendent Dr. Rita Fisher told me.

There are no benefits. A sub's salary equals the amount I took home after a day of making Blimpie sandwiches my senior year of high school.

Plus, as Fisher pointed out, you have to be flexible. Most of the time, subs learn of a job through a 5:30 a.m. wakeup call.

I wanted my experience to be as authentic as possible, so I asked administrators to deliver the customary wakeup call rather than scheduling me in advance.

While I didn't know what days I'd be subbing, I did know which schools I'd be at.

In preparation, I spoke with Orchard principal Clay Vangilder about the basics of substitute teaching -- what to wear, what time to show up.

I planned my wardrobe carefully, following Mr. Vangilder's advice of avoiding skirts and wearing comfy shoes.

The 5:30 a.m. call didn't come though, so I dressed as a reporter -- blouse, off-white skirt, three-inch heels. At 7:55 a.m., just as I sat down at my desk at the Southeast Missourian, my cell phone rang.

Mr. Vangilder needed me to sub. Right now, without a wardrobe change to pants and comfy shoes.

By the time I drove to Jackson, another first-grade teacher had my students working diligently on math problems. You could have heard a paper clip ping off the tile floor.

The teacher showed me a schedule the regular teacher, Mrs. Vangilder (who is the principal's sister-in-law), had left and the various books and materials I'd need for the day. No doubt to a experienced sub or regular teacher, it was a very detailed schedule that should have been easy to follow.

I had prepared an arrival speech. It went something like this: "Good morning class. My name is Mrs. Miller. I'm going to be your substitute teacher today and we're going to have a lot of fun."

No doubt the students would be awestruck by my enthusiastic tone, my earnest demeanor, I told myself smugly.

And I'm sure they would have been awestruck had I actually delivered my speech. Before I had time to pick up the chalk and write "Mrs. Miller" on the blackboard, a blond-headed boy was at my side, pulling on my skirt.

"Teacher, teacher. My stomach hurts," he said.

The logical thing to do, I thought, was send him to the nurse's office. But then, two other students piped up, "You always say that, Casey!"

What now. If I let him go to the nurse's office and he's bluffing, he'll know I'm an easy target and might cause problems later on. Then again, what if he throws up on my shoes?

While I contemplated this complex problem, the other 24 students in Mrs. Vangilder's class had grown restless.

Three boys in the back of the room flipped pencils at each other. All of the students seemed to be talking.

"Let's wait a while and see if you feel better," I told Casey. He nodded but looked skeptical.

"Good morning, my name is Mrs. Mil..."

It was obvious none of the students were listening.

"What does your teacher do to make you be quiet?" I asked a nearby student.

"She turns the lights off," the girl answered.

I walked to the back of the room and hit the switch. It worked. They were quiet, but only for a few seconds. I looked at the handwritten schedule Mrs. Vangilder had left. We were already running behind.

It was 8:37 a.m. We were supposed to begin a reading lesson at 8:30.

According to Mrs. Vangilder's instructions, we were supposed to read two stories, "What a Sight " and "Lost in the Museum," together.

Together? Did that mean we all read out loud in unison? Or that I called on individual students to read a paragraph?

I decided to try picking individual students to read portions of the story. Within seconds, students were complaining that they couldn't hear the reader. So we tried reading aloud, with me leading them, Pledge-of-Allegience style.

Some students said I went too fast. I slowed down. Then other students said I was going too slowly.

I read the second story out loud while the students followed along silently, sort of, in their books. And then it was time for a bathroom break.

I called the students to line up at the door. There was a stampede.

"The teachers usually calls us by rows," a girl named Melissa offered helpfully.

Before opening the classroom door, I advised the students to enter the bathroom only four at a time. That's why 11 boys rushed in together as soon as we reached the bathroom door.

I didn't realize the gravity of the situation until five minutes later, when the boys refused to come out of the bathroom.

Apparently, boys bathrooms are the perfect place for a game of tag. From the hallway, I could see them chasing each other, and began calmly calling for them to come out RIGHT NOW!

None of the boys appeared to have heard me. By then, all of the girls had emerged from their bathroom and were waiting in the hall. A few of the boys had come out as well, but there were still six or seven running around.

Is it OK to go into the boys bathroom?

I stood in the doorway and called for them to come out again. One of the boys ran toward the doorway, saw me and ran back in, giggling.

That was it. And in I went. All six of them looked shocked. One boy rushed to zip his pants.

"It's time to go. Now," I said, and quickly walked out with reddened cheeks. They all followed.

Another first-grade teacher, Donna Kielhofner, came to the door at lunch time. The students had been writing about leprechauns, and it was only after they were on their way down the hall that I realized I'd forgotten to have them wash their hands first.

I spent my lunch time in a teachers' meeting. I was in no hurry to go back to the classroom. The first lesson after lunch was math. I don't like math, mainly because I've never been very good at it.

Mrs. Kielhofner made copies of some extra math worksheets for the students and dropped them off at my desk during the final minutes of lunch recess.

"How do you get them quiet enough to do worksheets?" I asked her.

She demonstrated a special clapping pattern and the students repeated it then fell silent. Just like magic, I thought.

The math lesson wasn't too difficult. I just had to explain the difference between a prism, sphere, pyramid and cube.

The bigger issue was getting the students to stay seated. I'd had trouble throughout the day keeping them quiet, seated and facing forward.

I felt like a broken record. "Turn around, turn around, turn around ... stop talking, stop talking ... turn around ... sit down, sit down. ..."

I tried separating the ones who disrupted the most, moving them away from the rest of the class to chairs that faced a wall. After a few minutes, they turned around and began talking to the nearest classmate.

If I turned my attention to quieting one disruptive student, the other 23 would begin talking. It seemed impossible to keep everyone's attention for even five minutes. The boys especially had trouble staying seated.

Finally, I lost my patience.

"I want everyone to keep their rear ends on the plastic!" I shouted.

"It's not plastic, it's metal," Casey said.

I sat down in the nearest chair. It felt like metal all right.

I confiscated two things during the course of the day -- a tiny plastic pig that Madison was constantly playing with and Victoria's eraser. The eraser kept popping off her pencil and landing on other students' desks. After the third time, I took it.

"What if I need to erase something?" she asked.

"Just don't make any mistakes," I said.

She pointed down at her worksheet, where she'd just spelled her name V-i-t-c-o-r-i-a.

I sighed and walked away.

The last two hours of the day passed quickly, mainly because the students were in counseling and music class and I was alone in Mrs. Vangilder's room.

On her desk are a variety of education-themed knickknacks, no doubt collected during her years of teaching.

A small plaque read: "Teacher, you are patient, wise and kind."

And that, ladies and gentleman, is why I'm not a teacher, I thought. There wasn't anything really wrong with the students, I realized. It just takes a very special, talented person to be a first-grade teacher.

Before the final bell rang, I had the board erased, the trash cleaned up and the desks lined in perfect order. When the last group of students left the classroom, I was right behind them, headed to my car and away from first grade. Forever.

Day two

I originally thought substituting at Jackson Middle School would be more difficult than at an elementary.

Sixth- and seventh-graders get a bad rap, with the raging hormones and all. But after my day with the first-graders, I was sure filling in for Dan Stover as a sixth-grade teacher would go much more smoothly.

The sixth-graders in Mr. Stover's homeroom settled in as the bell signaled the start of class rang. I looked over the two-page letter Mr. Stover left detailing the day's plans. On the back was a handwritten note asking me to take special care of one student, Vince.

Vince sat in the back of the room, but as I began roll call, he walked to the front.

"You're beautiful," he said.

"OK," I said. "Go sit down now, all right?" He did.

We worked on spelling and language arts during the first two periods. The students all behaved though a few, like the first-graders, had trouble staying in their seats. And just like first-graders, they ask to go to the bathroom every five minutes.

I noticed a few of the boys had rubber bands wrapped around their hands and that tiny folded scraps of paper seemed to be magically appearing on the floor. I didn't say anything until one of those scraps of paper hit the back of my leg as I was leaning over Vince's desk helping him with an English question.

I turned around. Three desks over, a boy with short brown hair tried to hide the thick yellow rubber band wrapped around his fingers.

"Hand it over, Bailey" I said.

"It was an accident," he protested.

"Yeah, right," I said.

At the end of the lesson, he took a dollar out of his pocket and asked to buy back his rubber band.

"Come on. It's a special one," he said.

I went to the podium. All the students had finished their work and were talking quietly.

"Everyone, I need your attention please. Bailey is going to give a speech about his special rubber band," I said.

"If you give a speech," I told him. "You can have it back."

He shook his head and went back to his seat.

I found out later the students weren't allowed to have rubber bands at school at all.

My homeroom students left during third period, and three girls from another class came in for a study hall session. None of them actually needed my help, so I began looking over the upcoming math lesson.

"We are adding and subtracting fractions," Mr. Stover had written. "I have some students who are having some trouble with this concept." An attached sticky note advised me to work some examples out on the board.

I began to sweat. I was going to have to show these students how to add and subtract fractions. Oh sure, I could do it. With a scientific calculator! There didn't seem to be one in any of Mr. Stover's desk drawers. There was also no math textbook in sight.

If I had ever really learned how to do fractions, I had long since forgotten the process. I spent the tutoring hour and my lunch period trying to figure out how to do it.

I looked at some worksheets the students had done the day before. By trial and error, I eventually figured out my own unique way of coming up with the correct answer.

During the math lesson fourth period, it became obvious the students also had trouble understanding fractions. Only four or five really knew what to do, so I used them as tutors and had other students work problems out on the board.

I hope they're not scarred for life from the Miller method of understanding fractions.

The last two periods of the day were both social studies, taught to Debbie Lintner's class and then to my homeroom students.

Mr. Stover had assigned a test on Alexander the Great, which took the students only 20 minutes to finish. We went back to working on fractions for the rest of the day.

With just a few minutes to go, I asked the students if I had done OK as a sub. One of the students gave me a handmade card that read "Mrs. Miller. My favorite sub of all time."

"You were great. Will you come back?" asked a girl named Tatum.

"Not on your life," I said.

After the last bell, another middle school teacher, Mrs. Lintner, and I talked about subbing and teaching in general.

"I think subbing is harder than being a regular teacher because you don't have that bond with students," she said.

Hard, but also a learning experience. For instance, I learned I'm not cut out to be a teacher in any form. And though I thought I appreciated those in the education profession before, it was nothing to the way I feel now.

And, for Tatum: Here's the part about your toe socks, as promised.

cclark@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 128