My first clue that I had entered a strange world came when I parked in the other lot, not my old usual. I walked inside and suspicious, pubescent faces greeted me. A few steps later, I stood inside the office, where I received a much warmer and more familiar welcome. I held out my arms as a thick folder, keys, and ID badge cascaded into them. I walked into a hall to encounter my second clue in the form of a recognizable voice:
“And who are you today?”
“Mrs. _____,” I said, winning a chuckle from my old teac—um—new coworker.
“Then have a good day, Mr. Schepers.”
*
Thus began my first day as a substitute teacher. At my old school. At my entire K-12 educational residence. To teach…math. Now, I actually enjoy math quite a bit, especially algebra and trig, but it is a far cry from what my hot-off-the-presses English MA suggests I busy myself with. So when I sat down at the teacher’s desk and opened the lesson plans left for me, I was struck by all-but-forgotten relics of my youth. Coordinate grids? Geometrical proofs? What kind of magic was this?
Fortunately, I had first hour free as prep time. I scoured over the notes, the handouts, and the fire escape plans (just for good measure). Come second hour, I was feeling decently prepared and confident in teaching the seventh graders all about plotting, transformations, and translations. I was ready to blow their minds with my mathematical prowess. Instead, once the students’ initial curiosity subsided, I realized they quickly settled into business as usual. As each class came in, I introduced myself, handed out the materials and worksheets, proctored a couple of quizzes, fielded the occasional question, and proceeded through the lesson plans without much of a hitch. If a group’s volume began to increase (testing the waters of my authorial aplomb, I’m sure), I had only to make eye contact, pick up my pen and (pretend to) write a note to their teacher, and a hushed diligence would resume. Soon enough, the day had ended. I kept the students on task, completed my daily duty, and left feeling affirmed in my decision to make the classroom a vocational home. These were all good things, but I couldn’t quite shake a nagging thought: Had I personally done anything of lasting significance?
*
Contrary to popular opinion, substitute teaching is emphatically not babysitting: this is the misconception that my third-party substitute training program seeks to correct and combat through the efforts of the company’s employees (like me). I firmly stand behind this belief. However, it’s a tad tricky to convince a classroom delighting in their educators’ sicknesses that a sub is deserving of their respect.
Because of this tension, I consider the substitute’s plight to be a paradox of permanence. Our teacher is absent, the students reason, ergo, this person before us now is but a specter—or, at worst, a charlatan… POUNCE!
Wholly subject to the transience of “Here today; gone tomorrow,” the substitute teacher’s most necessary and yet unstated role is to optimize learning capacity—to actually teach something that will ideally stick with the students. This is reason enough for me to adjust my attitude as a sub: no longer is a day’s assignment a run-out-the-clock scenario; instead, it’s a beat-the-clock challenge. This realization imbued this particular substitute teacher specimen (moi) with a resurgent vitality, a desire to teach as effectively and efficiently as possible while connecting with students as authentically as possible. Because they know I’m only around for a brief stint, it’s my opportunity to welcome them. It’s my privilege to be quick to grin and slow to scold—to show them that they may not know me (and may never see me again) but that I’m glad they’re here nonetheless, and that I’m glad to be here too.
*
Since that first day (and this reflection that resulted from it), I’ve had a few more tastes of substitute teaching. I filled in for math again to learn that middle schoolers despise trick questions on math brain teasers yet love the creative license to devise loopy, convoluted “solutions.” I tried my hand as a gym teacher, sans whistle, which is no small feat when supervising high-school weight training one period and running around playing “zoo tag” with kindergarteners the next. (A freebie tip: have a system for choosing which kindergartener gets to be “it” or prepare to meet the doleful eyes of the unpicked kids whose hearts you just broke.)
Most surprising, however, was the runner’s high of finishing the day, of interacting with students while successfully maintaining some semblance of order, of sight-reading the experimental symphony of conflicting bell schedules. All of this, some still may say, only to walk out of the building after turning in my keys and badge in order to evaporate. A Keyser Soze of the teaching ring, I recede into the ranks of the ephemeral and enigmatic educators lurking in the shadows of substitution. “And like that, poof. He’s gone.”
*Epilogue*
I can say with much relief that I am neither as elusive nor as sinister as Kevin Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects. Two perks of dwelling (again) in my small hometown are, first, that news travels fast, and second, virtually everyone knows one another. I recently bumped into Mrs. ____, my first assignment, who told me that the students didn’t ask for me back—not as a sign of rejection, she clarified, but as a sign that I had held my own as a sub and didn’t “let them get away with too much.” Stamp of approval, indeed. Beyond this mini performance review, however, I’m happy to report that I’ve heard from other interested parties (more teachers and parents) that students bounded home or returned to class the next day with news of “Mr. Schepers” (or maybe just “this one guy from church”) who taught them, if only for a day.
Jacob Schepers (Calvin ’12) is the author of A Bundle of Careful Compromises (2014), a winner of the 2013 Outriders Poetry Project competition. His poetry has appeared in Verse, The Common, PANK, The Destroyer, and others. He lives in South Bend, IN, with his wife, Charis, and two sons, Liam and Oliver. He is both an MFA student and doctoral candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame.
