tagryn | "Confessions of a Substitute Teacher"

Confessions of a Substitute Teacher. Below are some sections I could definitely relate to from my experience as a sub:

Teachers leave lesson plans for substitutes but Mr. Pool says his game plan is always the same: "Don’t let the kids fuck with me."
...
(on classroom management): "It’s like dealing with a controlled burn. This fire’s gonna jump if the wind gets going. I’m constantly trying to contain it," Pool says. "I hate to call the office for help ’cause then you’re the guy who’s always calling the office in distress."
...
Mr. Pool’s latest thing is to be happy to get through an hour without anyone getting physically injured. To him, it’s the equivalent of being in a serious car wreck but able to say in the aftermath, "At least nobody got hurt."

"Nobody gets an eye poked out, nobody dies on my watch. I’ve kind of narrowed down my purpose to that," he says.

In some instances, block scheduling is his biggest enemy. "I mean, almost two hours of social studies. Come on, right? That’s the killer. After 45 minutes, kids are gone. They don’t want to hear from you. And if I’m getting a hard time in one of these block classes, it’s a big chunk of hard time. I’m getting a hard time for an hour and 50 minutes. I’m just like hold on, hold on, make it to the bell."

Truth be told, after my first couple of months subbing I tried to deliberately avoid taking assignments from schools that used block scheduling. The kind of make-work assignments that most teachers create for sub days are just death to try to keep kids interested in for 2 hours, and if it turns out to be a bad class, those can be some of the longest couple of hours of your life.