The last time I had any fun as a substitute teacher, I was not teaching.
I was covering for a science teacher who went on stress or sick or borderline mania leave.
Apparently, he did not take very good care of himself (what teacher can?); so there I was, teaching a class of students who had not seen their permanent teacher for at least a week, and this was only the third week of school.
Still, I did not let that get me down. In fact, I learned to laugh and not take anything seriously — public schooling sure don't take seriously the educating of young people.
The students and I learned a lot. I spent more time teaching them words in Hebrew, Arabic, French — true, nothing to do with science, but at least we were engaged in something interesting.
And what, pray tell, were they doing while I was cracking jokes and make light of a dark situation? They were copying notes by rote from transparencies projected on a filthy white board. Oh, and the notes were so faded, so inscrutable, that even I couldn't make out half of what was written — and the students definitely could not.
This was a science class, with no beakers, vials, labs, no gooey stuff, nothing natural — Really, how can anyone learn about the systems and sequences of life without actually handling it? Reminds me why I hated science so much in high school.
Anyway, come fourth period, and we are all eager to eat lunch — the one nourishing activity most people can look forward to on campus. The overhead projector (an act of God, I presume) finally conked out. No more notes, no more scribbling. The copy room lady, nice if you're nice to her, offered to help me out in a pinch, and I got all the transparencies copied out for the students.
So, with time to kill, what do kids usually do? They started rapping. Kids in juvenile hall do this, too, something stimulating to break up the state-imposed monotony.
Now, the kids at Leuzinger may call me "Slim Shady", but a rapper I am not. I can barely string together two or three rhymes. Yet the crowd of antsy students pressed me, and so I took up the challenge.
I did pretty well, I guess — at least some of the students thought so. We got so loud that one teacher ducked her head in the room to ask, "Is everything all right? I heard a lot of noise coming from this classroom."
Yes, noise, laughter, fun, such things are foreign to most classrooms, including those sequestered in poor and working class neighborhoods like the one where I was getting my rhyme scheme on. I told the lady that everything was fine.
I believe that some people call it "life", or living it up. At any rate, no one got in trouble. At least I did not have to send anyone out of the classroom for disorderly conduct.
At lunch time, I got a hurried, halting phone call from the permanent teacher, bedded up at home or in the hospital. He told me that in no uncertain terms the students had to copy all the notes on those transparencies. I told him that the projector had shut down for good. I neglected to tell him that the students had such a difficult time reading his scrawny handwriting on smudgy plastics that the classes barely copied half of the notes.
"They must copy those notes. They cannot be sitting around visiting. They must have those notes down for the test on Thursday." He was very stress, pressed, and it all made me very depressed.
What a nightmare, for him. As for me, I refused to be bullied or guilt-tripped into doing the impossible. He insisted that I copy the five pages of notes on the board. I understood that the man was gravely ill, but I did not think that he was mentally deficient, too, or that I was obsequious enough to do such a mind-numbing activity as write our a bunch of dirty notes on a white board. I expected to do little for my sub-par sub pay that day.
At any rate, I had three of the students in the last period copy the notes by on the board by rote. Now they would have to copy that bunch of sloppy, unconnected information not once but twice. At least their handwriting was better than mine (besides, I was too principled — read, lazy — to do the repetitive work myself.
At the last minute, I told the students to rush the transparencies right away to another copier, save some time, and provide everyone a copy of those notes, those dreaded, dreary, drier than dust in a sand dune notes.
At least there was one victory — I stiffed the permanent teacher, got the notes copied, then taught the rest of the class some French. When the union president walked in briefly, he told me not to worry about anything. "You are a real trooper," he told me.
An army metaphor — how apropos!