I'm with ya here...subbing is has got to be one of the worst jobs in education. I'm a terrible sub, too. In fact, I think that you'll get a pretty terrible sub anytime you ask a teacher to cover a class in his/her own school. Our hearts aren't in it, and our minds are filled with things we have to do in our own classrooms.
As for Mr. Blume, he's amazing. He must have been granted an extra dose of patience to work in education for so long!
Thanks for visiting.
From: "this new guy"
Someone just the other day said he was amazed at how I can stand doing it with the frequency I do. I told him that, as a sub, I need to employ 'tactics' other teachers don't have to employ to get some kind of control over the room. I scan the sheets for 'trouble names,' I review the text(s) to refresh my memory of the subject and the assignment, I try a form of discipline I call "negotation" but others might term "soft."
But at 81, if I'm still doing this, please take my walker away and beat me to death with it.
They didn't have subs like that in my day in GN.
>>I call security and have them removed, which I'd never do in my own classes.
Let me get this straight: at your school, the security guards will actually show up if you call about an unruly kid?
At my school, if I actually got through to a security guard or the main office (both lines are busy about half the times I've tried to call, also always in "coverage" [what we call subbing] situations), it is extremely unlikely they'd find time to come after breaking up fights, catching kids running and screaming through the halls...and our security guards are saints and I've kept on good terms with each of them.
By the way, did you know that New York City has a special reserve of teachers half of whose job is to be substitutes out of the blue? They're called ESL teachers. Our federally mandated role of teaching immigrant students how to speak English is actually not our primary duty; instead, we are strategically deployed to babysit rooms full of kids whose teachers are taking 3-day weekends.
I do get a response when I call, so perhaps they're doing something right at my school. I'm a high school teacher with my own classes, so I don't get sent to cover for wayward teachers any more often than my colleagues.
Sorry to hear that's happening to you.
It's not just happening to me. It's happening to a LOT of push-in/pull-out ESL teachers in NYC. It's even worse for AIS teachers (the ones who, say, teach illiterate kids how to read and take aside the disruptive kids to figure out what might actually be making them disruptive).
Why does substitute teacher pay come out of individual schools' budgets? Is it just to give principals incentive to ineffectually bully teachers who stay out (like mine does)? But why should a school's students be punished because teachers are using their contractually granted sick leave and personal days? When I have to do a coverage, a kid doesn't learn English or doesn't learn how to read that day.
Is anyone in the UFT making any issue of this? It's perhaps the single biggest workplace issue for many "quota" teachers.
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