I became a substitute teacher somewhat out of necessity. In a faltering economy, I couldn’t afford to move to a new location to find a job, and my college degree and I were wasting away at a local convenience store making less than $8/hour. Teaching had been my original intention in college, but I’d been sidetracked by publications. I was lucky to know a few people who had gone through a training program to obtain emergency teaching certification, and they encouraged me to check it out. While the main point of the program is to staff the local intermediate unit, which assists local schools (especially with special education), many who take the training become day-to-day subs in mainstream schools. The training takes a mere three days and focuses on information that is more suited to the IU. Most of “what to do” was up to me to learn.

My first day was terrifying and exhilarating. I’d managed to find a better-paying seasonal job to round out my summer; my last day was Labor Day. I was looking forward to taking a few weeks to prepare for subbing by cleaning and organizing. Instead, Tuesday, September 8, I woke up at 5:30 in the morning to a phone call. I agreed before I really understood what I was doing. That was just the beginning, I suppose. In retrospect, the first day was fairly plain. It was 7th grade language arts, and one period I had a co-teacher who took the reigns. The regular teacher’s plans were superb–she’d thought of a lot in advance. The 7th graders were only in their 2nd week of junior high, so they had no idea that I was not at all aware of what I was doing. At the end of the day, I felt confident I’d made the right choice in pursuing teaching as a career.

When I look back, I’m very happy that I accepted that early phone call. It let me train myself and get my feet wet without falling on my face. I learned how to follow a lesson plan, how to relate to students, and even how to deal with trying to find a school I’ve never seen. Since then, I’ve had numerous other learning experiences with subbing. It’s trial and error, and what one can accomplish in a day depends on the type of students the school in question has. The demographics vary, even in my small county, and the students are sometimes less receptive to a substitute depending on their grade level and their level in the education system. I hope to detail some of what I’ve learned here, and to write about the experiences—good, bad and in between—so that I might learn more from them as I reexamine what I’ve done.