I invite you to enjoy this journey into substitute teaching. I was an on-call teacher for several years after a full time teaching career in my own secondary school classrooms. On call to 80 schools K-12,  I was travelling around my city every day and often to two different schools the same day, for several years.

The experience was startling, amazing and privilege.  I got to see kids over the full range of growing up, and often the same kids  in different years as they moved through the system.

I call this collection Sub-terrain. We subs are not offering an experience that is substandard and we are not as it happens, sub human. What we offer is a stop gap, and it is often substantial.

I literally might teach kindergarten one morning and grade 12 that afternoon. French one day, Spanish the next. I saw teens from wealthy homes who had gone shopping in New York City for the weekend, and kids with ill-fitting thin coats on a cold winter day. Kids from activist parent homes aghast the student’s test score was 79 not 80, and others whose parents forgot to pick them up on time and had to be reminded.

My trips in the dark morning to assignments took me through the  history of school design- the grand hundred-year old sandstone buildings with steep steps and tall wooden doors, to the super modern ones in the suburbs with open classroom layout, all rooms surrounding the library. Some schools of the 1950s were identical in design and it was mind blowing to weave through the same corridors and around the same corner but at an entirely different school.

I got to see teacher creativity, from the bare classrooms with straight desks and nothing on the walls, to the Spanish café theme bilingual room loaded with mobiles and pictures of Mexico.  Some classrooms were literally works of art. I marvelled at the color-coded grade one room where every child had their own matching file folders, cubbies for supplies and desk ID. One was clearly the room of an artist with everything in black and beige wicker, nearly a spa meditative space.  I knew there was no budget for such decorating. Some teachers had just chosen to spend their money this way.

I worked at sturdy 1920s wooden teacher desks and at super modern blue ones,  some messy, some perfectly bare but with instruction notes. I got to admire teachers yet again.  Some were dealing with really huge classes, balky defiant students who frankly got worse for subs because why not? Yet other schools treated subs like gold, announced on the PA to the school that today there was a ‘guest teacher’ in the school and they should all be on their best behavior.  Grade 8 kids who on seeing a sub cheered, grade 11s who high -fived each other that it was game on, and yet little grade ones who on seeing me cried, distressed the regular teacher was gone.

Heartbreaking moments. The grade one girl who, crying, whispered that she missed her mother. I reassured her that she’d soon get to go back home and see her, but then she told me her mother had died. She was rubbing the necklace her dad had given her to rub when she felt lonely  I remember well the little boy who was crying and when asked, told me that his dog had been hit by a car. Suddenly my mission was not so much to teach carry-the-one in math, but to comfort.

Fellow subs shared with me their experiences,  the wide range of respect or disdain kids had for us just by virtue of our role. One sub had her purse stolen. I got my car mirror smashed.  It’s not personal. In a school for kids with learning disabilities one child stood up on the desk and urinated.  But we subs also had some wonderful moments, ones that still bring tears to my eyes. We got to see beautiful things about kids, about allegiances and kindness.

The grade two girl who rushed to help the shorter kid by bringing him a step to stand on at the whiteboard. The fierce loyalty some high school girls had to defend a boy who was gay.  The high school girl who was upset and, alone after class, confided to me that her dad was in hospital dying and they had told him not to smoke. 

There was laughter too.  I loved having discussions about history with kids. Given context they can move quickly into role -playing.  I had kids imagine being leaders of each of our provinces and standing there in a line at the front of the class, asked them how they would handle economic upheavals in their province. One girl piped up immediately that her province had a lot of extra fish so she’d send some of it to the others.

I saw beauty. I saw two very tough high school boys, brothers, who in a discussion about school shootings talked with respect about how their dad was raising them.  He would be blown away to hear that . On a phone call I told the dad later and the phone got silent. 

I still remember one little girl on a sunny spring day. Playing with the multicolored parachute we were to all share, she went to sit right in the middle of it and looked like a flower. She for a moment she was postcard perfect.  I got to see so many moments the parents did not get to see that they would have loved.  Some days in high schools I realized that the discussions we were having about a French play and sibling rivalry, were revealing pretty deep thoughts these teens had about life. 

I was part of whatever was planned that day. Taking kids to the field trip at the museum or to swim lessons at the neighborhood pool. Taking them down to assembly and hearing the entire hall of 300 teens get so quiet you could hear a pin drop, out of respect on Remembrance Day. The pep rally where the kids waved the lights of the cel phones. One elementary school where all these little kids, hundreds of them, stood to sing our national anthem and I actually teared up hearing the power of their little voices.

This has all made me optimistic about how the world will be. These kids would be grown up very soon and we’d pass the torch to them. I saw that they can handle it.  What a privilege I had to see the future in advance.

So I welcome you then to this trip of some of my experiences.   I hope the stories trigger in you too memories, laughter, maybe even some tears. You likely have many similar stories.  Enjoy.