School
For context, there is a severe shortage of substitute teachers. For good reason. The pay is horrible -- less than what you would make working in a cafe. Some students see the substitute as an excuse for the sort of behaviors you are being hired to curtail. You are enmeshed in some power nightmare of Foucault's -- continually trying to limit minor infractions -- hats, hoots, ear buds, vape pens, phones, face masks -- while the students vigilantly seek to ignore the rules. Of course students, districts, schools, grades -- all these matter in how much work I need to spend as an enforcer.
Given all this, there is a pleasure in being a substitute teacher. Subs are needed, after all, and you sense your own importance, in some humble way. You never experience a crisis of meaning. Your presence means some teacher didn't have to step in and had a free period to grade papers (or whatever it is you grade if it's on a computer).
And you are often trusted to do your job, even if this means you spend the day in a half-dream state, locked in a concrete room with no windows, not having any sense if the sun is shining, or the clouds have moved in.
In one school district we spend a lot of time telling students to get off their cell phones, and are told ourselves we cannot use them. In this same district, the students do all work on computers, using Google Classroom. So what do you do, other than sign bathroom passes and tell the students to put their masks on their noses and to hide their cell phones?
The official answer would be to get up, walk around, and encourage the students to continue working. But anyone who has sat in the classroom knows this is futile. Students are indifferent to unfamiliar teachers, unless you talk about nonacademic matters. One day while driving into school, I almost ran into a bear. I had never seen a wild bear before. They wanted to hear about the bear.
Some teachers solve the inactivity problem by defying the rules and looking at their cell phones. I understand this. What else is there to do? However, it's hard to play the hypocrite. Plus, this might quickly turn into unbroken hours scrolling the internet. Bad for posture.
I started bringing grip strength equipment with me, and would alternate between working my grip with brief periods of subtle pranayama-type breathing exercises. Thus, I spent long hours in a state of quasi meditation. The time passes as it passes. No one knows what I'm up to. I still stand at regular intervals, interact or try to. At the end of the week my hands are shot, and I rest them over the weekend knowing I've made myself fractionally stronger in this one small niche of strength training.
I also bring tea.
At first I brought one thermos but soon had three.
Sipping the hours away is effective for passing time, but has one drawback. Because of the shortage, there are days where I'm hardly given a break -- maybe a few minutes for lunch. And this break can be at 10 a.m. or 1:30 p.m. I never know. This presents a bladder problem for the tea drinker. As should be clear, when you're working as a sub, you cannot leave the classroom. I can't decide to go to the bathroom simply because I need to urinate. We must wait for that break. And in some of these large public schools, even finding a suitable staff bathroom involves planning. Now and then you get lucky, and you don't have to run around trying to find one, knowing your short little break will be spend looking for a toilet. (This is probably something that doesn't make sense if you've never been inside a large, unfamiliar high school -- how confusing they are, architecturally. There seems to be no pattern to anything. All for the best. Monotony is the enemy of the student.)
Some days I bring my thermoses, and drink from only one. The others, I stare at, and resist the temptation. I hold them in one hand as I walk, and they clink like bells. I'm self-consciously playing the role of the eccentric teacher. Except no one finds it amusing because no one notices and no one cares that I'm carrying three thermoses of tea in one hand, and a gripper in the other. As I pass students in the hallway, they don't look at me. Their concerns lie elsewhere.
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