Commentary: Reflecting on substitute teaching experience

My one stint as a long-term substitute teacher was over a decade ago, but I still wonder about the children in that class and think about the lessons I learned with them. I’m sure I learned more from them than they did from me in those six weeks.

At the time, I was in my first semester of a teacher credentialing program at Cal State Northridge, so dealing with third-graders was like homework for me.

The students gave substance to the lectures on classroom management, each day a vivid reminder of the importance of lesson planning. They reinforced what I’d already learned as a substitute about how keenly children sense any lack of preparation on the part of teachers, and how quickly they can gain the upper hand, given an opening.

I remember my professor’s advice on classroom-seating arrangements.

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” was the adage he quoted, even as he encouraged us to look kindly and attentively on the disruptive or disengaged students who so often gravitate — or were historically seated in — the farthest reaches of the classroom. Those were the students, he reminded us, who needed our closest attention.

But arranging students for optimal learning wasn’t easy. As the weeks progressed, I spent many an evening at home in an exercise that felt like a cross between lab science and a practice chess game, considering each desk move and its possible consequences, in hopes of creating the least combustible classroom chemistry.

I came to appreciate the relationship of class size to teacher well-being. Fewer students mean fewer reactive combinations.

I also learned the downside of pull-out intervention programs for students in need of extra academic help. Known as Resource Specialist Programs, or RSP, they are provided to students identified as needing special services to help them succeed in a regular classroom.

As much as a student who I’ll call “Victor” benefited from the more-individualized instruction he received during RSP, he’d inevitably return to class to find himself adrift in whatever activity was then underway. A step or two forward for him, one step back.

I suspect his regular teacher, who knew his schedule and needs better than I, smoothed the transitions from RSP to classroom instruction, but Victor became my point of reference when, as a school board member some years later, I supported establishing programs to address the needs of students at all skill levels — advanced, emerging, or struggling — during specially staffed instructional blocks.

With all students in a class “pulled out” at the same time to more closely address the particular needs of each, no child would miss out on whole-class activities. For a variety of reasons — principally personnel costs and the complexities of master schedules, I suppose — such programs have not been fully implemented.

The value of recess was another lesson indelibly imprinted in those weeks. As a substitute teacher disproportionately assigned to recess duty at the lunch benches, I saw how often the children most in need of physical activity were “benched” because of misbehavior in class.

I’m happy to believe that benchings — like high-school suspensions — have decreased as teachers have been trained in ways to engage students more actively in their classes. But I still think students need more physical activity throughout the day. Their teachers could use it too, as could we all.

I made my first teacher-calls to parents that year, and where I feared resentment for a substitute — a stranger to them — calling home about a child’s difficulties at school, I found parents grateful to be treated as partners in their child’s education.

I discovered how good it felt to be welcomed as a colleague and assisted along the way by more-experienced teachers. A culture of collaboration is a real blessing, and not every school has it.

In short, I learned that teaching is a whole lot of work, requiring continual adjustment to meet the wide range of personalities and learning styles in a classroom.

I remember the children’s faces when my lessons worked and when they didn’t: smiles from those who learned their multiplication tables, tears from the girl flummoxed by my first lesson on decimals.

I have a particularly happy memory of the encouragement the students gave Edgar, who came into the class knowing almost no English. When, after just a few weeks, he spiritedly recited his lines of dialogue in an enactment of a reading selection, his classmates cheered.

If all went well, those students graduated from high school in 2012, which makes them about 21 now, adults in all legal respects. I wonder how they’re faring in college and career. I suspect Edgar is doing very well.

JOYLENE WAGNER is a former member of the Glendale Unified School Board.