For the most part, the individual playing Teacher for the day was a retired school employee who gave us classwork and then sat quietly and read the newspaper. They dressed semi-professional, walked into class with a cup of coffee in their hand, and called on the students who raised their hands. They were usually polite, clean people who were safe adults to be around for the hour required of their service.
As a sub, I don't know if I fit that mold.
It's not that I am unprofessional or unsafe. Not by any means. (I'm a frickin' backpacking guide: I can wrap your ankle if you trip on a chair leg in class and properly document the incident to hand to the school principal.) And it's not that I don't fit the stereotypes, either. I usually have a cup of coffee with me when I get to class in the morning and have a drawer at home full of dress pants.
What makes me different than the subs I grew up with is that I actively want to be a part of the class experience. I think it is kind of boring if I am just another face these junior highers vaguely associate with their education. For them and for me. I am young and have life experience and love to share stories and lame jokes. And sharing goes both ways, you know.
Yesterday in Ms. Swick's English classes we read a short story called 'Raymond's Run' about a young woman taking care of her developmentally and physically disabled older brother. We first looked at it from a literary perspective (What is the theme? What is the plot's climax? Who is the main character?) and then moved into a human perspective.
Donald Miller's work falls into the non-fiction genre--the human perspective--and I was glad to have read these words just a few minutes before students sat in their seats. I shared this with them from Searching for God Knows What:
I remember when I first learned about people who were and weren't cool. There was a kid in my middle school who never took a bath. He had dreadful buckteeth, so large they came out of his mouth an inch, and so under no circumstances could he close his lips. I used to look at him in class and wonder how his mouth did not dry out. He kept long hair, his family too poor to afford a haircut, and he would wear the same clothes for a week, each day becoming more gray, each week his hair coming more over his eyes, and he had the jumpy feel of a beat dog. He would set his languid body over the papers on his desk, his oily hair coming over his head like a curtain, and in this position he would sit all day, talking to no one, only hoping to avoid the jury of his peers, a constant source of condemnation.
... I get this feeling sometimes that [at the end of our lives] we will wish we had seen everybody as equal, that we had eaten dinner with [people like my classmate], held them in our arms, opened up spare rooms for them and loved them and learned from them. I was just another stupid child in the flow, you know; I didn't know any of these things. I didn't know it didn't matter what a person looked like, how much money they made or whether or not they were cool. I didn't know that cool was just a myth and that one person was just as beautiful and meaningful as another.
After the snickering from the first few lines died off the room turned into a still silence. I closed the book and looked at the faces staring up at me.
A boy in the back of the room raised his hand, "Miss Baird?"
"Yes, Nathan."
"Is there any more of that book you can read to us?"
So I love the fact that I am spending part of my fall season at my Alma Mater being seen. And heard. And having good conversations with students who are questioning what life looks like outside of their hometown, outside of their home life. It helps me remember there is hope for humanity, that there are world-changers in classrooms who are spreading the concepts of love and peace alongside the ability to define parts of speech and solve equations.
Because even a sub can encourage change.
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