(I’m posting these journal entries now, just to archive some older writing so I don’t lose it.)

Mark’s journal entry dated September 25, 2002: First Day as Sub
Today was my first day as a substitute teacher. I woke up early after only 5 hours of sleep, called in, and picked up a high school English class at Amador Valley High School.
Part of me thinks I’ll remember everything forever, but of course I realize that if I don’t write it down I’ll lose a lot.
It was about 5:00 a. m. when I picked up the assignment, which was for an “early start” at 6:50 a. m. (which actually turned out to be 7:02 a. m.) . (I got to the campus just after 6:30, worrying I was already late.)
I was substituting for Mr. X, who has four Freshman English classes and one “Leadership” class. Mr. X was actually present during the first period, and since the other classes were identical I had no trouble with the “lesson plan” (the students were doing several grammar “pre-tests”). At the end of that first period, I was drafted to substitute in Mrs Y’s second-period Spanish I class (since Mr. X has a prep period during the second period). So my “first time” in charge of a classroom was actually the Spanish I class, which is not exactly what I’d planned.
Ms. Y’s classroom was locked, so I had to use the neighboring classroom phone to call for someone to come unlock it. Then there was no lesson plan for the Spanish I class – I called the office again and was told that the file said to “show a video about a country, or have students review vocabulary.” I decided to be a “good guy” and let the students vote, knowing they’d choose the video. But then I couldn’t get the VCR/TV combo to work, and the class of first-month freshmen weren’t very helpful – but eventually one of them got it working.
The students were pretty well-behaved, mostly quiet and attentive . . . . but I also worked a bit to be interesting and distract them from being distracted.
At the bell, I had to call to make sure someone was coming to lock the room; foretunately another sub was already en route to the classroom to cover the remaining periods (though Ms. Ashe had a prep period during 3rd period).
I zipped back to Mr. X’s 3rd Period English class, which included several students who had just been in Ms. Ashe’s Spanish I class. The third-period class was the worst of the day, with students constantly talking and easily distracted. As I wrote to Mr. X in en email:
“I had some difficulty keeping the third-period students quiet; I’m not sure if how much fault goes to the students, and how much to me. There were also several students from Ms. X’s second-period Spanish class who also are in your third period class, and the lack of any lesson plan for her unplanned absence may have led the students to expect similar disorder the next period − quite honestly, though, even the Spanish class was much better behaved than your third-period.) An additional distraction was that one student was called out twice, first to go to the counseling office, then again to see the attendance office/dean, and after each return his neighbors were abuzz with questions. Finally, after several “waves” of quiet comments and laughter, I realized that there was actually a price tag on the bottom of my (new) shoes, which provided another distraction.
“The students during fourth period were absolutely fantastic: quiet, focused, and on-task. The students during fifth period were also very quiet and mostly on-task. (This was especially surprising since there were many more potential distractions from other students popping in and out of the room during fourth and fifth period, compared to third.) As expected, I had little to do during the ordered chaos of the Leadership class.”
During the classes, I spent some time reviewing the “writing and grammar” book which included the pre-tests, and also looking at the posters and displays in the classroom. At Mr. X’s direction, I did not offer much help – though I did spend a few minutes with one student in fifth period who seemed almost completely clueless, and gave quick directional answers to a few other questions during that period.
I felt as if the day went quite well – certainly much better than I’d expected. And I enjoyed it. No rude awakenings, no horrific surprises.
Tomorrow is another day.

Mark’s journal entry dated September 27, 2002 5:30pm (3rd day as Sub)
Today was my 3rd day as a substitute teacher. It has been awesome, fun, enjoyable – joyous – ecstasy. I am learning,
I am “on” all the time and loving it. I am learning to see/evaluate/help. I am making rookie mistakes. I am being honest. I am “smiling all the time.”
Have I felt like this before? I don’t think so – there is a completeness, a “fit” a perfect match.
I am learning how much I don’t know – how to find ways to communicate
new material that “work” for students, how to deal with students who lack
basic skills, how to judge when to say something, what to say – and what to let go by.

Mark’s journal entry dated September 30, 2002 (4th day as sub)
Today felt awful, although it wasn’t really that bad. I was substituting for a 7th grade teacher (Ms. Z), who actually was there when I arrived (early) and briefly went over the lesson plans.
I suppose it started with a lack of confidence – the first two classes were special “writing” classes and our task was to read a story and write responses. I asked whether the students would read silently or aloud, and the teacher said “you read” – but then the book said to have students read, and apparently that is what’s normally done. The students were somewhat responsive to questions – if only to try to push the discussion off-topic. But most simply didn’t seem to be interested in writing, and faltered quickly, and made few notes in the margin space provided. And of course, we only got three pages into the seven-page story, and I’m sure the teacher knew that (and I think should have warned me). I had the second class under better control, less off-topic, but still broke off at the same place.
And then came the real challenge: the “block” class. Well, the first challenge was actually getting from one room to another, since the teacher has small classes in a “conference room” and then the large block class (37 students) in a classroom that’s shared with other teachers – one of whom came and went while class went on.
During the first of the three periods for “block,” students first worked in workbooks, then did silent reading and “response writing” during the second period. But they acted clueless about what they were supposed to write, and 6 or 8 did not have their individual books. I loaned three books to students to start and see if they liked them, but others just flipped pages in the literature textbook, and I’d clearly lost control of those students even though they were reasonably quiet most of the time. Of course, the two students that the teacher warned were “problems” didn’t bring books and weren’t interested in doing anything.
Partway through the fifth period (the second “block” period), another teacher came in to use the computer, and his presence was first quieting, then disturbing. The students started to get restless and stood as the lunch bell approached, then started to charge out at the bell, and the other teacher leaped up, ordered them to sit down, and wait until the room was quiet until they could leave. While I said I appreciated the help, and it may well have been the right thing to do, I felt as if this undermined my authority, and in part I felt the students had been more disrupted because he was there!
After lunch came the period I knew would be a problem: the regular teacher said the students were broken into three groups: a “play” group (practicing a play), a “newspaper” group (working on preparing stuff for a newspaper about ancient Rome), and a larger “Time Line” group. To complicate matters, she was changing the assignment for this last group. And she said to send the two smaller groups “out into the hallway” to work on their projects – noting that the two “problem students” in the class would be in one of those groups. I suppose I was fearing that period all day, because I knew it would be chaos.
To be honest, I think it went better than I could reasonably have expected, but it was still extremely difficult. I was supposed to “brainstorm” with the large group to come up with a list of “people” and “events” so each student would have a different time line to prepare, but it seemed as if the teacher really hadn’t thought it through much. I spent half my time going out to the hall to quiet the other two groups down, while the larger group was focused on choosing someone rather than identifying enough historic figures so each student would have one. I felt like a yo-yo, and it was pretty clear that without a very clear plan, I would get bogged down – as I did.
My first mistake was in not planning ahead on a method to decide how students would choose their characters. The second was in not preparing a list of characters in advance, because the “brainstorming” was not productive at all – it was simply a matter of assigning roles to some students, then forcing the others to identify more characters, after they’d missed out on the opportunity to get the “best” roles (Caesar, Hannibal, Cleopatra). Then, the actual logistics of the timeline were quite unclear, and there was really no adequate way to begin research on most characters, without sending students to the library in large groups (which the teacher said not to do, and I’m sure the librarian was thankful).
There was also ambiguity about homework – I said to finish the morning desk-work at home, and to work on the project also, but there were also some very ambiguous references on the board to homework, and I had no idea what they meant (though the students seemed to have a pretty good idea).
Basically, the problem was that I needed much more painfully detailed instructions, and it did not help that the first two of the three “block” periods were spent doing quiet desk work, then after lunch we broke into groups without a plan.
The final period was a small group of seven “English Learners” for whom I had no helpful instructions – they were supposed to know what to do, but two had workbooks that required them to listen to something (and they said they didn’t know what to listen to), and two more claimed they were supposed to work on something else instead.
At the end of the day, I felt that I’d done very little beyond baby-sitting the students. And, though I did much more than that, I felt quite uncomfortable and my immediate thought was that I would never again accept an assignment to substitute for this teacher. In retrospect, I think I just needed more detailed instructions – and so did the students.

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