Substitute teaching…oh man, raise your hand if you’ve tried that.
It’s a good precursor to a career in teaching, and equally good for making a little extra money during the day, catching up on reading and crossword puzzles, and trolling the district for young, single teachers.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time at the junior high and high schools in my home town. The job was never short on surprises or little life lessons. I’d recommend it to anyone who is not in a hurry to join (or re-join) the rat race.
Watching the original Lord of the Flies about fifteen times, conducting a junior high brass band and a high school choir, and tackling gigantic autistic kids are among the highlights of my brief substitute teaching career.
As far as I know, Japan doesn’t have substitute teachers. Quite a few educators are part-time or teach at multiple schools, but I’ve never seen anyone who bounces from school to school, teaching math one day and social studies the next.
This presents a problem when a teacher wants or needs to take a day off. That in and of itself is interesting, because teachers have vacation and sick days, but they are discouraged from using them because of the inconvenience their absence would cause the rest of the staff.
Nobody teaches from periods one through six, and conference periods are many. Teachers aren’t supposed to teach more than four classes a day and usually have about 16 per week. This gives them time to wear the other hats bestowed upon them by the school.
Played tennis in junior high school? OK, you’re the badminton coach. Made the call to a suicide hotline when you walked in on your friend holding a knife to her wrists? Guidance counselor. Constructed a miniature model of Tokyo Tower with nothing but matchsticks, a rotten apple, and a tube of Moroccan toothpaste? Master scheduler.
Then there are the committees. I don’t think they do much, but of course committees have to have meetings and meetings are a very Japanese thing to do.
So when someone wants to take the day off, not only is a math teacher gone, but so is the Athletic Director and the vice chair of the School Rules Committee.
Only one English teacher has ever asked for time off, and it’s usually to take her son to the doctor because he keeps getting ear infections.
The teacher’s classes are covered by other teachers in the department. Even though I don’t have a Japanese teaching credential and therefore can’t legally teach a class alone, I took a few of her classes on those days and handled them just fine.
Some departments only have one teacher. At our industrial school, music and fine arts are just there to keep the PTA quiet about requirements, so there’s one art teacher and one part-time music teacher who is pregnant and misses a lot of days.
Her classes get shuffled around the staff, and I always hope that they’ll ask me to do it because I think I’m up to the task. I drop hints about it and I’m on the piano every day at lunch, but so far no dice. All I’m good for is English.
The responsibility landed on Coach Napoleon last week and he tried hard to pawn it off, but nobody would take it. The usually gruff softball coach showed a weaker side, whining about how he couldn’t read music and didn’t know what to call all of the “toys in the box” (percussion instruments used for teaching rhythm).
I took a peek at one of Coach Napoleon’s music classes, and it was comically awful. He stood before the students with a defeated look on his face and pointed at the blackboard while the students clanked castanets, shook maracas, and lamely tried to produce the rhythms written on the board. I imagined that he could be further out of his element only in an English class.
It’s an interesting system. We have uncertified people teaching classes for the day on both sides of the Pacific in completely different ways.
From the students’ perspective, the Japanese teacher is someone they know and trust, but the students also know that this person isn’t cooking in his own kitchen. The American kids never know for sure just what the sub knows, but also have no idea who the person is. Anyone with a college degree can stand up there and do it - prospective teachers, wafflers like me, or complete weirdos.
This one is too close for me to call. Both ways work, and either way it would be better if the real teacher were there. I don’t like the pressure to avoid taking days off here, and I don’t think that the teachers do, either, but I’m just a temporary guy and they are here for life, so they accept it.