Sub Plan

After missing a week and a half of school due to an unexpected case of pneumonia, (it would have been two and half weeks if Spring Break hadn't cushioned the experience), I have been forced to come face to face with a truth I have long been avoiding due to my usual good health. I don't have a solid emergency sub plan in place, and though the old fall back "show a movie" works for a few days, when unexpectedly absent for a week and a half, "show a movie" doesn't cut it. I know that there are teachers out there who have their entire semester, maybe ever their entire year, mapped out in advance. I, however, am not one of those teachers. I like to go with the flow of my inspiration and imagination, and I never know what I might decide to read, explore, or assign until a week, or sometimes a weekend in advance.

Partially this is due to my student population. At continuation high, students come and go. Classroom makeup is constantly changing. I have combined grade levels, 10th-12th in every class, and for every student that breezes in and then breezes back out again, there are those that feel at home and don't leave until they graduate (sometimes as 5th year seniors). This means that I may have the same students three years in a row, and though they may seem as though they aren't paying attention, pull out a story we read two years ago and they are deeply offended, as if I am clearly not doing my job.

Much of my curriculum I glean from current events. What's going on in the world right now? What articles are in the news? What ballots are on the initiative? What natural disasters are giving us new perspectives on the world? Where are we bombing now? And these items quickly lose their pertinence. Topics that come up in class may drive our next essay assignment, and I may never use this particular topic, along with accompanying readings, again. This sort of fluidity in the classroom means a constant stream of successes and failures. The poems written from the perspective of people's dogs, for instance, fell flat. I'll never use those again, and am still recovering from the failure, (I thought they were really funny). The prison project, on the other hand, was widely well received, but now I can't do it for another two years, at least, at which point my statistical handouts will be out of date and I will have to assemble all new materials.

This is one way I keep class interesting -- by making sure the kids never know what to expect next. This also means if I am suddenly laid out on the couch and have a last minute sub showing up, I don't have anything for them to do. If the timing is right, the kids might be in the middle of a project. They know what they need to work on, so all the sub had to worry about is making sure no one smokes pot in the back room or starts a fight. But if we are between projects, I have nothing to offer the sub besides my emergency movie which, oh yah, half the kids saw last year, and if I show it again, you can bet I'm going to hear about it.

To deal with this problem I have decided to purchase a book of "never fail" language arts assignments that come on neat little ditto sheets with a line for the student's name, and easily understood instructions. Each ditto sheet has "fun" but "instructional" activities like "rewrite this four sentence story being more specific, and using lots of details", or "write a paragraph using only one syllable words", or "rewrite these sentences using hyperbole". The worksheets are simple, perhaps instructive in a vague, banal, and somewhat meaningless way, and they remind me of two things.

One, my job would be so much easier, I would sleep so much better at night, and I would have a huge weight of responsibility lifted from my shoulders if I stopped coming up with all of my own material. If I just bought a daily curriculum, copied worksheets, used the text book, and relied entirely on other people's ideas, I would be freed from the pressure of having to be endlessly creative, and having to beat myself up every time a lesson went sour, (think dog poems). I wouldn't have to worry that the story I am bringing in contains the word "cunt", because all of the stories we read in class would be conveniently pre-censored, and so tried and true, (as in, students have been reading these same stories for the last thirty years), there would be no risk involved whatsoever.

Two, maybe I am a flawed teacher in some way, because I find the text books available in all subjects, the prescribed worksheets and "creative" projects, and the "tried and true" materials to be so boring, so dull, so insipid I feel guilty participating in their dissemination. Not like everything I bring in is top notch, (think dog poems), but at least I am always striving to find things that are actually meaningful in some bigger sense of the word. Still, with this effort comes great responsibility, and I am never entirely sure if I am successful or not. Maybe I am blinded by my own agenda. Maybe my students would improve their skills at a higher rate if I stopped focusing so much on critical thinking, and spent more time doing skill building activities, boring or not.

I try to reach every one of my students -- and as chronic ditchers, school haters, drug takers, and English loathers, this is perhaps an impossible task. Still, I can tell you exactly which students, in any given quarter, I have been as yet unable to reach, and each one, in their own separate way, haunts me. For the most part, the students who I can't reach want exactly the type of materials I will be photocopying and leaving out for the sub should I ever get pneumonia again. They are annoyed by my contemporary fiction, by my persistent agenda to force them to think bigger thoughts. They just want a worksheet that has a little line for their name, a straight set of easy to understand instructions, and an assignment that involves no deep thought, that they can finish quickly and then forget about.

On my bad days, I wonder if maybe I should just give them what they want -- formulaic assignments designed to improve a very specific, easily testable skill set. On my good days, I swear, I'll quit before I'll give in. On my mediocre days, I can't decide if I'm right or if I'm wrong. But maybe that's what teaching is all about -- discovery, uncertainty, exploration, failure, and success. In the mean time, my new sub plan will be laid out, and hopefully, with any luck, it will gather dust. As well it should.