Like in the education system, there is in the medical profession a pool of substitutes to fill in for a day off. This substitute may come from sharing the time of a partner physician at the same location, or from an available pool of licensed semi-retired physicians, or even other physicians who use their paid leave to substitute for other doctors.
But let us examine what it would be like to bring the atmosphere of a secondary-school substitute teacher into the ambience of a visiting physician’s medical space. First, the doctor would possibly have holes in his shoes and the limited clothes from the local thrift store probably wouldn’t fit him. It is hard when you are making as little as $50 per a half day or $100 for an entire day to buy the kind of clothes that create respect and generate a managed workplace.
In addition, the administrators at the place probably wouldn’t know anything about this mysterious substitute staying in their workplace for the day. Assuming the worst, it is not unusual for the school’s staff to treat the sub like an escaped criminal throughout the day. School staff members with virtually no education after high school and no visible interest in any kind of learning will even militantly guard the gratis lunch food from visiting business vendors against a substitute teacher eating any of the school food.
Then, just to be careful, a daily plan is created where the substitute can get through the day while saying only about one hundred words. After all, who knows the damage that could be done if she or he went on talking into 150 words? When it is promised to the substitute that an “easy day” is ahead, the sub needs to understand this is an admonishment to do and say as little as possible. But it seems that anything this unknown sub does or says may yet precipitate a disaster, in the view of the school.
Then the substitute hands out some forms to be filled out. That is, the medical professional calls them “forms.” In the jargon of the substitute teacher, they are worksheets. After the papers are passed out and the sub says about one hundred words, he walks around for the rest of the period and stares at everyone, trying to make his face look mean to control everyone.
All these constraints in the name of caution would be a disaster in the medical workplace, with the visiting physician being constrained from exercising any authority to practice his or her profession. In the life of the educational workplace, the substitute at least represents a moratorium in directed-learning advancement. The time is instead devoted to review work or the kind or worksheet assignment that is in normally saved for homework. The directed teaching that enables a student to learning something new – and you don’t learn anything old these days – this is all canceled until the regular teacher comes back.
Since substitutes can be in charge of classrooms 10 percent of the time on any given school day, the learning power outage in these rooms accounts for the learning time to be cut down to 90 percent of a school’s entire directed teaching.
This means that if schools could set up substitutes as real teachers, just as visiting physicians are treated as real doctors, the learning in California schools would increase by 10 percent, at least.
As it is today, in many schools in California, the substitute-teaching days are worse than simply non-learning periods. They are the most dangerous days of the school year.
“Where you subbing?”
When the sub enters the campus, he or she is greeted by students asking “Where you subbing?” As soon as this is found out, the student hooligans concentrate on creating their own agenda for the substitute’s classroom. This might include planning an attack on an unlucky classroom scapegoat, or sometimes even attacking the sub at the final bell by pelting him or her with balled-up wet paper napkins, which can feel like rocks when a half dozen students are throwing them at your head. Of course, I am reminding everyone since the beginning of my book about how this particular assault happened to me in my experience of “dangerous learning” in California schools.
Just imagine a parent in a tough neighborhood saying this:
“I’ve got a couple of hundred of rowdy teenagers for you to manage tomorrow, and I am paying you two quarters per kid to keep them on task. But look here, Mr. Subperson, I myself can’t get myself to respect you enough to learn your name or find out anything about you, but I will write up on the class white board for everyone to see, ‘Respect the sub.” So if the students trash you and ambush you in spite of a ‘Respect the sub’ warning, it’s not the fault of anyone in the school but you. Good luck and teach the kids something.”
A few years ago when I was subbing in a Lancaster School District school a student who argued against me moving his seat brained me with a softball he threw at my head. When I called the male principal of the two principals, he took the student outside to talk and then explained to me and my black eye that the student was really trying to play catch with a friend. But my “head got in the way.” This was even spatially impossible – I was standing in front of the class by myself, trying to teach the students in front of me. But this free pass from the principal empowered the student to act increasingly like a sociopath against other perceived unprotected people on campus for the rest of the year.
In this kind of situation, an expulsion hearing would have involved the costly presence of the school district attorney as well as possibly the involvements of attorneys hired by the student’s family. The least expensive way out for the district was to use the explanation that I walked in front of two students innocently throwing a softball at each other in the classroom as hard as their muscles could throw a ball.
But many substitutes I know who share these classroom crises do not let anyone know things are going so badly in their classrooms. The veteran substitute teachers tend to insist they would never have lasted so long if they had become known as the bearers of bad news. Napoleon was known to kick certain bearers of very bad news to a pulp. In the less dramatic school districts, a way to stay calmer is to not invite a known whistle-blowing sub back to teach.
But the students continue to take advantage of this situation because they see that the sub is not a supported link in the school. If an administrator visits the class, he will typically ignore the sub as if he weren’t there, turn his back on the sub, and then leave before his exit provokes even more stomping and mayhem by the students. Students tend to believe that an administrator who can’t even come up with the sub’s name in front of them is not going to support the sub in the classroom at any time.
The problem is that the principals and administrators for the common irrational reasons probably disrespected substitutes when they were children as well, and their disrespect has extended into their lifetime professions and their attitudes toward anyone substituting in their schools today. My guess is that they must have been among the hardest paper wad throwers at their subs in their own day. In some Southern California and Inland schools, the adult campus liaisons augment this chaos by imitating the most disrespectful students in calling the substitutes under their supervision only by their last names
Today they have grown well past the age of hitting the sub with a paper wad. Without a democratic negotiating process, they can now hit the sub with a daily wage cut in two years of over 33 percent. The result is to disable the already poorly maintained California sub to a position of barely functioning existence, to “get the sub” when the going gets tough which becomes almost indiscernible of the clarion calls of either administrators or cheeky students.
Probably the best place California’s administrative educators express their disrespect for substitutes is in the pay that is as low as a teenager’s pay of $100 per full day that they may give them at the end of the month. It is now more financially lucrative in monthly net pay and better lunches to work at “In ‘n Out Burger” than to teach America’s children in these conditions with the generally despised title of a California substitute teacher.
In comparison, how more productive, more proper and professional – and most of all safer — are the medical clinics that respect, connect and pay like adults all the professionals who work in the professional workplace.
But if substitute doctors were to be presented to clinics and hospitals like substitute teachers are used in California’s failing schools, our clinics and hospitals would be that precarious, too.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.