A first-time experience and I keep quiet — that can’t have happened too very often. But the details about the events of yesterday, fascinating though they were, will remain distanced from any comments I might make here about it. The experience: I was a sub. First time.

In an effort to gain a face in the local school system, I am trying substitute teaching, and I got my first call yesterday morning.

“Substitute teaching.” That in itself seems to be an oxymoron. Teaching is a profession requiring such intimate knowledge — not the least of which, the kids’ names — that “substitute teacher” has all the ring of “substitute shrink.”

“Yes, I know you’d rather be talking to Dr. White, but he’s away on urgent business and his office asked me to come down and fill in for him. Now then, what seems to be the problem?”

It just doesn’t seem like it would work.

Yet at an orientation session for new substitute teachers last week, I and other new subs learned that “subbing isn’t the glorified babysitting it used to be” and that subs are expected to continue on instruction. In other words, be a substitute teacher and not just a substitute authority figure. I’m not sure it was ever anything else, but I do think that there was less expectation of what subs would accomplish in the classroom, say, twenty years ago.

The Day

Seven years of teaching has taught me one invaluable thing about the profession — take nothing they do personally. Any silly, probing, “let’s-see-what- he-does-now” behavior is directed at my role, not my person. That realization will be key to being an effective sub.

I survived. Not only that, but I enjoyed it. It felt good to be in a classroom again. With the beginning of the school year here (and approaching in Poland — 1 September), it was difficult to keep from feeling a tinge of sadness at the thought of not teaching this year. The call Friday morning helped alleviate that.

I spent the afternoon with a group of seventh graders, the first time I’ve worked with that age group in many years.

Six weeks of my student teaching was in a seventh grade classroom, and those kids, according to my reckoning, have just finished college, so it’s been a while.

Seventh grade — an interesting age group, for they’re right on that border between “child” and “young adult,” beginning to realize that they’re not kids anymore but not quite sure how to handle that.