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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”
– Charles Dickens
By Cindy Reitzi
It was a tense and taxing time. It was a time of technological trials and much gnashing of teeth. It was the time of W2s and Turbo Tax withholdings – and holding and holding for “customer service.” It was a time to revisit the classics (Turbo Tax favors Vivaldi’s energizing “Four Seasons,” while the Internal Revenue Service prefers Tchaikovsky’s soothing “Swan Lake”). Alas, it was a time to assess the numerous definitions of “net worth”…
Late nights … frozen screen … an hour-long wait on hold … an extensive fix-it session. Sleep-deprived, I wasn’t in the mood for more complications in my waking life.
“Complicated” is when teachers ask me, “Who are you today?” and I have to think. “Complicated” means subbing for two to four teachers. It’s not that I mind multiple assignments; it’s just that, depending on the school layout, it can require precision timing. I don’t always know where the lesson plans are. They could be with the secretary, in the mailbox, in the department office, in the classroom or on an e-mail. Sometimes I pick up a class a couple minutes before I’m stepping in to sub, so I immediately make pragmatic inquiries like, “Where are the plans?” “Which classroom?” “Is the door open?” or… “Keys?”
So, that day, in that week, in that time, I walk into a sub office strewn with blue vacancy slips (unfilled jobs) and a harried secretary scrambling to plug the dam. Another sub and I offer to take on extra hours. I have Spanish all day and pick up a fill-in for ESL; the other sub is part-time but decides, “Hey, as long as I’m here…”
“Where are you today?” I ask sociably. She tells me. “Tough crowd...” She shrugs, dismissively. An experienced sub… “Have a good day.” She nods, sorting through the slips. I grab a Spanish key but don’t bother with ESL. There won’t be any keys to spare with all the extra subs filling in.
Spanish is on third floor; ESL, on first. This is the school with the complicated layout – nothing is centrally located and hall traffic often bottlenecks in narrow stairwells. To top it off, students with no concept of “indoor voice” invariably plant themselves on the third-floor foyer to bellow at friends on the first-floor landing as though hailing their favorite performer at an outdoor venue; or they walk straight into others while chatting or text-messaging on cell phones; or block traffic by – just at that precise moment – clustering in an urgent group to discuss the day’s drama and wadding up the passageway like dryer lint clogging a vent. All to discuss who’s going out with whom, what he said to her, the fight of the day, or whom they’re presently shunning. While I’ve gotten adept at zig-zagging quickly into traffic and anticipating human gaps on the straightaway (while avoiding wide-swinging bathroom doors), the stairwells have no wiggle room.
Since the sub office and ESL are on the first floor, I swing by the ESL office (central back hall, next to cafeteria) to check lesson plans and copy them to save time later. That done, I head up to Spanish (third floor, left front corner), read through the organized teacher’s plan, and discover all of her five classes are in three different rooms, none of which are consecutive hours. (Either she’s new or she really ticked someone off.)
I quickly scan the note and read that she needs me to copy materials for fourth hour during her third-hour prep period. I’m subbing ESL that hour. So, I scramble down to the copy room (second floor, back central hallway) and in my haste, mess up a back-to-back job with a third copy, some of which she wants on yellow paper. Wasting paper, I start over on white paper. I use bad language. I run back up to Spanish (third floor, left back corridor) and start the day. I write the multi-step lesson on the board. First hour. Switch to another classroom. I write the multi-step lesson on the blackboard. Second hour. Switch, and drop off materials in fourth-hour room. Dash down to first floor, fortunately through an unclogged stairwell, rap on the ESL office door (first floor, central back hall) to retrieve the handouts I forgot to pick up, then run to the classroom (first floor, right front corner). Students are milling, waiting. Locked. I ask the math teacher next door if she has keys to my third hour, but she says that door is ESL, so I reverse back to the ESL office, pound on the door and one of the teachers lends me a key. Returning, the students and I joke about how to say “patience” in Spanish, Chinese, Albanian, and Korean. The students are wonderful.
After class, I scurry back to the ESL office (first floor, back central hall) to return the handouts for the other sub coming in sixth hour. The door is locked; no one answers, so I slide the materials under the door. I climb back to Spanish (third floor, left back corridor). I write the multi-step lessons on the board. Fourth hour. Drop off materials in the sixth-hour classroom.
Mid-afternoon, I run into the other sub. By then, she has been around the world – from Gourmet Chef to Phy. Ed. to ESL to World Languages, traversing the vast byways of the building. Sighing, with a little more perspective, I admire her grace under pressure.
Nicely done. Four teachers…and still smiling.
Posted May 29, 2007