(Note: Written not long before COVID took off, making an already fraught situation worse.)

This post was inspired by a sad lament online from a colleague who asked if other teachers regularly lost their planning periods to cover for absent teachers when no substitute was available. The group answer was a resounding “Yes!”

I knew that answer before I read any comments. I had seen similar posts before — and I had been filling in for missing teachers regularly until I retired. Now, sometimes I rescue teachers by substitute teaching. But sometimes I don’t and I thought I might offer a snapshot of reasons behind this hidden teaching hazard.

I will be subbing this afternoon for a Spanish teacher in a state-award-winning school that I trust to provide me with a fun opportunity to help kids learn. I will not be paid “well” — subs around here are absurdly underpaid sometimes for their education levels. I would make $100 per day if I worked the whole day. A few districts I know pay better, but none more than $125 per day. That breaks out to slightly more than $15 per hour — not much for a woman with two Master’s degrees and multiple certifications including high school mathematics, French and Spanish. But if I were in this job for the pay, I would never bother to sub at all. Starbucks would give me free coffee, college classes and health care for about the same wage. Subbing gives me no benefits at all. (Well, sometimes there’s a Keurig cup of peppermint tea in the deal, or leftovers in the teacher’s lounge. Those Keurig machines don’t get cleaned often, however.)

I do enjoy teaching and it gets me out of my pajamas, but I do it for love, not money.

I mostly just work afternoons lately. I prefer to go to bed around midnight and get up around 9 A.M. So I am not picking up those morning subbing positions. I would rather sleep in. I am not picking up full-day positions. I don’t need the money, I don’t want to get up, and I don’t want to work that hard.

The one great advantage to subbing rests in work flexibility. If I want Tuesday off, I am off. I pick my hours. Or I don’t pick any hours.

It’s Monday morning. For the sake of this post, I go to look at vacancies available. There are seven morning jobs out there. I don’t know how many day jobs are going unfilled because once I choose an afternoon job, the day and afternoon postings disappear from my feed. Of more importance, I see fifteen jobs posted for tomorrow. I would bet most of those vacancies will still be there tomorrow. A few will be taken, but others will pop up as teachers and their children get sick or are called to emergency meetings. I check later as I return to finish this post: There are now 26 vacancies for tomorrow and it’s 10:47 PM. If no one has taken those jobs by now, no one is likely to take them. Those 26 are not all the jobs in my districts, either. For all I know, another 26 jobs are going begging. I work for four districts, three relatively small, one medium sized, but I don’t see all the positions available. My feed favors locations where I am known to work. A number of elementary schools gave up on me awhile back, since I ignore them in favor of the middle schools.

The missing substitute problem tends to get worse in my area as the year goes by. In the past, retired subs were only allowed to work 500 hours over the school year here in suburban Illinois. Now that total allowed has risen up to 600 hours, but in May secretaries will be scrambling to make morning phone calls. “Please, please, can you come in?” They sound so desperate.

I am mostly asleep with my phone turned off when those calls are made, but every so often I awaken early and pity moves me to rescue struggling colleagues. Because I remember those days. Oops. My alleged planning period? What planning period? By the end, I never counted on a single hour to plan/grade/tutor or anything else during the school day. I might be math or I might be English. I might even be covering P.E. I might find a decent lesson plan to use. Or I might have nothing. That teacher who had intended to be out could mostly be counted on to supply decent guidelines for the hour, but teachers with a sudden case of the stomach flu? Any plans might be hopelessly outdated. I have stood in a classroom while a kindergarten colleague wrote the kinder schedule down, using a doorframe to steady her scrap of paper. That was all the plan I got that day.

But I am drifting away from my purpose in this post. I want to help salvage a few planning periods. I want to explain why some teachers are losing their planning time so regularly. Pay is part of the picture. But I am doing most of my subbing lately in my two lowest paying districts. I’ll list some reasons: 1) The lesson plans in these schools are always adequate and often much better than adequate. They fill the hour. Mostly, the plans advance learning and give me an actual chance to teach. They provide fallbacks for failed technology and sometimes even differentiation for kids who have IEPs. 2) The administration has my back. In the last few weeks, I sent two kids out of classrooms for gross misbehavior. I have spent enough years in Title One schools so that I can manage an occasional wild ride, but I also know a major problem behavior when I see one. In one school, the student was sent back after three minutes because, the Dean said, “she promised to be good.” In the other, the Principal called home. That second school will be seeing a lot more of me this year than the first school. In fact, I may be done with the first school. I simply don’t need the aggravation. 3) Some schools redeploy me less often. I understand that in a subbing crisis, I may become a missing kindergarten teacher instead of the bilingual resource teacher I had planned to be. But when that change happens too often, I am going to avoid the school where it happens. Especially if I end up being three people with no breaks, I probably won’t be back.

I am thinking of the Titanic as I write this. A ship can only take on so much water in so many compartments. I understand icebergs happen. Angry, tired ED kids who miss their familiar teacher try to drive outsiders away. Lesson plans can blow up for a great variety of reasons, especially when created under time pressure by people with a rising fever. Uncertainty is part and parcel of subbing. But a tipping point exists in subbing, that unknown moment when a given sub looks at the posting for Titanic Middle School and says, “Nope. Not again.”

Eduhonesty: So what can you do to help yourself, fellow teacher? Be the teacher who convinces the sub to come back. Have an emergency sub plan that works. Make sure whatever plan you leave takes the full class period: Much better too much than too little.

Set up a plan for disciplinary contingencies and spell out how that works. Who does the sub need to call when a student has slipped from classroom managed behaviors into racial slurs, for example? Are there referral forms available? Leave a few in the sub folder. Kids take referral forms seriously sometimes, even if written by the sub. Writing has a certain power. I have always been entertained by how much more well-behaved a classroom becomes if I start walking around while writing on a clipboard. I could be scrawling down my Costco list, but behaviors usually improve immediately.

Encourage subs to come back. Say “Hi!” in the hallway. Offer support if you are teaching nearby. Put the better subs on your preferred sub list.

You will have better and worse subs. Except in dire situations, I’d suggest not putting people on any “no sub” list your school might have. The problem with adding to that list of people not allowed to sub is that any time you decrease the number of available subs, you increase the odds that a vacancy will go unfilled, sucking up your planning time. You also increase the odds that another, better sub will end up redeployed, suddenly teaching kindergarten instead of the fifth grade position that sub had originally chosen. You increase the odds that the better sub will lose those music and gym breaks to cover for multiple teachers who are out, making for a tougher day. I’d suggest teachers hang onto those marginally competent subs simply because the number of jobs available in many areas exceeds the number of subs available — and every one of those unfilled jobs may result in a regular teacher having to pick up classes during planning times. Or may result in a better sub deciding to work for the Carpathia School down the street, where he or she can almost always count on getting that fifth grade position without worrying about suddenly being the gym teacher instead.

I think I’ll stop here and post this although I may add to it for the next few days.

I should probably add one note. I think kindergarten teachers are absolute heroes, and massively underappreciated. They ended up as my examples simply because I find my natural niche seems to be middle school. That sea of hands holding up gloves in the midwestern winter — well, I never seem to know how to budget time and manage all those zippers, laces and other bits of outerwear. And then there are the shoelaces that keep untying themselves all day… I honestly don’t know how kindergarten teachers do it.