(Click on the pic for a better view.)

She gave it a shot, this pretty, young Hispanic girl with her long dark hair and friendly smile. She worked through the hour while I subbed. Others in the class completed this paper. One boy did not even try the more difficult side. “I don’t know how,” he said.

The girl is in 10th grade. The boy is in 11th grade. I passed out that paper throughout the day. Most of these bilingual high school students could not do the more difficult side. I’ll grant that a few may have been getting out of work by dishonestly claiming ignorance of a process that looked like too much effort for them.

I’ll also grant that readers who wonder why high school students should be doing this multiplication worksheet have grasped a serious issue. Was this the best use of students’ time? But a sub is supposed to deliver the lesson plan handed to her and pass out the worksheets the teacher has prepared. I did exactly that.

It’s worth pausing to think about the fact that we keep adding more and more outside responsibilities to our teachers’ workloads, more meetings, professional development, and committee work that result in subs in classrooms. The best that will happen with any substitute will be that no learning time gets lost, thanks to thoughtful advance planning combined with strong efforts by a capable substitute. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is a wasted hour, possibly even a mistaught hour, as the sub blows off the lesson plan or tries to do math he or she does not understand.

I would call this lesson a loss of instructional opportunity. I talked with a few classes as students worked on multiplication sheets. Apparently these students are taught multiplication regularly. (Sigh.) But I cannot solve any underlying problems in my one day in the classroom and I was expected to make students work on this sheet, and I was expected to turn in all student worksheets at the end of the day.

I would argue that this example could be added to the list of reasons why we ought to stop sending teachers out of the classroom for data meetings, curriculum meetings, Common Core standard meetings, etc. during the school year. The classroom teacher in this example may be doing a better job than I suspect from the worksheet. He may have chosen this activity because he was sure that all of his students could at least do the easy side, which required multiplying large numbers by single digits. He may have been trying to keep all students occupied to prevent disciplinary issues and help me out. I don’t know.

I do know I wasted the time of many students — both those who could do the worksheet and therefore did not need to do the worksheet, and those who could not do the worksheet and therefore needed instruction rather than a worksheet.

Teachers should be in the classroom. I taught this multiplication to some of the students in that day’s classes, but those students deserved better. They deserved to be taught math in incremental steps by a teacher who could focus on their individual needs.

Eduhonesty: I like to sub for half-day assignments and all these meetings and professional development seminars are making life easy. Click. Click. I tell the software I want an assignment. Today, I started at 11:00 and ended at 2:30 on a warm, bright, sunny day. I stopped for squash soup, walked the dog, and went to the movies to see Dr. Strange.

With a few rare exceptions, though, those proliferating meetings and seminars are not helping America’s students learn math.