If you didn’t read UPSTR#4, that’s okay. No need to back track. Suffice to say here that I was bemoaning the lack of incentives substitute teachers have to encourage students they encounter for (typically) one day in their lifetimes to settle into the program groove and focus on the words “belched to the wind” (as Whitman said) from the sub. One of the better full-time teachers told me, “If you ever find such an incentive, be sure and let us (full-time teachers) know!”
Put your head into the heart of a pubescent middle schooler, into the culture which provides the greatest challenge to caucasian (if I had wanted to say “white” I would have said “albino”) substitute teachers to understand the total lack of incentive for you to respond as directed by whatever transiting countenance pontificates to you for all of 55 minutes, tops, one day of your life. You have no stake in the sub teacher. He or she will be out of your hair soon. There are no consequences you can’t handle, the way some of your brothers and sisters (who have beautiful hair) wear their jail time as a badge of honor. What can the sub do to hurt you? Generate a day of detention for 45 minutes after seventh period? Good practice for what you’ll encounter later on; right? You have no stake in the substitute teacher’s society. If you are not committed, on a visceral level by the time you enter your freshman year at high school, you will be on the outside looking in; signifying you’re one with your posse while breaking wind into the face of the rest of American society. It’s not your game. You’re beyond the American game. You’re in a game of your own.
In middle school, I learned that properly timed, the promise of holding the class five seconds after the dismissal bell for every demonstration of disrespect for the class or the teacher had the desired effect. There I found that after four delays, 20 seconds, the class settled down. In high school, the class reacted to five second delay increments the way you might respond to an an agressor throwing cotton balls at you: with disdainful laughter.
The students believe they are looking through the substitute teacher, that the attitude the show as though baboons in spring will embarrass the sub and give them another reason to giggle en mass. Fact is, they students aren’t seeing through you at all. That’s because they don’t see you, the point of the lesson you are teaching. They don’t see you at all. This happens when you’re the teacher and they’re the students.
Two high school students responded defiantly to delayed dismissals on a testy Wednesday at SpriHi. One because she was black with beautiful hair and would not see the sub, following the end of second period. I didn’t exist, my words didn’t exist, and she determined she would walk through me to her next class when the bell rang without delay. The other student, following the end of fourth hour, was a white with incredibly faultless hair. She was determined to walk through me. She said fuve inches from my nose, I had no right hold the ones who had behaved well (she had behaved well up to the moment of defiant impasse) . By the time I explained, in a nutshell, why I held the entire class, the promised delay had run its course, and every student departed as though inspired by ants in their pants. The point I intended to make was this: until the class unit AS A WHOLE is so bothered by the price to be paid for blatant disrespect too many students display, the behavior of the recalcitrant offenders will nver change. One factor accounting for relatively few muggings of students in the area surrounding area schools is the certain knowledge that fellow students highly discourage such antics. The will of the whole student body politik guides the inflamed blind to see the errors of their ways and to adjust their behavior to serve th good of the collective whole.That is my hope for the classes I sub teach. If the caucasoid young lady with beautiful hair had been forced to write “Disrespecting the substitute teacher and my classmates is 100 percent uncool.” on the blackboard, she might have had her point. If I had written a referral to keep the entire class 45 minutes after 7th period dismissal, that would have been unrealistic as well. But it wasn’t about that. It was holding them over 30 seconds.
30
freaking
seconds.
Live long . . . . . and proper.
