Substituting for Fun and Profit

 I am new to the teaching profession.  I received my master's degree in 2006 and worked for a year as a 4th grade teacher.  Then life struck, and I had to move to Seattle just at a time when budget cuts and mismanagement made even getting on the sub list nearly impossible.  Thus I made my way into academia and ran a writing center for a local tribal college.  This was an unqualified diseaster.  While I loved the students and the teaching, I hated the politics (politics in Indian Ed being exponentially more complex than anywhere else).  So I was politely laid off and have been on unemployment ever since.
 
I am currently substitute teaching in a relatively affluent public school district.  After almost two years on unemployment, I am grateful to be working again.  When Ii was hired into this district I decided that I would take any job the district offered me.  It became apparent right away that paraeducator jobs in special education had a particular need for substitutes. I have worked nearly continuously in these jobs since the first day of school.  I think some beleive that these jobs are a bit of a come down for a certified teacher with a masters degree.  Although the difference in pay is daunting (almost  a third less than a certified sub job) the advantages have become apparent right from the start.

As a para-sub, I get an opportunity to observe many kinds of teachers, teaching many kinds of things.  It is a real opportunity to evaluate how others teach and learn from great teachers and maybe from some poor ones as well.  I also get to work one on one with some of the most challenging students in these schools.  They have already taught me so much about what works and what doesn't work.  When I have been called to be a substitute teacher in a over full classroom of first graders, I have taken what I have learned with individual students and applied it, successfully, to whole classroom management.

I have also had the opportunity to work with children that I would never work with otherwise; children that are physically challenged or medically fagile.  It was my priviledge to work with a little blind girl in kindergarten.  She trained me in a week just how and when to help her.  I have learned a great deal about all kinds of physical disabilities. Thankfully the children I have worked with have been both tolerant of my ignorance and kind while educating me.  All of this is knowledge I can take with me when I finally get into my own classroom again.

As with most of the country, education has been hit just as hard with the recent economic depression.  That means I may be on the sub-list, eating beans and rice, for quite some time.  I plan on using this time to learn how I can be a better teacher.  I have also learned there is no better place to quietly observe what is really going on behind the scenes in any given school...and that is the really interesting story....