Substitute Teaching
I worked for five days as a substitute teacher at three public schools in New Hampshire. I took notes on my experience in the government schooling algorithm. I made a story of the notes.
Despite its countless damning flaws, I do have some gratitude for the existing mainstream school system. It’s not all bad, but it’s mostly bad. I would not advise anyone to send their children to a mainstream American school. At the end of the piece, I link other options for education. As usual, there’s a song at the end.
I sip water from the school’s water fountain. I spit it out. I approach the school’s front desk lady.
“Is there a place I can fill my water bottle?”
She looks like she’s been sitting in that chair for a hundred years.
“We have a water machine in the back. Otherwise, you’d have to use the bubbler.” She cackles.
I go into the back room and fill up my bottle with acceptable water.
“How’d it go today?” asks the desk lady.
You couldn’t pay me a thousand dollars to do that again.
“It was great,” I say.
“Oh. Good. So you’ll be back?”
No.
“I’ll check my schedule.”
I just finished a day of substitute teaching Physical Education class. Six classes of around twenty children each, from eight to eleven years old. 120 kids, screaming, crying, arguing, and yelling at me. No breaks, no assistance. Just me, an untrained person, by myself. Worse than alone. It is really just glorified babysitting on a factory scale.
Children are 100% of our future and American public school is bonkers.
I filled out an online application, attached my resume, did a five-minute phone call, and just like that, I’m a substitute teacher.
I go to the school district office to fill out tax paperwork and do fingerprints. The office lady says, “OK, go on this website to sign up for shifts, you can start tomorrow.” Zero training. Not even a piece of advice or a link to a YouTube video. I signed up for five days of substitute teaching at three different schools.
The first day is at an elementary school. They send me to recess duty. It’s November in New Hampshire and I didn’t bring a coat or hat. Great start. A veteran recess supervisor sees that I’m new here. She walks across the field. “Just remember,” she says, “They are not your friends.” Perhaps she sensed optimism in my eyes and felt the need to balance it out.
I watch the kids play soccer and after a while I start to kick the ball with them. An automated alarm notifies us that the thirty-minute play period is over. We migrate back toward the brick building. A child yells to the sky, “I liked homeschooling better!”
Next, they send me to a 6th-grade classroom. Since the regular teacher is here, it’s not clear what my job is. There are no extra chairs, so I stand and watch the show for an hour and twenty minutes. There is a period of time for kids to work on whatever assignment they want. I sit and help a couple of kids do math problems on their school laptops. The main problem is that they are not reading the math problem because they don't want to. After I read the problem aloud, they can figure it out.
During the science portion, I teach them stuff about electromagnetic waves. The teacher, a nice young woman, is stoked. Finally, she is not alone.
The vice principal, who is wearing a suit and tie, comes and asks me to teach a music class. “They’ll come with their laptops and do the activity on Schoology,” he says.
22 eight-year-olds stroll in, all with different needs, and only me, with no training. No amount of training could rectify the situation.
A fat and half-shirtless kid is rolling on the floor. A small kid with amphetamine eyes runs up to me spewing incoherent gibberish. Kids are banging drums. Two kids incessantly ask me if I like Pokémon. The phone is ringing.
I resort to a zero-talking policy for five minutes. I single out the kids who are physically unable to be silent. I send one into the hall; he understands why.
It’s an hour of chaos. I radio for backup but it didn’t come. This setup, this environment, what they ask of you, is an impossible job without strict authoritarian tactics and carrot on a stick “classroom management.”
I got paid $45 for that afternoon.
I show up to teach “Media Technology Integration.”
“Actually, we have a change,” says the fat front desk lady. “We want you to teach music class.”
“Can I say no?”
“We would be very sad.”
I’m sitting in the music room writing a tirade as I wait for 120 children to cycle through the room. This situation is not their fault. They shouldn’t be locked in a room with a stranger for forty-five-minute increments with no plan except a worksheet. Who would do this job? You get $92 per day. That doesn’t even cover the cost of the benzos to get through it. There’s a huge shortage of substitute teachers and it’s not a mystery why. $92 per seven hours of chaos and nothing else. Not even a donut. A market rate would be $200 - $250.
During my break period, I’m sitting in an empty classroom. On the other side of the wall is the school psychologist's room. I hear a child’s voice:
“He starts yelling and swearing and she’s crying and my sister’s crying.”
This is a valuable piece for the children of the community. An escape from a broken home, and the potential for help.
I’m at school, again. Frankly, I’m surprised I’m back for another round of lunacy. I spent fifteen years here and narrowly escaped. Now I’m on the other side, a spy in the algorithm, and also desperate for some form of social structure.
The desk lady says things have changed and they want me to help out in a different classroom, with a special kid. Whatever, fine. The special kid’s teacher is a smokeshow. Many school teachers are nice young women.
The kid is alright, he’s just sugared up with ADHD, stuck in a low-security prison doing futile laptop work created by anonymous bureaucrats and corporations.
“Is driving fun?” he asks.
“It is in the beginning.”
The two students next to him engage me in conversation. I can tell they have involved parents.
“What are you working on?” I ask.
They show me their math. It’s more math than almost any adult can do. They’re twelve.
“Here they give you the math problems. But in real life, you have to figure out the math problems, and then solve them.”
“You sound like…like a millionaire,” one says.
“Maybe I am. Rounding and mental math is useful too, especially in finance and engineering.”
“I’m gonna be smart. I’m gonna invent one hundred websites and see what works,” another says.
“Whoever created YouTube is rich,” says the kid I’m supposed to be supervising.
“What social media do kids use?” I ask the group of seventh-grade boys.
“TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat.”
“Do you guys know who owns TikTok?”
“The Chinese!”
“The Chinese Communist Party.”
“Wait…Communists own TikTok?” a kid asks. He is visibly upset.
“The communists own everything in China.”
Now these kids are getting an education.
I used to coach an afternoon mountain biking program at a local bike park. My group was five kids of around ten years old. Good kids. We would ride a lift access bike park for a couple of hours every Thursday. I let them do whatever they wanted and asked them questions.
“Do you like school?” I ask Axel.
“No. I like recess and lunch. And science.”
I allow for silence.
“Sometimes I like learning new things in math. The only time I do math is in school.”
“I see.”
“I like this program because we get to leave school early and it’s better.”
“Why do you like leaving early?”
“This is better and I get to miss social studies.”
“What do they teach you in social studies?”
“A bunch of crap we don’t need,” says Axel, who is nine and thinking clearly.
I’m reminded of a Nassim Taleb quote. “The opposite of education is not ignorance; it is education in social science.”
Waiting in the chairlift line, I ask the whole group: “If you could go to school any number of days per week, how many days would you go?”
Axel says two. Ely says three. Patrick says one. Tyler says zero. Archer, a homeschooler, looks confused. Then he laughs and says “Haha, you guys have to go to school!”
Archer is nine. The other kids thought he was eleven. Perhaps he appears more mature than the run-of-the-mill nine-year-old because in Archer’s classroom there are as many adults as children.
Twenty children stuck in a room with a random stranger is a recipe for disaster. A new 20-22 kids every hour, for seven hours. For $92 per day. Per child, it’s less than $1. It’s 76 cents. All those taxes and your child’s teacher gets 76 cents per hour. Fifteen dollars per hour to corral twenty children. I’d rather drive for Uber for six hours. I did do Uber. I completed 150 ride-hailing trips and cannot recall an experience remotely close to the overwhelming stressful moments of substitute teaching.
I'm on “lunch duty” at the elementary school. Across the board, kids are eating sugar, processed grains, seed oils, preservatives, food dyes, and mystery meats.
Kids are required to raise their hands to get “seconds.” I stand in a sea of sugared-up children, giving them thumbs-ups to get another serving of meat patties and fat-free, homogenized, pasteurized, sugar-added chocolate “milk.”
I think about Evan, a teenager I met at the bike park, on the three-person chairlift. Evan told me that he is not allowed to eat in class at school. He’s sixteen.
“Lunch is at 10:30 and by the end of the day everyone is hungry. The math teacher lets us eat in class so everyone eats in math class.”
“That’s so funny that a random person can tell you, no, you’re not allowed to eat.”
The third guy on the chair chimes in: “Sounds like prison.”
“Teachers can no longer say ‘No you can’t go to the bathroom.’ But you’re only allowed to go three times,” Evan says. I laugh. He continues, “It’s so annoying, they make us fill out a form to go to the bathroom.”
“In prison, you can go to the bathroom as many times as you want,” I say.
Do parents know what goes on inside schools? They do to some extent. But some turn a blind eye to the absurdity because sending children to government daycare is the path of least resistance
In music class, I picked up a guitar and played them a song. I let the musically inclined play in front of the class. A thank you from a child hits different. It goes a long way and nearly compensates for the stress, abuse, and nonsense. Some kids are good kids. Sports plays a role. Sports, reading, and the chemicals they ingest. Playing outside, reading books, and eating only nutritious foods, indicates that the parents are involved, and that’s the real reason why the kids are good kids.
Schools have an army of slaves locked inside and they produce nothing. All these kids coerced into unpaid labor and there’s not even a product to show for it—aside from worksheets and anxiety disorders. All those tax dollars and the system is a net negative burden. I have heard that unschooling, doing literally nothing other than keeping the child safe, has better outcomes than public schooling.
I taught ski lessons at Mt. Hood for two winters. I asked one of the Portland, Oregon first-graders, “What do they teach you in school?”
“Reading, history, and black people.”
I laughed.
“What do they teach you about black people?”
“Everything,” he said.
Taleb’s words echo in my head again. The opposite of education is not ignorance; it is education in social science.
I did five days of public school substitute teaching. Like most other jobs I've worked, it's not worth it. If you can do anything other than this, do that. Get as far from government schooling as you can. Our children are the continuation of us. We may as well build something better than today's public schooling. It can cost less and have better outcomes with fewer bureaucrats involved. It’s a matter of decentralization, returning the power to the people, including young people.
Learning environments other than public schooling:
For ages 4 - 12
Prenda
Montessori
Reggio Emilia
Ages 12+
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Chris James writes in a fresh and irreverent style that harkens back to a touch of Jack Kerouac and William S. Boroughs.
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