Some Sub rules in FactoryTown.

First: get in early and harden the room. Remove and secure anything that can be thrown, written with, or picked up. Check every desk for objects, papers, anything. Empty the wastebaskets. Straighten any books on shelves. Make it NEAT and ORDERLY. It won't stay that way, but at least its straight when the kids get there: that sends a message that you are organized and prepared. It's the 'broken windows' philosophy: mess begets more mess.

This isn't an exaggeration, either. I saw teachers with criminally slovenly rooms; books thrown in heaps in corners, current issue, school-property textbooks holding up short legs of TEACHERS DESKS (no, not making that up). Food packaging on the floor. Trash littered everywhere. Often the cleaning people couldn't keep up with the mess generated and would hurry through, or often skip whole rooms: every other day you could sometimes count on, every day was a fantasy. So trash thrown on the floor could be there for two-three days. I heard teachers point-blank refuse to clean their own assigned rooms: “Ain't my job!”

Half the kids show up without pencils or pens. Carry enough to get through the day. Usually I could scrounge enough pencils off the floor in any given school on any given day to supply two classrooms. Sharpen them all. Do NOT let anyone use the pencil sharpener. EVER. I usually removed them; if it was electric, it got unplugged and went away; the manual ones were usually broken. If by some miracle they still functioned, I often snapped a pencil nub off in them and put a note on them: BROKE.

What works is the 'pencil exchange'. A cup or holder full of pencils, an empty container. A kid could come up and swap a dull one for a sharp one. This was a potential problem as well: it was best if the pencils were cut/sharpened to the same length. Ideally they should all be the same color and type. I had whole classrooms erupt in violence because someone got a different colored, sparkly, with a cartoon character on it, or otherwise 'special' pencil, bragged about it, profanely dissed everyone else, and started a riot. Try to keep the pencils the same length, size, and color, and allow the kids to swap them as they go dull.

Often, if I was in an elem classroom for a while, the kids were greeted, every day, with an identical pencil and a blank piece of lined paper on every desk, every day, with their full name and date already written on it, by me. We spent the first 15 minutes writing (laboriously) about a positive thing in our lives. We DID NOT, under any circumstances, EVER! Read these out loud or share them 'with the class'. They stayed confidential and in my sole possession. I picked them up individually and put them in a binder. Nobody read anything out loud about themselves, no-one revealed weaknesses that could be attacked by anyone else.

You would not BELIEVE some of the shit these kids would write down. 'Positive' things were in short supply, so a lot of the time they'd simply write down events in their lives. A lot of it was hilarious, some of it was stupid, some of it was absolutely terrifying. It does create a bit of a legal conundrum: a lot of the stuff described clearly (to middle-class White people) criminal and abusive behavior. I had to ignore it. You 'narc out' one kid about one thing and you are DONE. If it was really egregious I usually asked the kid about it to see if it was an exaggeration, or a lie, and checked it out personally. I took care of such things off the books and under the table. I NEVER involved administration or authorities in a direct way. I had in inside contact at the police who checked things out for me, and only about kids. No drugs or crime or anything: just kids. We had an arrangement. I set it up through another teacher. When I dropped the dime and called 5-0 ( I did this exactly 3 times in 2 years) I did it with a celphone contact to a known cop who handled it discretely.

Anyway. I drew an artwork on the chalkboard every day: a cartoon character, etc. with the day's subjects written in a large word balloon. SpongeBob was a big favorite, as was Dora in certain schools. Sometimes Tinkerbell, Disney figures. The kids ate it up. For Middle School kids, I wrote my name in a graffitti 'tag', in (preferably) multi-colored chalk or markers at the top of the board. It turned me into a rock star. I would create, in front of the kids, graffitti letters for each change of subject. They ate it up. Often, kids would shyly come up after class and show me tagging and artwork they'd drawn in their notebooks. It was a big bonder. Very effective trust-building exercise. Worked wonders.

Needless to say, I DESPISE 'Smartboards'. The teachers wouldn't leave passwords to use them, and the permanent mounting wouldn't let you get at the boards. Bullshit. I took rolls of wallpaper backing and tape to work so I could direct kids to the front of the room. Smartboards. Please.

Everything worked better under physical order, regimentation and supervision. Since the majority of the kids couldn't co-operate at all with each other, or in groups, a strong central clearinghouse of authority was vital. The touchy-feely idea that the kids had to 'express themselves' was just not workable in the short time frames I had to deal with as a Sub. Not practical in any way. I'd sometimes get vague instructions to have kids 'work in groups'. This was DEATH.

Usually the 'lesson plans' I got were less than useful. I went to a seminar once and the speaker, a White guy from a White 'burb, showed everyone the lesson plan they would get from the regular teacher. I had not, in two years, ever seen anything like it at all. I think I got an actual lesson plan maybe four times. The rest of the time I got handscrawled notes, a simple schedule with few or no instructions, or in many cases, no plans or seating charts at all of any kind.

Overwhelmed teachers would put together a lesson plan at the beginning of the year and file it with the office of the school, who would often lose them. Even if it was there, this scheduled lesson plan almost always went to hell within days, so by the middle of the school year it bore no resemblance to anything going on in the classroom. You flew blind the majority of the time, with no idea who was in any given classroom and no idea what they were supposed to be studying. I got one 'lesson plan' from a High School Math teacher whose 'lesson plan' was a loose-leaf binder page with 'Hav then study quetly' (sic) scribbled in marker sideways across the paper. For six periods of freshmen.

My least favorite 'instructions'? This: “The kids know what to do.” Yep, they sure do, and it isn't doing dutiful schoolwork in the absence of their usual teacher. How can any adult be that much of an idiot? It always baffled me, the rank stupidity of so many teachers about the nature of children and human beings.

I subbed for a Media teacher (with the books on the crashcart and walking from classroom to classroom). I got a TV/DVD combo, a battered box of patronizing videos, and a time schedule; that was it. The first classroom I walked into, the teacher leaped out of her seat and screamed, “You ain't showin' mah kids no DAMN MOVIES!”

I had to have a talk with her, right in front of the kids, that I was in an impossible situation: I was required by my work contract to follow the 'lesson plan', or face disciplinary action; or, to face a formal complaint from a tenured teacher (her), leading to disciplinary action. It had clearly never occurred to her that I might be in the ugly situation through no fault of my own. We compromised: I read a book with the kids, interactively as best I could, and she 'promised' (what good that might have done, even if she'd actually done it) to back me up about not following a pathetic 'lesson plan' from the Media teacher. This kind of thing was constant. CONSTANT.

You often ended up in the middle of power struggles and hatreds between staff members who viciously used you as a pawn in some greater internal battle. It was awful. One school had divided itself into race categories. The White, Black, and Hispanic teachers all ate lunch apart from each other in separated parts of the school. THAT place was intolerable and so dysfunctional I finally deliberately generated a complaint and got myself barred from teaching there. Horrible staff. Horrible. Inexcusably nasty.

The big thing in classrooms, I found, was to generate a 'hook'; find some kind of mutual reference point; the artwork did that for me. The kids dug it, and it made my life so much easier I kicked myself for not thinking of it a year earlier. I viewed the truncated teaching thing I did as a kind of magic trick, an illusion, or standup comedy. For classes of Black students, I studied Black preachers and Chris Rock comedy specials.

I put on a show, and if things went halfway okay, the kids would learn something. I loved that part: “Ha! You learned something! I tricked you! Ha ha ha!”

Treating subbing like standup makes things much easier. I also learned to style myself after Black preachers. With Black classrooms, to hold a book, stride back and forth in front of the classroom, and speak firmly and with authority. Rhyme words if I could. The mere body language of 'preacher' made kids sit up and behave. I mean, I'm a tall, Whitey-White-White guy, and the physical act of being a Black Preacher made my classrooms pay attention. My race didn't matter: it was the physical movement and presence that counted.

I got impassioned about some thing once in a sophomore classroom, stalking back and forth, waving a book, actually getting good enough to speak in rhythmic cadences and rhyme a little bit, and an extremely argumentive and problematic girl in the front row, who had been tormenting me all day, melted. She started waving her arms around and yelling, “Speak it, Mr. HardHat! Testify! Speak it! Oh, I love this stuff! Oh me oh my!”

She then turned to the class and snarlingly told them to leave me alone or she'd 'take care' of them! Poor behavior halted instantly: they were all terrified of her.

I was so surprised both at her response and the effect it had had, not to mention what I had just become, I almost blew it and stopped my rant in shock. I managed to save it, though, and the rest of the day was framed as a Church Service. I didn't have kids read out loud, or talk, I had them 'testify', 'speak it', etc. It went great. I suspect two or three may have learned something, too.

Ha! Fooled you.