An Embarrassment: One Year as a Substitute Teacher
It is easy to forget how embarrassing high school can be. During a recent substitute teaching assignment, I was reminded of that fact when I attended a local high school’s Senior Day assembly, an embarrassing, Gong Show-like invitation for humiliation.
As my class entered the school’s auditorium, we were met by subtle manifestations of the anarchy that was soon to follow. Already the order envisioned and prescribed by the powers that be was proving to be a chimera. Students, who were expected to remain with their sixth hour class, began breaking off from their groups like so many sheep straying from the pack, searching for the greener grasses of their respective clique. We shepherds were rendered useless.
The embarrassment began promptly as seniors - two by two - walked the plank of the stage as their names were called. They were sometimes greeted with cheers, sometimes fits of laughter, and sometimes the crowds low-murmuring imitation of silence. All the symbolism intended - an individual’s movement into a new stage of life - was overshadowed by reminders of a sometimes debilitating social hierarchy. Instead of ushering in the future, the act dragged many students back into a past they’d likely rather forget.
What followed was an excruciatingly lengthy awards ceremony, broken up with musical performances by members of the senior class.
The awards allowed for several students to receive recognition for the intelligence and diligence that most likely ostracized them socially, but more often than not these students’ achievements were celebrated with cackles and insults from the underclassmen. After one student, an overweight female, won an academic award, a girl behind me joked, “They should give an award for the fattest ass.”
The same girl also opined that Debbie (name changed) should win the Most Annoying award for her two admittedly sub-par vocal performances. Debbie reminded me not only of the humiliation one can passively be subjected to in high school, but also of many high schoolers’ tendency to willingly put themselves in awkward situations. I fronted a musically-challenged punk band when I was in high school, so I can relate to the cringe-inducing naiveté of young performers. As Debbie began her first number, an American Idol-like karaoke duet with a friend, I felt embarrassed for her. Wearing a low-cut, medium length dress (most likely bought specially for the occasion) Debbie belted out slightly off-key notes with all the gusto of a William Hung. To make matters worse, the backing track began to lose faith in her as well, and was soon reduced to stuttering and skipping before the sound man stopped the CD, cutting the performance short. Amazingly, Lisa kept herself composed; and, after another slew of awards no one cared about, returned with a somewhat better acapella rendition of a song from “Phantom of the Opera.”
After yet another series of unnecessary awards, including the Elks National Foundation Most Valuable Student Scholarship and the Daughters of the American Revolution Good Citizen Award (seriously), an un-named rock band took the stage. Like any bad high school band, the four members of the group displayed bravado in their wardrobe choices, but not in their stage presence. After it became obvious to the audience that only one (maybe) member knew how to play his instrument, laughter from the seats led to red faces on stage. I couldn’t help but be reminded of myself when I observed the bass player: mowhawk, cut-off jeans, and high-top All Stars unsuccessfully covering up myriad anxieties and insecurities.
The assembly itself was an embarrassment. It was unnecessary, hurtful, and ultimately boring. But more troubling than those two and a half hours are the greater problems that the assembly symbolizes: time killing as substitute for education and students who don’t know how to handle themselves properly.
The time wasting was not limited to the three hours in the auditorium that day. Countless hours undoubtedly went into the planning of the assembly (one envisions multiple committee and departmental meetings), and a half hour was left over at the end of the day that students were required to waste back in their sixth-hour class. While school-wide and school-sanctioned time wasting such as this isn’t a regular occurrence, it can be seen on a smaller scale daily in individual classrooms. After a year of substitute teaching, I cannot tell you how many times I was paid to waste time: show a movie, pass out a cross-word puzzle, supervise an impromptu study hall. While several teachers did leave quality lesson plans, and others left these time-wasters because they did not trust in the abilities of a substitute, more often than not the lesson plan represented a trend rather than an exception. These simple plans often made my job easy (who wouldn’t want to get paid to watch taped episodes of “American Choppers?”), but they also began to worry me. Several times, while witnessing what appeared to be a comfortable and practiced malaise in students, I would ask them what they usually did in class. Their responses would regularly be to the effect of oh, we never do anything in here; and, despite the tendency of students to lie to substitutes, I often felt they were telling the truth.
So what has happened to our system that it allows such infuriating practices to continue? In the case of this assembly one could reasonably conclude that the administrators of the school inadvertently endorse such practices by engaging in these school-wide time wasters. Or perhaps, as someone who has sat through more than one woefully inefficient, ineffective teacher’s union meeting can attest, teachers are being over-protected to the point where the administration has no effective mechanism for censuring those who regularly fail to make their students’ education a priority.
Or maybe it’s the students. Maybe teachers have reverted to time wasters because when they attempt anything more constructive they are met with rampant opposition from disrespectful, uninterested students. Senior Day certainly lends credence to this theory. Young people who ‘excelled as students were subjected to the ridicule of those who hadn’t.
From where then do these behaviors originate? Explanations abound. The original sin theory posits that humans are simply born with the ability to be mean. In education circles, there is a train of thought ascribing poor behavior to poor teaching. Engage a student, they argue, and their behavior will improve. But at this assembly, I, like most students, was bored out of my mind. Yet I didn’t start cat-calling and mocking those on stage like many students did. Groupthink, perhaps? Many would argue this behavior is learned at home and that often students’ poor behavior, and consequently poor school performance, is a result of bad parenting. Personally, I’ve been developing a theory centered on young peoples’ identity - how they see themselves as basketball player, as computer nerd, as freestyle rapper, as bad-ass, but rarely as student.
Many theories address what happened at the Senior Day Assembly, but none fully explain it. Whether it is the system, the kids, or the combination of the two is unclear. What is clear is that this sort of thing shouldn’t be happening. As I edit the rough draft of this essay I am sitting in the technical drawing lab in a high school located in an affluent suburban district. Self-motivated students are quietly working in an auto-cad program, respecting me, each other, and focusing on their learning. There are students, teachers, classes, and even districts that have it right, but for every successful architectural design class there is no doubt a Senior Day: an embarrassment.