Substitute teaching

One of the occupational hazards of being an administrator is getting called on to sub on short notice, when no other sub can be procured. The likelihood of this increases dramatically during the winter months, when various colds and flues have a tendency to strike. In the last three days, I have twice stepped in to teach in these circumstances.

Last Friday I subbed in 8th grade Spanish. Students were giving presentations in English and Spanish on culturally-based subjects of their choosing; one group presented on Selena (the famous Tejana singer), another on Shakira, and a third on Pan Dulce, Churros, and Horchata. In each case, the students spoke in front of a powerpoint presentation first in Spanish, and then in English, using note cards only for reminders about the order of their ideas and the occasional difficult word to remember or pronounce. At the end, other students asked questions, and applauded the hard work each classmate put into the activity.

Today I subbed in 6th grade Spanish. Students were working on combining sentences, a grammatical activity that teaches students to write compound-complex sentences and increase the complexity of their writing. Students first analyzed a model sentence for its component phrases, and then took three or four or five new sentences and combined them in a way that mimicked the underlying grammatical idea of the original. For example, one model sentence read "The children, shouting and screaming, came running into their homeroom." The three sentences that followed, which were meant to be combined into a new single sentence following the model, read "The ponies were neighing. The ponies were pawing. The ponies went barreling into their barn."

In both cases, what was so wonderful - besides helping the teachers feel ok about missing their class - was the opportunity to delve into student thinking, to ask them questions about their work, and come to know their understanding of the topics at hand. This is the magic piece of teaching that motivates all teachers; there is little as satisfying as being able to connect with a student's intellectual state, and to subtly advance his/her understanding to the next level of complexity. It was a little holiday gift that reminded me, paradoxically, of the importance of the job I have now in supporting teachers to have the time, resources, skill, awareness, motivation, and pedagogic tools to do the same.