Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

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THIS BOOK IS a moment-by-moment account of the twenty-eight days I spent as the lowest-ranking participant in American education: a substitute teacher. I taught all ages, from kindergartners to twelfth-graders, and all required subjects — reading, writing, math, social studies, and science — plus a few electives here and there, like metal tech. I taught honors students and students in special ed classes — about a thousand children in all. I didn’t have a teaching certificate, and I’d never taught in a primary or secondary school, but that didn’t matter — all you need is a high school diploma, a clean criminal record, and a willingness to tolerate your own ineptitude.

I sought out the teaching job because I wanted to know what life in classrooms was really like. There are many books of educational advice, of theory, of hagiography, of gloomy prognosis — what’s missing is a lived-through sense of how busy and complicated and weird and long every school day is; how many ups and downs there are, and how exhausting — and sometimes entertaining — school is, for students and teachers both. Forget curriculum, forget the parts of speech and the noble gases, the nature of prime numbers and the components of an argumentative essay: for many kids, going to school is simply about finding a way to get through six and a half hours of compulsory deskbound fluorescence without wigging out and incurring punishment. In these pages I’ve tried to convey, without exaggeration, the noisy, distracted, crazy-making reality of one fairly typical, not-terribly-poor-but-hardly-rich school district. I’m grateful to all the students who put up with my own fumbling attempts at doing my job, and to Sarah Hochman and David Rosenthal, of Blue Rider Press, who gave me the go-ahead to write this book.

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