By ALISTAIR BOMPHRAY
Note: This is part two of a three part essay. Click here for part one.
It was a three day gig, which meant those first five minutes foretold an especially grim future for the hapless substitute. It would not be eight hours and out, take my paycheck and go to Reno.
Nor could I take comfort from the substitute’s only real source of vindication: “Well, I won’t have to see them again.” I was locked in. Three days of attending to multiple forms of major misconduct going on at the same time. Three days of feeling like I was playing Whac-a-Mole at Showbiz Pizza—but instead of a mallet I was armed with only hollow threats and my increasingly wounded dignity. Three days of looking into the eyes of the four students who actually wanted to learn something and feeling my heart sink.
Such is the power of twenty-five nine-year olds to engineer the unraveling of a supposed grown-up. There is nothing worse than the feeling of ineptitude that arises while being defied by a kid in a Sponge Bob T-shirt. As I felt my control slip away somewhere between the first bell and the taking of attendance, I glimpsed what seeds my own fourth grade self had sown. It is the fate of every wise ass to meet a wiser ass. On that day, I would meet twenty of them.
To recount every episode of my three day odyssey would be akin to describing the details of a car wreck. That said, there is one story that bears mentioning.
It was morning recess, that glorious fifteen minutes of freedom when the kids get to run around outside and go crazy at no risk to the school’s (or the substitute’s) internal functioning. On this day, I agreed to let one student stay behind in the classroom and draw Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. This was a bad decision on a number of levels. In my defense, I did have one fleeting moment of panic as I reflected on the time bomb that I had wittingly left ticking in the classroom, but at that very moment, three of my students were sprinting down the hallway banging on other teachers’ doors, a situation that required my immediate and complete attention.
It all happened quite quickly once we were back in the classroom. It was a math lesson, and I was boldly attempting to demystify long division for the four students who had not yet realized that they hated me.
The rest of the class was having a party. The handout was either sitting untouched in front of them or tossed to the floor and subjected to the even further disgrace of a shoeprint. Two students were fighting over a pencil. The Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist was busy cartooning.
One student, the ringleader, who spent most of his time wandering the halls, was at this moment sitting behind the teacher’s desk giving counsel. I was powerless to move him from this post. When I took a break from the lesson to ask him why he wouldn’t do any work, he looked me square in the eye without blinking and said, “I can’t read.”
Fair enough, I thought.
I didn’t have time to go into this with him because right then two of the girls sitting in the back of the class started complaining about a smell. They were sitting next to a tall awkward girl who was the object of constant derision. It seemed clear what was going on.
“C’mon, girls, nothing smells,” I said, returning to the front of the class to remind them that I was still the teacher.
The tall awkward girl shifted in her chair. She was not one of the four, but she sensed an ally in me, if only for the fact that I was an even easier target than her.
I continued with the lesson, double-checking to make sure I still had my small but dedicated following. The four had dropped to three and seemed perilously close to dissolving completely.
“Ewww!” one of the girls in the back shrieked.
“Ewww!” the other shrieked.
“What?” I asked, marveling at how easily I could be sparked to anger.
“There’s poop in the trashcan!”
“No,” I said. “Don’t be silly.”
“Ewww!” the girls shrieked in unison.
I calmly walked over to the trashcan and looked inside. Planted on top of a pile of unfinished handouts was a small brown turd.
This was my moment of truth.
To be continued on Friday, April 10…
