The Substitute

The Substitute

As I walked into the classroom and saw the sub sitting in the front of the room my first thought was: "good another sub, 7th hour, what a great time to have a sub, this will just be a nice easy class, all I have to do is sit here..." little did I know, however, that it was going to be the start of a rough class.

The bell rang and everyone was in their seats, surprisingly, but we were pretty calm and it actually seemed like the class might be able to pull through and behave themselves like they did the day before. My hope for this quickly dissolved the minute the substitute started talking. He was an older man, with crew cut hair and glasses wearing normal teacher attire, he seemed like just another average Joe really. It's not that he was a bad guy or anything, he just happened to be a little strange and not what were used to. He started to read the objectives that our teacher had left for us, but nobody in the class could understand what was being said. It just didn't make sense coming out of his mouth. This inevitably led to giggles and such around the room. After a minute or so of the rambling, instead of listening to him confuse us more, the majority of us turned to the board where our assignments were written. Something quickly caught our attention though: READ PAGES 309-403. This immediately caused hands to go up and mouths to open spurting things like "Mr. Teacher do we really have to read 100 pages??" and "are you kidding me? I'm not reading all that!" We got things to calm down pretty quickly, and it took him a while to catch on, but eventually he figured out that the pages numbers were written wrong on the board. Surprisingly enough, one of our usually rambunctious classmates actually helped him out by changing it for him. Now that this was taken care of we were all ready to work, however, he decided that it was necessary to repeat the instructions again which, after losing our attention so quickly the first time, again didn't go so well. One kid in the front row decided that it would be funny to shine a laser on his forehead, and I'll admit, it was humorous, even if it is a childish thing to do. This sent the class into a laughing fit. We expected him to ask us what was so funny or to stop laughing or try to maintain control since we were laughing quite loudly, but all he did was continue mumbling off the instructions. After a minute or so of him quietly reading the instructions to the class, which actually sounded more like he was readying them quietly to himself, we all calmed down and got to work. The class did a good job of staying on task and we finished the first assignment fairly quickly so he started us on the second assignment: popcorn reading.

Popcorn reading was the turning point of the class period. Typically popcorn reading isn't very difficult...but our class managed to make it difficult. Hoping to get out of doing the last part of the assignment a few students decided to prolong the reading by pretending that they didn't know how to read. It was actually pathetic at some points. A kid starts reading: "On he-har-heeearing, oh hearing. On hearing the fan stop he left imme-immad-imadtly-immeadiately....He he-hast-haastly in-queen-no-inquin-inquired what the ma-mattar-matter was." Honestly? That couldn't have fooled the teacher and it annoyed the class quite a bit. The kid eventually finished the paragraph and stopped reading, but to everybody's surprise the teacher actually asked him to read the next paragraph!