One story from when I was subbing that I absolutely love is about when I was in charge of a middle school English class and everything went wrong. I got in, and a seventh-grade girl took one look at me and said, “yes! The substitute is wearing a tie; he’ll keep the class in line.” Unfortunately, the teacher did not leave any sub plans for me to follow, and I did not keep the class in line.
The advisory class drive me through the roof as they screamed while playing Shell Shockers, an egg-based first-person shooter that definitely wasn’t supposed to be accessible on their school provided laptops.
The next class showed up and I tried my best to organize a speech activity where students had the chance to talk about something they cared about or found interesting or funny. It did not work. The only kid who got up to say something started reading (not reciting) digits of pi as the rest of the classroom descended even further into chaos (which was impressive, because at that point I thought we had thoroughly plumbed those depths). Eventually, someone signed into the projector and turned on Cars, to my blessed relief, the students quieted down and watched one of the greatest films of all time … for around 15 minutes and then the bell rang, and a new group of monsters arrived.
Fortunately, by this point, I knew what to do, and I turned on a movie, sat back, and relaxed, though unfortunately, the kids didn’t want to watch Cars, so we watched some other trashy movie instead.
The moral of the story, which I learned later, after deeply contemplating quitting the job finding an alternative source of income, was that there are emergency sub plans kept in the school office to prevent anything like what happened to me from occurring, and thus the entire debacle could have been avoided with a brief trip to the sub-school. Yeah.
The other moral of the story is that Pixar is the opiate of the masses, and if Karl Marx was alive today, he’d agree with me.
I did feel bad for disappointing the girl who believed in me because I wore a tie.