My Experience Long-Term Subbing for an Unplanned Leave -

Matilda was a hit when long-term subbing for a third-grade class. Here is the poster drawing of Matilda I made.

Last updated on September 26th, 2023 at 10:17 pm

By October, I was fresh off the plane from a variety of overseas trips and back at the substitute teaching game. I didn’t mind returning, but the transiency of going to different schools and classrooms on a daily basis bothered me—it was my second year out of classroom teaching, and I was sorely beginning to miss having my own class.

Eager to course correct, I got the message out to as many of my teacher friends as I could begging them to let me know if any positions opened up at their schools.

In no more than two weeks, I was informed by a friend who had just started teaching at a school I was particularly interested in that there was a third-grade teacher out on medical leave, and that they needed someone to step in immediately.

My heart practically completed its very own spin cycle. This could be it.

By “it,” I meant a classroom that needed me, and I needed it. I first began thinking about this faraway, abstract set of pupils during an especially soul-crushing experience teaching in an especially volatile classroom in which one of the students was screaming and launching books and other items.

What if there’s another class out there waiting for me?

They needed help. Here was a veteran teacher, widely beloved and a bedrock of the school and community, who had a sudden onset of illness and a class of third graders left behind.

Stepping in for her seemed like the right thing for me to do. Here I was—a qualified teacher randomly available in the middle of the first semester. Who else would do it if I didn’t?

After some emails back and forth with the school office staff, I got in touch with the secretary to ask her some hard-hitting questions: How long will I be there, and when should I start?

She gave me a bit of background: Mrs. Clary’s* diagnosis had been sudden. She had already been out for two weeks. Different substitutes had rotated in and out of the classroom during that time, but none were interested in taking the class for a longer period of time.

(I recognized this as a red flag. But this didn’t stop me.)

She then told me that the position was going to last for three weeks… or more. I tried to sound positive and professional as I realized that this timeline was completely dependent on the outcome of Mrs. Clary’s health.

And they didn’t have a clue what the outcome would be.

It was a tiring brain exercise trying to wrap my mind around being with the class for three weeks or three months or for the remainder of the year, but I managed to agree to doing it.

I sat stunned on the couch for a bit, overwhelmed by my own overthinking.

I picked up the phone and dialed the school again. I greeted Theresa* again.

“Will there be lesson plans?” I asked.

“I think there should be for at least a month,” she told me.

This lack of confidence about the lesson plans was the second red flag I recognized, but I somehow shrugged that little concern aside. My life was suddenly tinged with a greater sense of purpose, and that topped all of my misgivings.

“Can you start Friday?” the secretary asked.

I agreed, thinking Friday would be the perfect day to start with the weekend as a nice buffer to hold whatever mountains of work awaited me.

“Great! We’re excited to have you. And the class is scheduled for a field trip on Monday, by the way,” Theresa said.

My first week with the class was a trial by fire.

I was throttled in with almost nothing to grasp at. With fifteen minutes to create a game plan for the day, I studied my available materials.

Supplies on the teacher’s desk included a gift bag full of hard candies—a student bribery tool brought in by a parent—and a stack of unfamiliar workbooks and textbooks.

The last evidence of lesson plans actually written by the classroom teacher sat at the corner of the table top, wrinkled and dated from two weeks ago. The current plans—likely cobbled together quickly by another teacher—listed only times, activity names and textbook page numbers.

My teaching experience and imagination would have to color in the rest.

This wasn’t easy. The students bustled in, administering my first test of the day. The room was abuzz with the nervous inhibition of a group of kids unleashed a little too long.

But I barged ahead, faking it and (dubiously) making it– or making something, at least. Some students straightened a bit, seeming to welcome the new stability and structures I was introducing.

Others bucked wildly against it.

I somehow navigated the class through their “lessons” until each break in the day—lunch, and then specials—when I could analyze the plans and books and make out a rough strategy for surviving the next burst.

When the bell finally chimed signaling the day’s departure, I crumpled to the floor to study the array of books splayed around me (vocabulary, writing, grammar, math, social studies, science, etc!) and dug out a very soggy and neglected peanut butter sandwich from my bag.

My car was the last one left in the parking lot each day for weeks as I tried to piece together entire school days out of skeletons.

As I fumbled through creating cohesive lesson units and trying to imagine what the teacher wanted me to accomplish, I reminded myself that her hard was definitely scarier than my hard.

I envisioned her sitting in a doctor’s office or hospital waiting room, exchanging glances with the other patients and shifting in her seat while eyeing the framed motel art.

Perhaps her gaze would land on a painting of a lighthouse while she held hands with the thought that this disease might kill her.

So she needed to be brave.

Meanwhile, I felt alone and flung into another world with so precious little information while bearing all of the responsibility.

I felt the criticisms from parents, the pressure to instantly bring the class up to speed, and the teetering balance of managing difficult student behaviors while also maintaining order and engagement pressing in on all sides, and I didn’t know how long I could take it.

But I had to scrape up my courage, too. For these kids. For her.

She was being brave, and I was being brave, like distant planets spinning in synchronization. Maybe the scariest part for me was that no one truly understood what this particular situation was like. Yet I found an odd comfort in that—that we were both walking through strange valleys.

A month into my role of Third Grade Teacher of an Indeterminate Time Period, the days in our classroom held tenuously to a palpable and relieving sense of rhythm. Not a Top 40 hit-type rhythm, but an approximate cadence with which to amble through our days.

The main trick I had up my sleeve, a source of delight and learning to sweeten each day’s shuttling from activity to activity, was a chapter book by Roald Dahl called “Matilda.”

Each day we muscled through the ELA lesson and centers, the math packet, the computer program, cafeteria lunches that rotated through different forms of fried poultry, and preparing for a looming high-stakes state standardized test.

But every afternoon, I sat on a stool at the front of the room and read them “Matilda.”

We were transported. Captivated. Cheering on the little girl, who, seemingly trapped by cruel parental and school figures, finds her way to break free.

Matilda found her power in a very powerless situation.

Maybe we each hoped to be a bit of Matilda. I know it gave me hope, that somehow I could succeed in this lonely and difficult position.

In my early days with the class, I repeatedly told the students that “Mrs. Clary didn’t leave her brain on the desk for me to put in my head.”

Imagine trying to accomplish what you thought were insignificant routines, such as sharpening pencils or distributing materials, and those tasks instead inciting major debate among the students.

This process agonizingly stretched out a slew of tasks in the beginning:

*Passes out papers*

Student protests: “That’s not how Mrs. Clary does it…” Then debate follows among the students as to different nuances of the all-important paper passing procedure.

*Opens classroom door*

Student: “But Mrs. Clary…”

*Breathes*

Student: “But—”

And then one day in early spring she came back.

The teacher was halfway through her treatments, but had regained strength and was ready to return. I would join her in the classroom as a co-teacher a few times a week.

We would usually have lunch in the room together and discuss plans for the rest of the day. One particular day, Mrs. Clary asked that when I bring the class down for recess, to stand them in a line and quiz them one by one on various multiplication facts before dismissing them to play.

So when I brought the class downstairs to the playground that day, I implemented this practice.

As one of the girls recited her math fact, she remarked, “Mrs. Clary DID leave you her brain!”

*names have been changed