A teacher that I know had reached a breaking point and decided to resign her full time position. I had met her when she was still at another location, a middle school. Now I see her often at a high school where I frequently work, and watch her repeatedly being upset, sometimes crying, and hear distressed conversations’ bits with other teachers. Not ready to retire yet, she has decided to become a contract pool teacher; staying at the same school but serving as a substitute teacher.
I am not sure this is necessarily the road to happiness, but I know it is the road to a peace of mind. For a substitute teacher, a miserable day ends at 3:00-3:30. For a full time teacher a miserable day may last a whole semester, even a whole year, with short breaks in between. At the end of a school day, teachers carry their head and heart aches home, into the evenings and sleepless nights. Days off are used to reset strategies and plan new ones that maybe, just maybe, will be more effective…
The advantage (or disadvantage) of a pool teacher, over a daily substitute teacher, is that they are usually based at one school. For the above-mentioned teacher it might be a drawback, facing many of the same problem students, and possibly the same unsupportive administration. No doubt, there is a benefit in knowing where you are stationed, and thus avoiding early morning phone calls, that may requests your service at a remote, or undesirable, location. Yet, not committed to a specific location, means that a troubling day at a certain school ends at the end of that day.
There was a time when the district offered a permanent substitute positions at certain schools, usually under-performing ones. I was offered that kind of job in the past, and weighed the pros and cons. One setback was the fact that I did not know ahead of time where I would be assigned. The one school I knew had an opening, and I could have pulled some contacts, was a school where I had several long-term assignments, but my experience there made it an unappealing prospect. The other schools, I suspected, could be even worse and further away, so I declined the offer.
If there is an ideal type of work that I could do as a teacher, I have not found it yet, but substitute teaching, or contract pool teaching, is the closest so far…
