Sub Vision: Get a Job… or better yet – a Career!

When a sales person calls and manages to bypass my answering machine to get to me, I get furious about a system that allows anybody to intrude my privacy at my special time. If a stranger breaks into someone’s home, he is a violator, and faces fierce consequences, so why invading someone’s space is not a violation?

The point that I want to make, however, is not about my frustration; it is about the people who are behind these calls. I want to tell them ‘young people, is this the best you can do with your life? Is calling people at home, trying to sell them something they don’t need, something you probably won’t buy - Is this the best way you can do to make a living? Aren’t you wasting your life?’

As I grow older, my attitude toward all young people is a mixture of parental and educational approach. I want to tell them not to waste time and energy on unimportant matters, to approach money as a mean, not as a goal, and a job as a career of the type that (as I heard once) they would do even if not paid to do it.

I am aware of a ready criticism toward someone who grew up, and raised kids, in a normal family situation, with values, education, and financial stability. And of course, any honest job is better than no job. We all had temporary situations when any honest job was OK; cleaning houses, babysitting or telemarketing. For a student with young family, or a person who supports an elderly parent, every job is respectable! But once situation is stabilizing, one must try to move to a better position, or at least try to find aspects of the job that he/she likes and expend on them…

Another reproof I may face might arise from the type of the job I do; it is not exactly a high profile career, one may claim. Unlike full time teachers, I am not that much of an educator… I don’t have their grueling responsibility of seeing 200 students under their care learning and maturing. Mine is more of a job than a career as it does not develop into a whole process with a start and with end results. I don’t take students on a long path that brings them from ignorance to enlightenment …

Yet, I am a teacher, and as such, I am true to my career indicator - I will do it even if I am not paid to do it…

True, as a substitute teacher I don’t have the satisfaction of seeing the whole progression, but never the less I am still a teacher and an educator. I don’t envision my job as just a warm body in a classroom. I am an instructor whenever I have the opportunity to discuss an academic subject - literature, historical event, or a math problem, and I am a mentor when the occasion arises to discussing social issues, relationships, values or current events, thus making them teachable moments…

There is nothing more gratifying for a teacher than seeing the result of a teachable moment… Not very often, but occasionally, students that I had before, at the same school or even another, would remind me that they learned something from me that affected them. Those are what Mr. Sima, my teaching credentials professor, would call ‘psychological dollars’, worth, infinitely, much more than green dollars…

Sub Vision: Substitutes and Contract Pool Teachers

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…