Embarking on a new chapter in my educational journey, I found myself transitioning from a day-to-day substitute teacher to a long-term mentor for a lively sixth-grade math class. The emotional rollercoaster and the rich tapestry of experiences that ensued are tales I'm thrilled to share with you. From the strategic deployment of a seating chart that became my compass in navigating student connections, to the integration of technology and game-based learning that revolutionized my teaching approach, this episode is a deep dive into the real-world classroom dynamics. Revel in the anecdotes of my adventures, where a simple math equation blossomed into engaging debates and the occasional serenading of tunes with my students.
Embarking on a new chapter in my educational journey, I found myself transitioning from a day-to-day substitute teacher to a long-term mentor for a lively sixth-grade math class. The emotional rollercoaster and the rich tapestry of experiences that ensued are tales I'm thrilled to share with you. From the strategic deployment of a seating chart that became my compass in navigating student connections, to the integration of technology and game-based learning that revolutionized my teaching approach, this episode is a deep dive into the real-world classroom dynamics. Revel in the anecdotes of my adventures, where a simple math equation blossomed into engaging debates and the occasional serenading of tunes with my students.
We have had so many new subscribers in the last couple of years that I'm going to play an archive episode from before that. Since we've had this podcast for five years, I want you to hear some of the episodes that made this podcast popular. So enjoy this archive episode this week that you probably have never heard before. So you've substituted taught for a couple of months. Different subjects every day, different kids every day. Everything's going great and then someone says would you like to be a long term sub? We'll talk about that today on substitute teachers lounge. All right, we're at episode three. This is going to be a good one.
Speaker 1:I had been a substitute teacher for about two months. I had enjoyed myself so much. I was getting close to a lot of different kids. I was actually learning some of their names, which is really tougher when you have a different class every day. You've got to learn 150 names every day and the only time you get some return practice is when you return to that same class. So that's one of the toughest parts starting out. But I had done a lot of fun things with them. I had tried to make class fun. It's easy to do that when you're there for one day and then gone maybe for several days before you see that bunch again.
Speaker 1:I taught a science class one time. That was about the phases of the moon, one of which is a blue moon. So of course, at the last couple of minutes of class, a couple of kids came up with me. I pulled up the lyrics to the song Blue Moon and we sang those together. I've done things like let them debate over topics again at the end of class, over topics like do you think your parents should have the right to follow you electronically everywhere you go? So I like to do fun things like that. I showed them a clip of a magician convincing someone that he was invisible and we talked a little bit about how easy it is to convince somebody of something if you're not careful and how you could use that later in life. We've talked about, you know, for the first time ever, I had to analyze a Robert Frost poem that had to do with trees and a lot of its meaning related to death. So before it was over, we ended up having a conversation about not only burial but cremation. So I've done, in addition to trying to get through all the material that the teacher leaves I tried to do something fun at the end of the class.
Speaker 1:I told you last week that I think the reason they enjoyed having me to come and teach their class is because I only got to see them once every few days and it was kind of like a little mini reunion when I got back. So I even had one. One middle school principal asked me oh, he knew that I had been to several different schools, in fact all the schools in the county teaching and he asked me which of the eight I enjoyed most. And of course that was a difficult question to answer. I did end up. There was two middle schools that I particularly enjoyed. I think it was mainly because I was there most often, and that's what I told him. I said if you're not first, your second. So all that had come along in two months. I had really enjoyed myself. And low and behold, one day at one of those two middle schools Somebody in the office came up to me and said mr Collins, the principal wants to talk to you.
Speaker 1:So I'm already in trouble with the principal. You know I'm gonna be the shortest term substitute teacher They've ever had. I wonder what I did to get in trouble. Well, I found the time to go talk to the principal at the end of the day and they informed me that they had a teacher that would soon be leaving on maternity leave and Wanted to know if I would be interested in taking her sixth grade math class For the final weeks of school. We didn't know how much that was, how long that was going to be, yet she wasn't sure when exactly she was going to leave. Of course, that immediately made me a little bit nervous, because instead of just showing up and teaching whatever information the teacher had left for that day, I now would have to teach multiple weeks. I would have to make sure they learned something. You know, if they, if they ended up dumber than when I started teaching their class, I would take that personally. So it was very exciting. It was also very nor nerve-wracking. I of course mentioned to them now you know I don't have a background in teaching, right? And they said, yeah, but we know you're an accountant and we know you're good at math and you've been good at the math at the math teaching classes You've already taught. So we would really like you to give this a try. And of course, I said yes. So what I did is I shadowed that teacher for free because I thought that was important For me to get down how I should teach that class.
Speaker 1:The teacher was Extremely organized. She had everything that should be taught. Every day I had copies to make. That was probably the most time-consuming preparation for the class and of course I did that either during a planning period or in the evening after school, often umpire or or refereed Softball I'm sorry, refereed volleyball in the evening, so I would have a couple of hours between when school was out and if my game was in the same area, a couple of hours to kill. So I would do the work during that time. But she was very organized. I made copies, as you often have to do when you're teaching math, because they're going to be working on problems, they're going to have homework, they're going to have Definitions and descriptions. So all that was beginning to take place.
Speaker 1:I shadowed her for one day. I did normal substituting for a couple of weeks after that and we I kind of had a general feeling that she was going to leave soon. So I chose to go back and shadow her again on a Friday and, sure enough, in the middle of that day she informed me that Greg, I think this is going to be my last day here, so my timing was good. I was there exactly when I needed to be to be ready for her to leave. We got to go over several things and that is what this episode is going to be about how to make that transition from being a single-day Substitute teacher different class, different students every day to a long-term Substitute, and in this class that was a total of nine weeks.
Speaker 1:One week was off for spring break, but I started the week before spring break and then eight weeks after that. So the first thing I did I thought I would at least be prepared for Monday morning. I actually came into the school over the weekend Prior to the first day I would teach. The principal gave me access to get into my door, so I was able to do that. I went ahead and made my copies. That teacher that normally teaches the class had a little slot for all the days of the week, so I would put my copies in those slots and we were ready to go for Monday morning.
Speaker 1:I noticed that one of the first things I ran into as I'm getting adjusted to the flow of the day is the things that slow you down, in this particular case, my early morning periods were 10 to 15 minutes shorter than the afternoon periods. And then a small thing I had to deal with the first day and it took me a couple of weeks to get it figured out is just pencils and sharpening pencils. And why in the world do we let these kids need a pencil every day? My first day the teacher had a pencil sharpener that only she would operate, so they would have to bring the pencils to her. She would sharpen them, I guess because the pencil sharpener was so noisy. So I started doing that too. And, man, when you do that in a class that's only 40 to 45 minutes long in the first place, that takes away a lot of your class. And you also have to deal with the students, the other students, the ones not getting their pencils sharpened while all this is going on.
Speaker 1:Things I tried to do to solve it. I did a log out sheet. I bought a few pencils, did a log out sheet. That didn't really work. We forgot to log things, pencils back in. Then I tried something that had heard other teachers try is take a student's shoe while they had a logged out pencil and they had to bring the pencil back to get their shoe. But of course I had some students that would then do it just so they could take their shoe off. So that didn't work. So I finally went with the Amazon approach. You can get a I think it was 150 pencils for about $8 and that was well worth it to me. I had a pencil sharpener a cheap one that was really fairly effective for $8. And so a $15, $16 investment, and then I had plenty of pencils. I was ready to go. Got that distraction out of the way.
Speaker 1:One of the things I also was worried about was the administrative side. It's hard enough to teach those kids and make sure they learn something, but the administrative side. I had to learn the systems that they used to. It was called infinite classroom. Not only was for daily attendance, so I had to take the time at the beginning of each class to check off the attendance and click save to get that going. And then, of course, as the weeks progressed, I had to turn in both midterm grades and into the year grades. And when I finally learned those systems I felt like I was doing a good job of keeping up with grades and I was keeping all their test input and I would use my planning period to do that.
Speaker 1:For the most part it was about three or four components. One component was testing. One component was a computer related learning tool called IXL. They also had a learning tool called IREDI that they also did on their computer. It was amazing because the share, the percentage of their grade that each of those were, it was about 25%. So if they got behind on their computer work it looked like maybe they were a D student when they could very well be an A or B student. As soon as they got that work caught up. Some of them had late homework to turn in. I gave them credit for additional homework. So we had to put all that into the grade system and I thought I had mastered it.
Speaker 1:I thought I was all ready to turn in midterm grades and I got everything updated and there was one button called final or complete or something of that effect that I forgot to click. So I had to go back in the last minute and click all those for midterm. I didn't knew what to do for finals. So that wasn't quite as hard. But as I learned the system it was very helpful to me because when the kids would come up to me and say Mr Collins, I think I'm behind in that area. Could you help me with that? I actually not only could help them with that, but tell them what effect that would have on their grade once they got all their work caught up. So that helped me learning those systems Of.
Speaker 1:The teacher had made use of a seating chart, so that helped me a little bit. I actually made copies with my phone of the seating chart so that I could then load them into my iPad, pull up the screen and I could take attendance that way and, of course, that also helped me learn their names. Some of the names I didn't get right for a while because some of them didn't go by their first name. There were some names that were very popular, like Caitlin and Kaylee, and some of those names there was multiple names, so I got confused a lot. Some of them would go with shortened versions of longer names, so I had to get used to that. But they understood. I think it bothered me a lot more when I messed up their name than it did them. So that was just getting used to things, but it's amazing how well you get to know their names when you're with them day in and day out for a while, so that worked out all right to.
Speaker 1:Of course, there's always in every school you teach at there's different level students. Now I think all my students were great. I would call them average students. In fact, I wouldn't even. I would call them average students, good students and great students, and I had classes that had mixtures of all of those.
Speaker 1:I noticed when I did electronic tools of learning like Kahoot. That is basically a game system, way of learning where I can actually design test. There's plenty of test I could pull up from their system to use and I did notice that the average student seemed to I would even venture to save learn more when we were using that tool. We it's a tool that will run on Chromebooks and I'm not going to give too many details about it because it's a great tool and I want to spend a future episode just talking about Kahoot. But I did notice different tools worked more effectively with different types of groups average to good students. They enjoyed playing Kahoot. I would even say the average students. They put more emphasis on learning when we played a game like that.
Speaker 1:Some of the most the upper A students, some of them would actually get tired with it. They would like to play it maybe once a week, but if we did it multiple times in a row, just because of what we happen to be doing at the time, I could tell they would tend to get bored with it. Some of them even asked me for worksheets to do so. That's good. You have a lot of different levels of students. I would even say, and feel free to argue with me, that math is much more than any other subject, has a lot of different levels. I think a lot of your while a lot of your math is learned. A lot of that you're kind of born with as well. So we dealt with all that.
Speaker 1:The seating charts worked well. They asked me if they can move around and set with friends and I knew there was reason why the teacher had seating charts. I let them do that maybe the last couple of weeks of school after we had had the year in testing to see how the students had progress through the year. So the seating chart was very organized by the teacher the lesson players had to do. The students worked real well in class my go to usually if I thought they were getting just a little bit carried away in class or wanting students attention. I would just have them come back and set with me for a little while and and then, after 10 or 15 minutes, I would have them move back to the normal seat, and that seemed to work out well. So that's what we did in that regard.
Speaker 1:And again, I had a great teacher that I was filling in for. She would send me text. I would return text to her. We talk about students in general, just how much Fun I was having, how much she was missing them. She would get a. I gave her my email address. She did a good job of sending emails to me that were sent to teachers and I otherwise not might not see. So we did all that. It was a great time. I think the kids learn well and I think I hope they enjoyed having me as a long term sub as much as I have them.
Speaker 1:My nervousness was unfounded. I was nervous in the beginning. I did use a couple of tools when we thought we were behind in a certain area. I had students in probably every class that I could look at and I knew that if they didn't understand it, I hadn't yet done as good a job as I could in teaching it to them. So there's all kinds of tools on the internet that will help teach. You can even just type in sixth grade teaching, and there are tools on there that help explain maybe more difficult topics. I can think of when we got to the statistics unit again, this was a sixth grade math class, and these two topics were eighth grade in the eighth grade curriculum only two years before, so I had to teach them in statistics enter quartile range and mean absolute deviation, and even though I wrote it up on the board and they took good notes and I gave them some notes of my own, I found some really good videos for that level age for those two topics. That explained it to me real well, and I showed that in class one day, and a lot of the kids gave me a thumbs up because they thought it helped them quite a bit. And then, ironically, when we got an end of year standardized testing, which we call K-Prep in Kentucky, there wasn't any questions on either of those two topics. So I'm glad, though, that they left there and they had learned about it more. So you know, we got the learning part of those two topics complete, one of the more enjoyable things we did.
Speaker 1:We had a couple of fun days during this time where they just come in and they have fun all day. They can dress down, we would go outside and play games like kickball. I would play with them. I wanted to be a part of what they were doing and I think that's another reason why we got so close. We would tour shrines and that type of thing. Some days, when they had a fun day on on their campus, we would go to inflatables, and a lot of times I think the two fun days were split into three parts. One part was the inflatables, one part in the gymnasium, one part was outside and then one part was back in the classroom and the teachers were free to pick what they wanted.
Speaker 1:Now, my thing is, I've always been a big music fan, so I prepared a video playlist for them. You know, obviously, mainly their songs, clean versions of their songs. Some the other teachers would show movies in their room. Some of the other teachers would do crafts, but I ended up being the music video guy, so they would come in my room to both play board games and things like that and then watch the videos in the background. So that was an enjoyable part of the job and, yes, I did get very close to those kids by the time the year progressed.
Speaker 1:I remember walking around the day of our standardized testing, which is within the last two weeks of the semester, and watching them do their work and being proud of what I saw. Of course I couldn't talk to any of them, I couldn't even make a motion, I couldn't even point to a piece of paper. The rules are so strict on that. But we did very well. I will not find out until October. Today is July 1st. I will not talk, find out until October how well they did. I might not ever see those kids or those teachers again although I don't really believe that's true because I'll be back substituting for them. But it was such an enjoyable job. I would encourage you, if you ever fall into that situation, that you jump on it. It's a very neat way to go to the classes. Go to the same class every day. It's funny.
Speaker 1:I got close to those kids are. My welcome didn't wear out at all. They came up and they considered me a friend. They knew I would let them talk to me about anything. We talk in the hallway. Sometimes they they would share stories with me about how one of the kids was not happy with them and I would just let them talk and listen. So I tried to be both their teacher and their friend. So it was a very, very enjoyable experience. We will talk about some of the tools I use for that in the future.
Speaker 1:I will tell you that as and we got closer and closer and I went to their graduations and all that type of thing, I got so close to to them that I had already told them that I would probably get emotional that a last day of class when they came in some of them chose not even come to class that day. But I thought it was kind of funny that three of the young ladies that I had taught all year they were joking around that they wanted to try and go back and make Mr Collins cry at the end of the day. And sure enough they did it. They came back and gave me a hearty goodbye and I got a little emotional. But all those kids were such good kids is one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life. It's one of those experience that has told me that you know, after 38 years as an accountant, I really think I wish I had gone into this for a career so very enjoyable.
Speaker 1:Do not turn down the opportunity to become a long term substitute if you're ever put in that situation. In fact, if you have been put in that situation, I would really love to learn all the things that you encountered, things that you tried, various different things that would be very appropriate for us to share here in the substitute teachers lounge. I've got a new email you can send it to either. If you wrote down the one I had last week, that's fine, I'll still get it. My new email is we're starting to get our website up is greg at substituteteachersloungecom. So that is my new email address.
Speaker 1:Please feel free to share with me anything that you thought of as we've gone through these first three episodes. I haven't decided exactly what the next episode will be about, but I think it will probably be about Kahoot and some of the tools I use for on the computer for these students, because I think it worked out very important. Kahoot has had a recent workshop in which they invited a lot of people. I didn't get to attend I think it was in Pennsylvania, but very, very powerful tool, and I will talk about that a little bit, if not next week, at least on a future episode. So again, thanks for being here for episode three of the substitute teachers lounge podcast music provided by Ben soundcom.