Let's discuss whether it's best to be a substitute teacher short-term or long-term.
Let's discuss whether it's best to be a substitute teacher short-term or long-term.
Hey, Greg Collins substitute teachers lounge it is January 22 2023. You know, when I started substitute teaching four years ago, my first long term role and got in early every day. And I remember one of the employees when I got in was made the comment while he's here early every morning, that won't last long. Well, the early part lasted forever. That's just the way I am. But you know, the little part about every day has changed just a little bit. So we're going to talk about short term versus long term today in more detail than I ever have before. Because I've changed my mind even as recently as this past week. So I'll share my experiences and then hopefully that will help you to decide what you want to do. All right, I will admit, I have been back and forth about short term substitute teaching and long term substitute teaching the advantages of each. I'm just want to share my your my experiences and let you know why I came up with the or I guess the proper wording would be have come up with the ideas that I have now, most recently, which changed this past week. Now, there's no way to tell you how I've gotten to where I am, without telling you reminding you about where I've been maybe in a little bit more detail than I've shared before. I started subbing in November of 2018 started this podcast summer of 2019. But in November of 2018, I started, there were probably three schools that I expecially liked to go to. And sure enough, I guess it was it was December or early January, at the latest were one of the schools realize, we have to find a it's not really the full time it's not really the proper term. They normally call it long term substitute teaching, where you're going to be teaching the same class for multiple weeks, as opposed to just finding the job. We're getting called for a job every day. For a different class. It was a math teacher, it was sixth grade math. And before I tell you all this, to this day, that class, I feel like it's one of the classes that I'm closest to I still saw a lot of those students yesterday, who are now sophomores in high school, and we still they come out and talk to me. They haven't forgotten me. You know, wait, I don't want them to get me there. They will eventually, they don't want me to most of them. Don't want me to forget them. But it was a great experience. But here's the way it fell out. Okay, so I subbed there a lot. In fact, I had taken a substitute day for another teacher. And I had a half day scheduled. And I thought, you know, I'm going to call the teacher that I'm going to long term for I had already worked with her a couple of days anyway, while she was in the classroom. I'm going to tell her, I spend my last half of the day with you just getting familiar. I know what's going to happen soon. And lo and behold, when I told her that she said, Well, Greg, you won't believe this. I've decided this was a Friday, I've decided that Monday is going to be my first day off. So it worked out perfectly. So basically what happened she left the week before spring break. So I taught that week. And then I taught the entire rest of the semester after spring break. So six to eight weeks. I can't remember exactly how that fell out. But it was you know, because that was halfway spring breaks were roughly halfway through the semester. That was my first dabble in long term substitute teaching. So now we're up to that would be the end of 2000. That would be the middle of 2019. So we enter into the 2019 2020 year. I started there and doing basically the same thing. And then I got another long job, a long term job. Another long term teacher was leaving at that same school taught for her for about six weeks. Then it was we're entering now into January of 2020. Now you know what's going to happen close to the end of the semester of January 2020. I basically substitute for that class right up until maybe, I guess it was about late February because All of that stuff on March 11, that happened in 2020. Concerning COVID, I was actually in a single class a single day class that day when all that happened. So. So basically what I had done at that point, I did one eight week job, another eight week job. So 16 weeks, all right now COVID happened, our area, gave the school system permission to hire long term substitute teachers for the entire year, put them on payroll. I mean, I wasn't getting paid as much as a full time teacher, but I was getting paid more than the short term substitute teaching that I had been doing. I was getting benefits and everything. So they hired me to do that I was excited. So that's another long chrome row that was for the whole, the whole school year, they actually gave me a class load and everything. I had about 25 students every period that year and got close to them, too. So now we're talking about a year plus 16 more weeks. Well, the next year comes along, we are now of course, into the year that begins 2021. It's at a high school, it's teaching a medical class of all things. So I was in there from it was for a lady who left have a baby, as was the first one that I had done. So in there for that time period. It began obviously in August, lots of crazy stuff going on. Still, we're still wearing masks. So I did that. That was probably another eight to 10 weeks, because she took off, you know, you're allowed 12 weeks for FMLA when you have a child, so she took off close to her maximum time, I can't remember then did tell the administration there that me and my wife wanted to take two weeks off for vacation. And they said, We understand that's great. We want you back the beginning of February for another long term role. Okay, so I started that one in February did take my break, but I started that one in February. Keep in mind, my wife is retired now too. So we've got things to think about. I loved every moment of my long term rows. I love vacation, too. So all of those thoughts are starting to enter in my mind. So I start that long term row in February. There's an episode about this. I titled it something like when I quit substitute teaching, and it was for real. Let me tell you how the story went down. I subbed in there from February to early March, I was supposed to go much longer than that. Well, here's what happened. Me and my wife, we still wanted to travel some more if I have that long term role. We can't travel as much or I could they would let me have the time off and get a sub for a sub so to speak, but I don't know I felt a little bit guilty about that. Then, I was starting to come to the realization that even though I loved substitute teaching, kind of felt like I wanted to have a day off every now and then maybe a Monday or a Friday. Ironically, in our area to this day. This happened right after Koba. But to this day, in our area, if you substitute on either Monday or Friday, they give you a $25 bonus, they pay you more for those days than the other three. If you substitute in a week for both Monday and Friday, you get an additional 25. So if you sign substitute Monday and Friday of a certain week, you'll get 75 more dollars as a bonus just for that. So those are the days that I'll hurt. I toughest I guess the word is to find a sub four because that's the days that teachers want to take off. That's why they're willing to pay the substitute teacher more. That's also the day that I wanted to take off. So I've got all those thoughts running in my mind. then lo and behold, I found out that my brother me and him are both fanatical college basketball fans. We live in Kentucky there's not a whole lot else more to do here. As follow as in as far as in state goes so big Kentucky fans remember we remember the final four years but a Kentucky fan. Even in the down years like we've had recently. You're always a fan. You're always there for the team. So and you know Kentucky fans are very knowledgeable basketball, they want to see a lot of basketball even if Kentucky's not playing my brother when he worked for Texas a&m, which is an SEC school. He had season tickets and he continued getting the option for season tickets every year and he went ahead and took them because he could even though he doesn't live in Texas anymore. He knew he could probably get them sold back in his arena. So it also gave him the right to buy our SEC tournament tickets that happen each week in March he told me he had them. So here I am long term subbing again and I wanted to go to the tournament with him. Okay, so. And then I realized that after that there was other things that I wanted to do that wouldn't be over before my long term role was so I had to do reluctantly, the thing I didn't do now, I'll be honest with you, it wasn't just that there were some students and a couple of periods that were challenging, nothing bad, nothing aggressive, just very disruptive. You know, when you've got other high school students fussing at high school students about all the trouble that they're causing? Well, then that's kind of an issue. Okay, so come, that's not the only reason I stopped long term subbing that class. But it certainly pushed me to the point since I wanted to go travel with my wife and my brother, that it's time for me to write a letter and say, you know, I think I'm gonna have to call it quits on teaching long term, because I'm retired. And there's things I want to do. And it that's the it was much longer and detailed and sympathetic than that. But that's basically what it came down to. So I haven't been back to long term substitute teaching, since that time, which was, I guess that was March of 2020, to about a year ago. And that's when I called it quits on long term substitute teaching, when I first got a long term substitute teaching way back in 2019. My thought was, I love this, I did love this still love it. There's benefits that go along with it. I want to do this from now on. And I really felt that way at the time. But sometimes things change. So all those stories is to help you to rationalize what's best with you. And then I'll close by telling you the thought that finally made me think this past week. Well, here's another reason that I didn't even realize, that makes me like short term more than long term. So if you're somebody that likes to have some freedom in days off without being I mean, you could still take a day off, but without being a jerk about it. If you like to have the freedom to do that, if you like to have the freedom to vacation when you want to, we like to take a cruise every year now. And we take it when the prices are lowered during the offseason, you couldn't do that before, when there was a teacher in our family or when we had students in our family, our kids are growing up now. But that's one of the reasons so think about that first, the other thing to think about their responsibility. Now I liked it when I was doing it. That responsibility at the time when you go from short term to long term substitute teaching is enormous. You are going from helping kids on a daily basis, learn their assignments, to actually with guidance, making the assignments the first row, the first teacher that left that I longterm for she was extremely organized. I knew every day, from the week before April until the end or mid May, whenever they are, I should say the week before spring break to mid May, whenever they got out. I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. Every day I knew where the copies would come from, I knew where the assignments were coming from, I still had some freedom to do things the way I want to, as long as they got the assignment done. The grading the grading responsibilities is enormous. You got to make sure you know Infinite Campus. Well. Now I love software like that. So I enjoyed it. But it's so time consuming, that it's so time consuming that I asked the teacher can I convert your paper test over to a test that they can take electronic electronically even using Google Forms so that they're graded automatically. And all I have to do is just post the scores or in some case, program it so that the scores go directly in that and she was happy to let me do that. So you got to know all that there is an intense level responsibility. If you're not doing it electronically, you're spending hours, bless their hearts, teachers, you're spending hours putting grades in correcting grades, deciding if you want to let a student make up a grade, trying to be sympathetic to what they got going on. If they missed a test, all those decisions you're going to have to make now if it's really crazy, important decisions, obviously you want to stay in contact with the regular teacher to make sure that it's okay with her. But that's how you go short term to long term you go from being involved and interacting with students every day, but different students every day. Going to longterm is a much more intense role. But that's why you're getting paid more. That's why You're getting benefits, they want you there, they're not going to just hire anybody for a long term sub, they might be a little bit more desperate and use subs, they don't really want to use on a daily basis if they have to, to get things covered, they're not going to do that long term, they're going to do nothing. You have to know the subject intensely. But they do want somebody that they feel like is responsible will interact with those kids and do a good job of keeping them on task until they get that role field or until the long term teacher returns. The last thing I was going to mention about this is the one that I kind of had a revelation this last week, as I was sitting down in some of the classes, and I realized it was a different class than the day before. And I realized, you know, I really enjoy this. I like seeing different students every day. Now I'll go back and re Reese up. I don't know where I got that word from, but I'll sub again in classes that I've had before. But I like seeing different students every day. I like to interact with as many students as possible. Not everybody's like that. In fact, maybe the majority is not like that, where you like to interact with as many possible students as you can we enter substitute teachers interact with more students on a yearly basis than the teachers do. Because they save the same students over and over. We interact with a bunch and I love that part of it. So all that together, you're going to have to decide eventually, if you do responsibility, responsible things and the teachers come to like you and the administration likes you. You will be asked to longterm teach. And if you do well, you'll be asked to do it again and again. And again. I've figured out that I had done it. Over 50% of my four years of substitute teaching has been a long term role. I've stepped back I'm only doing short term jobs now and hopefully you've learned enough about different things in this episode to help you decide if someday you want to go from a short term substitute teacher to a long term substitute teacher