Substitute Teachers Lounge
Substitute Teachers Lounge
Mirror Behaviors: Teachers and Students’ Surprising Similarities
Right now. I want you to think about students that have given you a hard time. Then I want you to think about teachers who have given you a hard time. Wait a minute. Are teachers and students the same? Greg Collins, substitute Teacher's Lounge. Alright, i want to first of all give a shout out to I listened last somebody told me to listen to it. I should have listened to it before but the group that I taught two years ago when they were in sixth grade, for the entire year it was COVID year and the schools were allowed to hire full-time substitutes, so I taught them math for the whole year and they had their eighth grade graduation just last month. I guess we're into July now, so it was actually in May, about May 23rd, and I went back and listened to it And one of the students mentioned that one of their funniest days, whatever, was.
Speaker 1:Back when I was teaching them and we were all virtual at the time Nobody was in the building other than me and I got kicked out. I actually had an electricity spike in the school and it was hilarious to hear them try to figure out how they could get me back in the meeting. They were still being recorded because it was recording to the cloud. So, even though I got kicked off, they were still being recorded and I played it to them later and just the things they went through was hilarious and I put it in the podcast back then. If you want to listen to it. I thought about putting it at the end of this episode, but it's about five minutes long so I won't do that. But it was way back in September 20th, 2020. So September 2020, that's easy to remember. So if you want to listen to it, it's about at the 24-minute mark when you get there and it was a pretty funny thing, and thanks to Grace in case she's listening to this for giving me a shout out at her graduation speech. I think she was president of the Beta Club, so that was pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Now I just got back from an Alaskan cruise and it doesn't matter where I got back from. Any area that you go to that you can observe people. I observe people for a week. Some of those days were just relaxation days and it's kind of funny to see people from general areas, because if there was ever a place where you've got a group of people that represents more areas, more nationalities, it's on a cruise ship, because we met people from, i'm going to bet, maybe 10 different countries, and being in a hot tub or a swimming pool is conducive to having conversations with strangers. You've never had conversations there because everybody's in a good mood, it's not like you're on vacation but it made me make some observations and made me think about times when Two teachers weren't really that different than students, and I'm going to tell you why. Just talking to random people on cruise ships did that for me. We had, we did have one day where we talked to two gentlemen who were good friends and one of them was a teacher and we shared some stories, but we got to joking about how.
Speaker 1:You know, probably the thing that you discipline students most for is talking, talking in class when they should be listening. Well, guess what? If there was ever a thing that you could also accuse teachers of, it's that, because those of you that have gotten to sit in teachers meetings I have, because I've done several long term assignments, and I know just from our Facebook page, the substitute teachers lines Facebook page, that a lot of you have run into this. In fact, most of my observations today I'm going to cheat a little bit because they really didn't happen to me per se, but I've picked up on them happening to others that are teachers.
Speaker 1:In this case, though, when you go to teachers meetings, people talk all the time. They talk over the speaker. I don't know why. It's just natural habits. I've done it too. I don't know why you feel like, when somebody's trying to convey a message to you, that you feel like you have to make a joke, you have to comment to somebody next to you and then you miss the next part of the message. For some reason, you think what you have to say is more important than what they have to say. But in that regard, the things we're punishing students for is the same thing the teachers are doing in those meetings. So those that we talked to who were teachers on this cruise agreed with them. It was a surprise, really, at how many teachers I ran into in that cruise, but that was kind of funny to do that, And I know you'll agree with me if you're a teacher and you've ever been in a teacher's meeting or, for that matter, that's not peculiar to teachers Every meaning that I've ever been in in my life, regardless of when I was in accounting, when I was planning something socially everybody thinks that it's okay to talk over somebody, to interrupt somebody, and we do that all the time. So the thing we're sometimes punishing students for we're guilty of too. Let's just make that a point. Now let's talk about when students think they're better than other students. That's happened our whole lives. We'll eventually talk about teachers too.
Speaker 1:Think about your students in your class that think they're better for whatever reason. Let me go back to my cruise ship for a moment. There is so much talk whether it's I'm not even sure it's even true half the time about we're Royal Caribbean fans. We were on Quantum of the Seas to Alaska, and there is talk all the time about how many cruises have you taken? Are you staying in a suite for this cruise? Have you been to Australia yet? It's like a pecking order of cruise people, and I know some of them are lying, because one person that told me he had a suite. It just so happened. I ran into him unlocking his door in my same hallway and I knew it wasn't a suite. But why do we want to do that? Now let's go to students.
Speaker 1:Students like to think, they like to get an edge, they like to think they're better than other students in certain ways. Sometimes it's just the coolness, whatever they call it today. I want to be cooler than the other students, maybe I want to be smarter than the other students, maybe I want to be more athletic than the other students, and they tend to brag about that. Now, i'm not sure how often we'd have to deal with that in the classroom, but it comes up from time to time, especially in the classroom. Maybe the ones that think they're smarter than everybody else, maybe they're dressed better than everybody else, but they look down on other students because they're not. Maybe they've got better grades. Now, my favorite students and you all know this, my favorite students are not only the ones that have not just that they have good grades, but when they do well on a project, they volunteer to help out other students. Now, in a nutshell, they might just be doing that to make themselves look good, but most of the students that I've had that do that. They sincerely want to help out the students.
Speaker 1:So a lot of times we as humans, we like to say things or even make up things that make us look better than everybody else. That happened on my cruise. It happens in the classroom. It hasn't happened much to me as a teacher, if at all. But I know that it's happened to some of you that you feel like teachers look down upon you because you're either a substitute teacher, so quote, you're inferior to a regular teacher. Now, granted, the full-time teacher has much more responsibility, is much, i'll just say it like this is much more important to that school than the substitute, because substitutes come in and out, the teachers have a career, but yet I haven't run into anybody that I felt like looked down upon me as if I was lesser than them. But you'll see it, i probably have seen it.
Speaker 1:Some teacher to teacher, more so than teacher to substitute teacher. You can just tell by the way they talk to others that maybe they feel like they're better, they've got more experience, they're just better at interacting with students. Maybe they've got this great software that they love, that they're using, that nobody else is using, and they think they're superior, maybe to you, because you don't know how to use it. There's all kinds of things And again, everything I'm talking about here today is really life in general. You know from any type of job you've had that there's just people that think they're better than you, for whatever reason, or maybe they think it's important for them to make them think that they're better than each other. So that's another thing that we sometimes have to deal with in the classroom, but then we see it with teachers and other adults as we go through our general life too. So we ask students to be one way and then sometimes we, as teachers, are guilty of the same thing.
Speaker 1:Let's talk a little bit about burning bridges. You've heard that phrase don't burn your bridge. Let me tell you one thing that happened to me during this cruise. It was really the entire cruise in the airport in, i guess. We flew out of Cincinnati, so we were going to fly from Cincinnati. It was a direct flight all the way to Seattle where the cruise ship was going to pick us up, and I was talking to these very nice older ladies older than me I'm 65. Their sisters and all four of them were older than me, and they traveled together all the time. We got to talking about cruises. I was talking about Alaska As you might expect, i talk loudly and another gentleman came over and he said I heard you guys talking about Alaska. I wanted to hear what you were talking about, because we're going on the same cruise. So it was so funny that that happened. And then that same gentleman I saw at least five times during the cruise week I saw in the Seattle Airport of all things, when we flew back out, and the crazy thing about that is we spent an extra day in Seattle. Well, so did he guess where else? I saw him in the elevator in my very same hotel. He had chosen the same one.
Speaker 1:Now, be careful what you say to other people, because you never know when you're going to run into them again. And here's, here's, the lesson from this one. Students, i don't even know how you would convey this, but you know by looking back that there are students maybe that thought they were better than you and really their life turned out a little on the unfortunate side. Things maybe had happened to them. You also know, students, that maybe nobody really thought that much of you didn't think that they had that many friends in school, and maybe they turned out to own their own business and make a lot of money, and maybe you even worked for them at one time. You know of stories like that And I'm not sure you can say much to students in that regard, because you don't know who they're going to run into later in life You could tell them your stories.
Speaker 1:But sometimes we have to be careful about what we say when we're substitute teaching, teaching whatever, because you don't want to burn bridges, you don't want to make another teacher upset. You don't want to make them upset period. But a lot of times that would come back to haunt you Maybe in the future it would have been nice If you had been nice to that person, because maybe now they're the principal of the school that you want to sub at, maybe they're the head of a department that you want to sub in, maybe there's specific teacher that you want to sub for And if you've burned your bridge, if you've made them upset about something in the past, maybe they don't want you to sub for them. So I hate to say it this simply but be nice to everybody. Treat everybody as an opportunity, because someday they may very well be an opportunity.
Speaker 1:Just like this gentleman that I ran into, i Could kind of tell I know the flight down that he was flying first class. He saw me and I know that I shouldn't say it like that, i'm guilty myself now, but I can. I could kind of tell maybe that when he saw me later He might have thought he was better than me. I Was joking around with him later and I hope I didn't make him mad now that I've said all this, but when we got to the Seattle airport to come back home, the lines were just massive and The security line was about an hour and a half away. We got there in plenty of time, but we took the time about a year ago to become TSA Pre-certified pre-check so that we could go to a specific line and not wait in the normal line. So we did that and I knew he'd be on the same flight as me because He was flying back to the same city. And, sure enough, we got to our seats about 90 minutes before he did and he looked at me and just smiled and shook his head. He knew that we were pre-search and we beat him to the line.
Speaker 1:It was just a small thing, but Nevertheless it was something that, if I wanted to act like I was better than him, would I use that to think I was better than him? Well, of course not. So we have to be careful not to burn our bridges and Make somebody mad when it might come back to haunt us in the long run. Alright, that's it guys. Sometimes you'll actually see two teachers that are guilty of the same thing that we Accused students of being guilty of. All the time It's on the way we handle it as to where our life gets easier or Harder. As a substitute teacher, i
