Stand-In and Deliver
- Sep 29
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 16
By Tess Kelly
Sure, there were other part-time jobs I could’ve landed when my school district’s dysfunction numbed me into early retirement. My modest pension covered the mortgage but I needed spending money for tacos, margaritas, socks. None of the other gigs I considered paid as much, had better hours or offered summers off. Six months after declaring I’d forge a new life and “leave the classroom for good and forever,” I was back as a sub.
For 20 years I’d mostly taught English as a Second Language in elementary schools where it didn’t matter that I’m skinny with a high-pitched voice and boring clothes. But elementary school subbing required lots of supervision. Middle school subbing required battling sass and hormones. That left the final category, the big kids. I harbored doubts. A teacher acquaintance once mentioned that students at his Philadelphia high school stuffed a substitute in a locker for kicks. I wondered if I could be crammed into such a slim container, my limbs pretzeled, my cries mimicked on the other side of a steel door.
But the post-Covid classroom environment was flush with technology. “Bring a book if you work in the high schools,” advised a fellow sub during K-1 playground duty, where we traded war stories about unruly kindergarteners and shooed away tattletales. “Their assignments are all on Chromebooks, you just have to tell them to log in.” My fears blew away like homework in the wind. Lickety-split I tucked a novel into my backpack and found myself wandering longer halls in larger buildings, hitting my daily step goal just looking for the right door.
I had crossed over. I had become a bona fide high school substitute teacher.
I discovered some assignments actually do require more than telling students to log in. Sometimes there are slides to show and lessons to impart. And classroom management challenges persist: teens talking back, horsing around, not returning from the bathroom. More than once a student has fruitlessly demanded I mark them tardy, not absent, for showing up during the last five minutes of class. But there are indeed days when it’s not hard to do crossword puzzles or catch up on the news.
One of my first high school sub jobs was for my boyfriend Josh, a social studies teacher. One period of psychology, two of economics. I begged him to go easy on me, and he did, for psychology anyway, when we’d watch a movie.
I wanted this to go well for him, for me, for Team Us. This one mattered.
Early that morning I dressed in my best jeans and a blue fleece jacket. Understated, yes, but I added heavy black boots in the hopes of garnering respect for my white middle-aged self. I hustled into Josh’s classroom, its walls adorned with two decades of class photos and iconic LIFE Magazine covers. I surmised the DVD player, overhead projector, and computer monitor. I rarely used these technologies as an ESL teacher. Perhaps that was a mistake. I poked my fingers at the equipment. Nothing. Panicked, I called Josh.
“Walk me through this!” I bellowed. He tried. After five agonizing minutes Josh suggested I ask his colleague across the hall for help. I darted through the door to find my savior. “He’s not here yet!” I wailed into the phone. Finally I turned on the fluorescent lights and located the power button just as the psych students arrived.
We watched A Beautiful Mind, about famous-yet-tormented mathematician John Nash. Josh had asked me to pause the DVD at the hour mark so we could guess Nash’s affliction before it was revealed. It took 15 seconds for everyone to agree it was schizophrenia. We watched the movie until the bell rang.
Spoiler alert: our diagnosis was spot-on.
Josh had warned me one of his economics classes might be challenging. As an ESL teacher I had rarely worked with more than six children at a time. This is not the norm in public schools. Whoever thought it was a good idea to pit one adult against 25 same-age juveniles was dotty. Does this exist elsewhere in the animal kingdom? In the classroom the odds sure look like they’re against the grownup.
When confronting two dozen teens who could reduce me to quivering pudding, I channel Mr. D, a U.S. Marine-turned-professional-rugby-player-turned-Special-Ed-teacher and the toughest motherfucker I’d encountered in the district. I worked with him for three years at a K-8 that reverberated with meltdowns and hurled furniture. Mr. D ran the Behavior Classroom, towering over students with steel abs and the iron rod that was his backbone. Even us teachers cowered in his presence. His eyes bored through our skulls to trembling amygdalas. His voice thundered without him ever raising it.
I met Josh’s dreaded econ students at the door with my attendance sheet. Short hair, long hair, in all shades and shapes. “Hello, I’m Ms. Kelly. Who are you?” I repeated over and over, slow and steady, scrawling check marks on the roster to forge connections, to show I cared.
Or that I knew their names if they messed with me.
Half the kids didn’t show, and a long-legged girl and two short-legged boys slipped out when they saw me. “Hey, where are you going?” I called to their backsides as they escaped down the hall to somewhere else. Maybe the library. Maybe Starbucks. Maybe the Eagle Eye Tavern, in which case I’d want to join them. But I had responsibilities, and thank goodness they ignored me since class-cutters made the group smaller.
I didn’t want to be a prison guard but I also didn't want to be their friend. I stood before the class with shoulders back, head level, hands at my sides to show I wasn’t afraid, to embody Mr. D. I didn’t smile. Smiling conveys submission. Dropping my voice to alto range, I explained what Mr. Weiner and I expected of them. Side note: Yes, my boyfriend’s last name is Weiner, but kids like him enough not to laugh to his face. And no, the students weren’t aware that I slept with Mr. Weiner. But if they were, maybe I’d have more cred.
Or maybe not.
The 14 students who’d bothered to show up read about Spain’s financial system. Or played with cell phones, which, let’s face it, are extensions of their hands. I asked them once to put their devices away but didn’t threaten amputation for those who ignored me.
It was no skin off my teeth if they scrolled Instagram as long as the scrolling was peaceful. They’d have to deal with Mr. Weiner if they didn’t finish their classwork. But noisy interactions tend to beget more of the same.
The thing I fear most is mutiny.
Thirty minutes in, a student with a crew cut trumpeted, apropos of nothing, that U.S. soldiers should join the fight in Ukraine and “take care of the Russians.” A slight blond girl shouted at him to shut up and other kids blared opinions across the room as if with bullhorns. Sweat formed at my hairline and in my armpits.
I needed mass pacification and I needed it quick. I decided it was time for the assigned 12-minute video about workplace automation, Amazon warehouse drudgery, and plastic shit choking the oceans.
The film followed the bleak evolution of The Worker. Whether typing in an office pool, laboring over sewing machines, or endlessly reviewing stock exchange transactions, the employees’ faces reflected blank resignation. A young paper mill employee lamented in monotone that it didn’t matter what she produced. “It’s all the same. You work to live, you work to eat.” An economist reminded us that billionaires are getting richer by the minute, siphoning off the rest of humanity.
The students were quiet. “Well, that was kinda depressing,” I said softly, as the credits rolled. We had a one-minute discussion. One boy poked a shaggy head out of his hoodie and said robots should do all the boring work. Another argued that robots take away jobs, although he added that the jobs sucked. Then the students wrote on their response sheets in silence, likely too bummed to stir up trouble.
I wanted to tell them it would be okay, that the future was bursting with opportunity, just wait and see. But I couldn’t.
I stood at the door when class ended and said goodbye as Josh’s students trickled into the hall. Some even thanked me which broke my heart a little since I hadn’t done much. It also made me want to hug them. For being young and brave and navigating a world that made less sense with each passing year. For dealing with challenges I never could have imagined in my own adolescence. For showing up. I’m lucky, I know, that I don’t pack boxes for Amazon, or enter data all day, or shovel washed-ashore plastic off beaches.
I’m lucky to still work with kids.
Tess Kelly’s work has appeared in Sweet Lit, River Teeth, Passages North, Cleaver Magazine, and BULL, among other publications. She lives, writes, and teaches in the public schools in Portland, Oregon.
