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My friend Jackie told me that there were substitute teachers teaching her English class from November through April.
“It was difficult to keep up with several different teachers because each individual substitute had their own way of doing things. Eventually after a certain point it just gets annoying and you don’t want to try,” said Jackie.
If a substitute teacher doesn’t have a good relationship with the students, the class environment changes from normal to troubled. A normal class should be active, with students paying attention and learning. But when a substitute teacher is just “babysitting,” then the students might pay more attention to their iPhones and iPods than the teacher.
Now imagine this problem dragging on for six months. Not only is nothing getting done, but this kind of environment does not teach anything to the students. There are some whose grades even drop.
“No, I didn’t learn anything,” said Andrea, who also had a class that was mostly taught by substitute teachers. Andrea said she just received busy work from her substitute teachers.
[pullquote_left]Not only is nothing getting done, but this kind of environment does not teach anything to the students. There are some whose grades even drop.[/pullquote_left]
Andrea also told me that she sometimes saw substitute teachers offer extra credit opportunities to students with poor grades, which had nothing to do with learning.
“He would offer like 20 points extra credit if we went to go support our ladies basketball team or any upcoming sport event,” recalled Andrea.
I experienced this treatment from a permanent substitute teacher during my Chemistry class. More than half of the students in the class were failing, so Mrs. Anderson, the substitute teacher for the rest of the school year would pile on the extra credit opportunities. She assigned less homework and more extra credit. She sympathized with our class so much that she threw away the science grading scale, which cuts off an A at 95 percent, a B at 85 percent, a C at 70 percent and a D at 60 percent, and replaced it with a regular grading scale.
