A Few Thoughts About Teaching School
Just over a month ago, I quit my job as a Staff Software Engineer. My plan was to start substitute teaching immediately and then figure out the rest from there, with the long term plan to teach full time in a school.
It took several weeks to get the ball rolling with subbing. However, I’ve been more or less subbing full time for just under a month now. Substitute teaching has been a really amazing and eye opening experience. I love that I get to hop around many different schools, subjects, and age groups in my local town. So far, I’ve subbed for everything from 6th grade to 12th grade in virtually any subject you could think of.
Granted, my experience is still quite limited but I thought I’d take a moment to jot down a few thoughts and observations I’ve had thus far.
The first thing you should know is that in Utah, our public schools are quite good relative to many other states. Especially in Southern Utah, our schools are quite well funded because it’s still more or less a “retirement community” which means that everyone that owns a home here, including the “snow birds” that are only here part of the year, pays into the public school system in the form of property taxes. Overall, I’ve been impressed with the physical quality of the schools I’ve been inside, the faculty, and the students. Sure there’s some obvious room for improvement, but really I haven’t seen any glaring issues at all.
However, there is a difference from school to school. Even for the same age groups. It’s palpable from the moment you walk through the doors. That difference plays into the classes and students themselves. I’m not exactly sure what the difference is, really. I have a few theories based on my observations and interactions, informed by my life’s experiences as well. Most things really aren’t all that mysterious and unique. Most things are pretty simple when you isolate the variables.
Subbing is interesting because I don’t actually meet the teacher I’m subbing for. But I do see and get a good handle on what kind of person they are. I see the way the classroom is decorated, or not. Is it clean? Dirty? Tidy? Interesting? Does the classroom feel like a place that I like to be, or does it feel like a prison cell? Some have quotes of dubious origin, the normal things like “Be the change you want to see in the world - Nelson Mandella”. Some have literally nothing. Some are carefully decorated in a way that’s both aesthetically pleasing and welcoming. As crazy as it sounds, I can get a pretty decent feel for how the day is going to go the moment I walk into the room and turn on the lights. It’s not a sentence, it’s just one more variable that goes into informing me how things are usually handled.
This extends to the school itself. Are the people that work there happy? Are they healthy? Are they well groomed and professional? Again, not a sentence, just another point of data that goes into the overall “vibe” of the place. Our schools are generally very well maintained and quite new, so I’m not dealing with dilapidated buildings at all.
As for the students themselves, I view them as entirely equal regardless of any external variables. This is because people under the age of about 18, especially people who are in the care and guidance of competent adults are not truly accountable for themselves. This is literally why we have a legal separation between children and adults. As an adult, it is my job to care for and nurture the children I come into contact with. They are not responsible for their haircuts, their clothes, their intellectual abilities. They are responsible for their actions, to a limited extent. And I think that’s the pudding. That’s the difference.
If you read my about page, you’ll see that I consider my greatest career accomplishment over about a decade of technology startups are the individual interns I recruited, trained, and helped as they transitioned into their first full-time “career” job. I can also say confidently that those individuals have paid me much more than any of the companies ever did, or even could have. Because they didn’t pay me in money. They paid me with who they are. Seeing them thrive - not only at their job, but in their lives.
How did I create an environment for them to thrive? I simply set the expectations as high as they wanted to set them. In fact, usually, my role was less about setting their expectations for themselves, and more about helping them temper their expectations so they didn’t burn out. It sounds counter-intuitive. Imagine cheering for some marathon runners by yelling “Slow down!” But that’s really what it was. They’d compare themselves to others, even other interns, but I knew them individually. I knew why I hired them, what their skills were. I knew who they were. As much as the corporate world believes we need perfectly trained robots all capable of the exact same tasks and output, that will never be the case. We need individuals. Maybe one could crank through a feature request and bang out a zillion lines of new code to much applause and appreciation, but another might take notice of a strange bug with huge implications and do what it took to get to the bottom of it. It’s a false dichotomy for sure, but my point is that no two people are the same. My role was more about taking them at face value and championing their unique interests in a way that would be rewarding for the company and themselves.
School is very similar, but also very different. Kids have to be there. I mean, they don’t have to be there, but they’re there usually one way or the other and not necessarily by choice. As a student myself most days I’d probably have preferred to be somewhere else doing something else. Like the corporate world, this has the unfortunate tendency to treat people in aggregate, using arbitrary metrics to assign progress and learning. Again, I’m not saying these are bad things wholesale, but without special care and attention they can be destructive. Just like we shouldn’t hope that every “staff software engineer” should have the exact same output, we shouldn’t hope that all students have the exact same learning outcomes.
So what am I driving at? Well, I’ve been giving a ton of thought into what makes a school “awesome” versus “less awesome” (they really are all incredible). I think many would simply throw a metric out, like socioeconomic status, testing scores, or attendance numbers. However, I think this is selling it very short. In my opinion it boils down entirely to expectations. What expectations do the faculty and staff have for the students? What do they have for themselves? Closely related, what goals do they have for the students and themselves and what role can an individual play in meeting those goals? Simply put, I think the difference boils down almost entirely into who cares the most.
This is not at all a criticism of any individual, school, class, or system. It’s just an observation. Every situation is unique. But the underlying principles are universal. Do people want to be there? Honestly, my goal as a sub is to do such a fantastic job that the students are begging for me to come back, and for the teachers I’m subbing for to feel so confident in my effort that they’re more likely to take a day off, attend a conference, or really just ask for help. I love to help! I love to help individual teachers, and individual students. Even if just for a single day I can do something to make someone’s life just a little tiny bit better (or if not better, maybe more memorable). This is exactly what drove me out of a corporate job. No ability to make a difference, good or bad.
I’m in a school, every day, with kids who are incredible. Not only that, they are literally my future, our future. I want to help set them up for success in their lives in any way I can. What goals do they have? How can I help them with that goal for a single day? Maybe it’s just having someone actually stop to look at them and listen to them. Maybe it’s caring enough to correct inappropriate behavior. I view it as life or death - literally. Most of life really just boils down to how well you can “get with the program” and be a positive influence in your sphere. An individual’s ability to do that almost entirely determines how happy and fulfilled they’ll be in life. Those that are unable to learn this have a fairly bleak future. Which is exactly why it’s so important to me to be a part of what helps them right now. Today it’s helping another classmate on a tricky assignment, getting sent to the Principal’s office, or earning a reward. Tomorrow it will be their livelihood. It will be our livelihood!
The grass isn’t necessarily greener. I’ve traded waking up in the morning to frantically check teams to see what urgent issues someone feels like I need to be involved in for checking for a last-minute sub position. I’ve also traded a nice comfy salary for relatively little pay. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how the money will ever be enough. As I look forward it’s daunting and alarming to think about all the things that I need money for that I simply don’t have coming. But when I’m in the classroom, when a kid raises their hand to ask for help, when I get to see all the interesting and unique ways people are people, those worries go away. In a way that a corporate job never fully satisfied. Even during the worst times I remind myself “well at least my great-grandboss isn’t going to randomly walk in right now and ask me to do some idiotic and counterproductive long term project”. At least I’m not in a daily standup. At least I don’t have to update and mitigate NPM dependencies. Maybe a kid is having a bad day for about a million justifiable reasons but that’s so, so much better than an emergency “all hands on deck” because a middle manager needs to have something concrete to put on their performance review or else face the reality of the meaninglessness of their daily life.
I like teaching. In fact, I love teaching. Kids are so awesome. Our future is so bright. I’m so happy and satisfied to be able to simply carry the egg across the finish line untarnished. Our rising generation is so much more capable and well equipped to deal with the problems in the world, all I have to do is boost them along as best I can.