Subbing At My Old High School

Last week I substituted at my old high school as an English teacher, which was my favorite subject when I went there. I took Honors and Advanced Placement English all four years, and had an absolute blast discussing and writing about literature. I eventually majored in English in college as well.

I did not have honors students on my day as a sub. I had students who hated reading aloud, out of whom answers had to be dragged, and who made my day essentially miserable.

But not entirely miserable, I should say. The fun, albeit bizarre, part was being back in my old high school as a working adult, in the teaching role, no less. Very strange.

For one thing most of my old teachers were gone. But one teacher is the mother of one of my high school friends, and was very friendly and showed me where the official "teacher" bathrooms were. Another was a teacher I never had when I was a student but always wished I had. He was so friendly and talking to him as a peer was very cool, and also very time-warpy and weird. Then there was one teacher who started out as a permanent sub while I was a student and was the absolute BANE of my existence my senior year of high school. My beloved AP English teacher left for an extended period of time because of an illness and surgery that required a lengthy recovery. So this...woman... came in and took over the class. She was the antithesis of everything that literature stood for in my life. She sucked all of the life and creativity out of our class, and all of the fun as well. Our original teacher was something of a pragmatic romantic, and was a great teacher for me because she was willing to go with me on all of my random trains of thought and help me develop my perspective as a reader and a writer. The substitute, however, was just one of those nightmares who is the type that goes by every syllable the dreaded Board of Ed. would utter, and leaves the souls of numerous potential literature-loving students in her wake. I hated her then, and when I saw her the other day she didn't recognize me, but I remembered her and couldn't help but give her a bit of the stink eye.

But I digress.

The most striking thing I noticed was what a closed and paralyzingly cliquey high school I come from. Mean girls are everywhere, they all look and dress the same, except for those few brave souls who dye their hair beautiful rainbow colors and such. But I remember one moment when I was asking for a volunteer from the class to read, and everyone froze, terrified. It was as if I had pushed a button and suddenly steel walls dropped out of the ceiling and slammed down around each and every desk, blocking them from each other and from me. No eye contact was made, no words spoken, no muscles moved. I think they even stopped breathing. It was then that I remembered that in my high school, you never, and I mean never, put yourself out there. I flashed back to when I had a sub who asked a student to read aloud, and we all sat there, and I remember feeling a tad sorry for the sub but being unwilling to explain that we just don't do that here. The social groups were too stratified, and you never wanted to risk being a target of ... whatever it was that we feared so much.

I thanked my lucky stars, God, the Goddess, and most of all MYSELF for no longer being a teenager in high school, and for having gotten over at least most of the damage that such an environment wreaks upon a sensitive, tremulous, slowly flowering self-image.

When the bell rang I couldn't leave fast enough. I had thought that the echoes of long-lost crushes, friends, music, daydreams, and memories would have danced through the halls and tickled my memory with happy recollections, but that wasn't what happened. But I suppose that what did happen was better in the long run: I got over missing high school. Even the good parts should just stay good, misty little memories. That part of life is over now. This is the part where I create what is mine.