Reflecting on substitute teaching in Portland

In January, Emily Chenoweth, a novelist and writing teacher living in Portland, decided to become an emergency substitute teacher. She details her experiences as a sub in an essay published by Portland Monthly. Chenoweth joins us to talk about what it’s been like to be in the classroom.

Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller:  Last year, Portland’s Public Schools put out a call. They needed substitutes, lots of them quickly. Emily Chenoweth, Portland novelist and writing teacher who last taught in schools more than two decades ago answered the call. She became an emergency sub, regularly going into classes from January to June. She wrote about her experiences, the joys and the real challenges, in a recent personal essay for Portland Monthly. And she joins us today to talk about them on the very first day of school for PPS. Can you remind us of the context of this? You started in January, a little less than halfway through the last school year. What was going on in Portland Public Schools at that time?

Emily Chenoweth:  What I heard about was just this desperate shortage of substitutes and I also was talking to my children’s friends and them talking about a certain lack of order in some of their classes when their teachers were out sick with COVID and I just thought to myself, maybe I can help. This is something I used to do. Perhaps there’s a little muscle memory. And I just decided to apply.

Miller:  Would you say this was a kind of spirit of service decision?

Chenoweth:  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ve been volunteering in my kid’s school since 2013.  And, of course, the pandemic brought all my classroom helping opportunities to a screeching halt. And so it felt like there was a chance for me to get back in the classroom and engage with students and do it in a way that was helpful to other people besides my own children. I didn’t go to sub in my kid’s schools. I wanted to go sub in other schools that were maybe having a harder time getting people to come in.

Miller:  What was the bureaucratic process like both at the local level, in terms of dealing with Portland Public Schools administration and the state level? We just talked about a week ago about the huge current backlog in processing teaching licenses in Salem?

Chenoweth:  I found the process quite efficient. I suppose if you look at it, I applied in January and wasn’t able to be in the classroom until March. Maybe that sounds like it’s not that speedy, but they are getting a lot of applications and people are still out sick with COVID. To me it felt like it was about as fast as I would want it to go. I wouldn’t want to say, ‘hey, I want to do it’ and them say ‘great, you’re in’.

Miller:  You wrote, ‘after passing a background check and completing the required online training, I was qualified to substitute, but this is very different from saying that I was prepared’.  Would anything have prepared you?

Chenoweth:  Probably not. I had worked as a substitute before - like two decades ago - and that was a very different time. We were not coming out of a global pandemic or still in the middle of it and there was no such thing as a little tiny computer that you could carry in your pocket. So I used to feel that I could walk into a classroom as a stranger, a substitute, and engage with students in a way that felt meaningful. And when I went into schools this time around, I primarily felt like that was not true.  It was much more difficult to make a connection with these students who were coming back to their school for the first time in a couple of years and who weren’t necessarily welcoming to a stranger like me trying to come in and make them do things that they didn’t really want to do. I mean,

Miller: I got to say my memory of having substitute teachers when I was in school, which, also so long ago, decades and decades ago, was it? They never quite knew your name, they didn’t really know what you were supposed to be working on, they didn’t exactly have control of the class. Do you have a sense for how much of what you experienced in the last school year could be attributed to the universals of substitute experience as opposed to technological changes and the immense societal convulsions of COVID?

Chenoweth:  Right? No, that’s a great question. Some of that stuff was always going to be in place, but I’m coming into a school with a mask covering three quarters of my face and every student in the classroom has a mask covering three quarters of their face. And so not only do I not know their names, it becomes extremely hard to recognize them and remember their names when you see them the next time because all you’ve seen is their forehead and their eyeballs.  The last time, I said again the whole lifetime ago, I was often left actual plans and I would try and make those plans happen and I feel like generally I did. But in this case I felt like I often walked in and I wasn’t being asked to teach anything and to engage with the students.

What I was being asked to do instead was to monitor their independent work time. And if this involved Chromebooks, this was a recipe for just a supreme time-wasting because I can’t keep an eye on 26 opened Chromebooks at once. So yes, this person is reading what they’re supposed to be online, but this person is playing Minecraft and this person is chatting with their friends via Google Chats or whatever.

Miller:  And that was the expectation given to you by the administration or the teacher? They have their Chromebooks. Let them be in their Chromebooks and just monitor them as opposed to teach them this piece of algebra today?

Chenoweth:  Yes, it was generally that, and I believe that the teachers were probably thinking this was easier for the subs. Like don’t make the subs try and remember how to factor a quadratic equation. But I felt that whenever I was given an actual lesson plan with a reading, with a slide show, with discussion questions, for me that made for a classroom experience that was significantly better because I could actually call on people and get to know them and hear what they had to say. Whereas if you’re monitoring independent work time, basically all you’re doing is going around and telling kids to stop doing what they want to do and start doing what they’re supposed to do. And so this relationship is fraught from the get go.  You’re just always basically saying stop, stop.

Miller:  And that’s Chromebooks, which students are allowed to have, are given to them by schools. But you started earlier by talking about the tiny computers that so many of us have in our hands all the time. Cellphones, which kids are not supposed to have and not supposed to use in class. How much was that rule followed?

Chenoweth:  It was broken multiple times by multiple students in almost every single class I ever substituted in. I would sometimes be in a classroom and feel like there were 27 kids in there and they weren’t actually in the classroom. They were in the internet. That’s what it felt like to me. And look, obviously middle schoolers are not alone in this. We all are addicted to our phones in some way or another.

Miller:  Can you tell us about your very first day as a sub last year?

Chenoweth:  (chuckles) Yes, that was quite the adventure. I was subbing for an 8th grade science teacher and as I wrote in my essay, it really did seem like everything that could have gone wrong did. I had been left a lesson plan, which was great. But the video I was supposed to show did not have any sound so I couldn’t play it. I had tech people coming in and they couldn’t fix it. And so what I did [was] sort of punted at that point. I think he’d left me another option. And so I found a different video and I showed it on, again, technology I’ve never seen before. It’s not like you get trained for how to magically make the school computer connect to the audio visual system.

Anyway,  I played it. The sound was terrible. The kids were talking, they were coming in and out of the room, they were supposed to be answering questions based on the video. This was impossible to make them do. I spent my lunch period finding a different video that fit with the curriculum and had sound and then I found a bunch of questions for them to answer after that and I had the school secretary xerox them. So I was walking in with my own lesson plan and I was very excited and then there were (chuckling) fire drills. I mean it was just really utter madness. And it was comical in some ways and it was terrifying in others. And I came home and thought ‘what’s going on with our schools, is this what it’s like all over because this is really not good’.

Miller:  Why did you go back after that?

Chenoweth:  Because I had said I would become an emergency sub and I take commitments pretty seriously I guess. And I was certainly not going to give up after one day. I mean that would have been really poor form.

Miller:  Did you seek out middle school in particular?

Chenoweth:  I did. And I think it’s part because I had two daughters in a PPS middle school. So this was an age group I was intimately familiar with. And I love my children obviously and I love their friends and I thought ‘yeah I’m gonna go in and I’m gonna you know bro, down with all these other wonderful middle school kids’. Their middle schools are traditionally underserved. It feels like a sort of forgotten middle child in a way between elementary school and high school. And so that was part of my thinking and then I wanted to go to a school that I understood was struggling to find substitute teachers.

Miller:  Well this gets us to something known as the incentive school system. Can you explain how this works?

Chenoweth:  Yeah. So Portland Public Schools offers substitutes extra money each day. I don’t remember what it was last year but I think this year it’s an extra $50 a day. Might have been the same to go to any one of 23 or 25 schools, most of which are middle schools. But there are some high schools and elementary schools as well. And those are the schools that have traditionally had a harder time getting and retaining substitute teachers. And so this is a PPS way of saying ‘come on, here’s a little extra extra for your time and effort’.

Miller:  We’re talking right now with Emily Chenoweth, a Portland novelist and a writing teacher who spent much of last year as an emergency substitute teacher in Portland’s public schools. She wrote about her experiences in a new essay in Portland Monthly. You wrote about two tricks, that I thought were both funny and clever, as a way to become more familiar and also just to ingratiate yourself with kids. You gave out tons of candy. Not literally tons but a lot - 2 lbs. of sour patch kids and 6 lbs. of Jolly Ranchers -  over the course of a few months. And you also wore a striped shirt every day. What’s the idea behind that?

Chenoweth:  Well, I just wanted kids to be happy to see me in some tiny way. I didn’t expect them to like me as a human necessarily or want to hear what I had to say about the lesson plan. But I thought that if they would see me in the hallway and be like, ‘oh yeah, that is the person who gave me a candy’. They’d have a little jolt of happiness and I would give them a piece of candy.

Miller: Just pure Pavlovian connection?

Chenoweth:  Absolutely. And here’s a little bit of sweetness for your day. Oh, you don’t really want to read about the Aztecs? Well maybe if you’re sucking on a Jolly Rancher, it will just feel a little bit more pleasurable to you.

Miller:  And the striped shirt was so they could remember your name?

Chenoweth:  So they could recognize me. But no, they never remembered my name but maybe in some subconscious part, they would see this striped shirt-wearing person walking down the hall and be like, ‘oh yeah’ and not look at me as a complete stranger.

Miller:  Right. In my mind, you’re wearing a red and white striped shirt like Waldo in the ‘Where’s Waldo’ books every single day?

Chenoweth:  I mostly did blue and white. I did have a red and white striped shirt that I wore once while subbing for eighth grade gym. An eighth grade sort of standing nearby going, where’s Waldo? I don’t know where Waldo is. (chuckling) And so that striped shirt actually ended up in my giveaway pile.

Miller:  That does actually seem like one you didn’t write about in the essay. But you were razzed and made fun of and sexually harassed. It does seem like a challenging age, especially the eighth graders?

Yes, yes. But some of this stuff was in slightly good humor, you know. And I think if I had been doing this 20 years ago, this stuff might have wounded me. But I’m a middle aged mother and this doesn’t bother me as much anymore. I don’t enjoy being mocked, but it doesn’t hurt my soul in the way that it used to. It was really hard and I did sometimes feel a little bit terrorized by the end of the day.

But there were also a lot of bright moments and there was a lot of comedy and sometimes,  the kids who acted out a lot you could engage with them in a certain way. There could be a good humor brought into my attempt at disciplining them as opposed to the ones who weren’t even paying attention to you. That was worse. I found those kids to be really, really difficult. You know, they’re behind a mask, they won’t answer a question, they stare at me like if they could evaporate me with their eyeballs, they would. And that was really tough. That was really tough. I found the disengaged ones harder than the ones who acted out most of the time. Not all the time. There were some kids who acted out who were really, really hard for me to deal with.

Miller:  As you noted, you have kids who are the same age as the students that you were substitute teaching. How much did you talk with them about what your day was like and what their days were like?

Chenoweth:  We talked a lot about it. Every night at dinner, we would go through our days. My kids go through their days literally school period by school period. So it’s a really long time. Yeah, I hope it continues. It’s a sweet tradition. I did understand that they were in classes with kids who wouldn’t pay attention, who spent all day playing Minecraft in different classrooms as opposed to engaging with what was being taught to them.

But I didn’t feel like they were ever reporting scenes of chaos which sometimes characterized my days. Um not always, but I did feel like they were having a somewhat different experience than I was. But again, they’re mostly being taught by their regular teachers. I’m always just a stranger walking into a classroom trying to make kids do things they don’t want to do. So by the very nature of substituting, my classes are going to be not as lovely as their classes.

Miller:  As I noted, today is the very first day of school for Portland Public schools. Will you sub again this year?

Chenoweth:  I do plan on it. I needed to sub a certain number of days in order to qualify to be recertified and because I joined late in the year, I wasn’t going to make those days. And so I thought that I wasn’t gonna be allowed to. But at the very end of the school year last year I just scrambled and even went back to my kids’ elementary school where I really hadn’t intended on subbing and subbed for kindergarten classes just to make the right number of days. And subbing for kindergarten was needless to say, extremely difficult or different than subbing for middle school. And so I made my days and I completed my training and I am, once again, qualified to be an emergency substitute teacher.

Miller: Our executive producer, Sage Van Wing, joins me to read some of your feedback on some of our recent shows.

Sage Van Wing:  We had a conversation recently about wild horses. The Bureau of Land Management is considering new versions of birth control. Rene de Soto wrote on Facebook, “There is something critically wrong with our land management practices when we opt to allow hundreds of thousands of cattle to free range public lands but are considering forced sterilization or birth control to maintain a wild horse and burro population of just 2,600.”

Miller:  Earlier this month, we talked about a new report that found that state lotteries around the country are supported in large part by people who are least able to afford it. The Oregon Lottery’s mission is to, “earn maximum profits for the people of Oregon commensurate with the public good.”  Brett left us this voicemail.

Brent (voicemail):   It just seems painfully ironic that a lot of these funds go to funding education. And I guess the way I would define the profits being commensurate with the public good would be for those funds to educate Oregonians to be aware enough of how poor their odds are, playing the lottery, that in time we’ll have a population that just simply doesn’t play it anymore.

Van Wing:  We talked recently with Shawn Donaghy, the head of C-TRAN bus system in Vancouver. The agency won an award for the best public transportation of its size in North America. Among other things, we asked about a shortage of drivers the agency is facing. Kristen wrote, “as a coach operator myself, I assure you the shortage of drivers doesn’t have much to do with drivers retirement. It has to do with drivers breaking. Literally breaking. Drivers are being assigned extra work and extremely long days without any regard to our health or safety. We roll on little to no sleep and are expected to. Drivers are being forced to work on their days off and extra hours. Shawn did a great political job of skirting the true issue of the driver shortage.”

Miller:  We also asked listeners about their experiences with bus service in the wider Portland Metro area. A different Christian wrote this, “The last time I rode the bus in Portland was just a few days before I quit working for TriMet earlier this year. As a driver, I noticed too much of the bad side of Portland. But the reason I quit was because the work hours were too constricting, not because of the people, although I did get assaulted twice in three years. A lot of my coworkers said ‘that’s just part of the job’. The instances of assaults on drivers was bad enough and the numbers went up during COVID. That might be one of the reasons why there is a shortage of drivers now.

Van Wing:  Stephen Vettel said, “I use the bus at least twice a week. The passenger volume seems to have returned to almost pre-pandemic levels. The volume on the Max is up but still not as large as in the past. Almost every ride seems to include someone boarding without paying. and the use of face masks seems to have really dropped off in the last weeks, including the drivers.”

Miller:  Amanda Lee told us, " I take the Number 12 from Northeast Portland down to PSU. That route is reliable, always on time and has a fair amount of travelers. This last week I noticed that there were drivers in training on the bus, standing behind the driver, learning the ways.

Van Wing:  But Drew Kelly said their experience was getting daily texts from TriMet about late buses, canceled stops, etc. “Taking the bus means a minimum of 45 minutes, often over an hour to get to my work. Whereas driving is only 10 minutes. It’s hard to get people to use the bus when it’s much more time consuming than driving.”

Miller:  The Cannon Beach City Council recently updated their outdoor camping ordinance. We talked to the police chief there about how they deal with homelessness Kelly Hoeppner wrote, “I just listened to what I assume was your attempt to portray Cannon Beach residents as elitist and uncaring as a result of their recently revised city ordinance regarding camping. We neither own property in Cannon Beach nor even visit there frequently. But when we do, it is a relief to have a break from the trash, tents, graffiti and violence that we are forced to live with here in Portland. Whether this is the old adage misery loves company or simply petty envy, your apparent desire that we must all share in the ridiculousness that has become our new way of life, is unforgivable”.

Van Wing:  And we got this voicemail from Kevin from the St. Johns neighborhood in North Portland. He heard another conversation about homelessness and the laws around outdoor camping.

Kevin (voicemail):  I understand I have means. So I pay for parking $3 an hour and if I come back to a ticket, which has happened to me, yet an unhoused individual has been in a paid parking spot for what appears to be months. How is that equitable - solely because I have means to drive, to own a car, to pay the parking - yet they have claimed this area for their own and I get a $45 fine for being six minutes late.

Miller: We recently spoke to Mike Crespino who’s on a quest to raise awareness about mental health resources in honor of two friends who died. He plans to skateboard from Eugene to San Francisco to raise money for a memorial. His mom wrote in saying, “I’m so proud of my son because he knew and loved both Silas Strimple and Ben Moody. They were avid skateboarders who have passed away. This memorial is being put together for them. They struggled with mental health issues and hopefully their community and elsewhere can see there is a need to do more so other lives may be saved”.

Van Wing:  And finally, we recently rebroadcast our 2013 conversation with the writer Salman Rushdie. Carol Trevor wrote, “thank you for reprising the earlier interview in light of the recent stabbing. Hearing his voice added so much to what he said. I wish him a complete recovery.”

Miller:  We always appreciate your comments, your questions and your suggestions. Our voicemail number is (503) 293-1983. You can also email us. Our address is: ThinkOutLoud@OPB.org. And on Facebook and Twitter we are @OPBTOL. Thanks Sage.

Tomorrow on the show, wildfires in the west are getting more frequent and more destructive. We’re going to talk to the new leader of Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development about the state’s latest recommendations for more fire resilient communities. If you do not want to miss any of our shows, you can listen on the NPR One app, on Apple podcasts or wherever you like to get your podcasts. There is also our nightly radio rebroadcast at 8p.m. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller. Have a great day.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.