Teaching is a grubby profession. Any romantic fantasy gets beaten out of you pretty quickly. Kids flip you off in the hallway, and a lesson you spent three hours preparing can go down the toilet in 10 minutes because half the class is checked out and the other half is staring at a phone hidden under their desk.
I’ve taught for over 20 years in universities, high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. The most common response I hear from teachers to “How’s it going?” is a sarcastic “Living the dream.”
It’s a dumb cliché, but it conveys how actual teachers — especially those in working-class public schools — view their jobs.
It’s been even more difficult for me because I’m now a substitute teacher — even though I have a Ph.D.
I wasn’t always a substitute teacher
I am not the first person to experience social mobility in reverse. But there’s a sobering humility to it when it happens to you — to someone who had always assumed they were on the way up.
I have a Ph.D. in biological anthropology and trained under Robert Trivers, arguably the greatest evolutionary thinker since Darwin. Before academia, I traded derivatives on Wall Street.
After several unsuccessful tenure-track job applications, I taught high school chemistry.
Then my teaching certification expired. A Ph.D., it turns out, is not enough to teach public high school. So now I substitute teach for $160 a day in North Carolina.
There are some plus sides to subbing
As a sub, I often watch fourth-graders hit the playground at recess. They don’t walk; they burst out the door like caged animals released into their natural habitat.
Within seconds, games appear out of nowhere, and the rules invent themselves. Someone is “it,” though no one is entirely sure who or what the game is. Give second-graders pool noodles in the gym, and they know exactly what to do.
Small, joyful moments with students like these help me feel grounded.
Last week, I subbed for a band teacher at a middle school. They had a concert coming up in three days, and the playlist was on the whiteboard.
When they started “My Favorite Things,” I dropped everything. A girl with braces played the flute: raindrops on roses. Five girls on clarinets came in after: whiskers on kittens. The French horns came in on girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, then the trumpets on snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes. Finally, the whole band: when the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad.
I sat there mesmerized, while a room full of 12-year-olds played “The Sound of Music” all the way through.
Sometimes, it’s an honor to just witness the next generation achieve greatness right in front of me.
But the best and worst parts of subbing are the same: you don’t get to know any of the kids. You don’t know their names, and you’re not coming back tomorrow.
The kids know it too. The sub occupies the lowest rung in the school. The lunch ladies get more respect. You haven’t experienced status decline until a sixth-grader has decided you’re a joke while his buddies giggle behind him.
My status sometimes feels embarrassing
I’ve spent years pretending I didn’t care about status. Everyone wants to matter somewhere — to be taken seriously, to not be the worst parent in the neighborhood, to not be the least interesting person in the room.
Losing the status I worked so hard for and pretended not to care about has been embarrassing and maddening.
But it has also taught me something a career in academia never could have. When you’re consumed by how you appear to others, you can’t actually see them. When you stop caring, others come into focus.
If I cared about my place in society, I would’ve never seen the girl with braces playing the flute or the second-graders hitting each other with pool noodles. I would’ve missed a room full of 12-year-olds playing a song from “The Sound of Music” even though no one’s grading them.
Maybe I am living the dream.
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