The Antidote for Tragedy

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

I started my mid-life teaching career as a substitute. I thought I could work a couple of days a week and kind of back into a full-time teaching job down the road. The local school district (not the one which eventually hired me full time) was glad to have me. Subs are a tough breed. The student grapevine smells them out even before the teacher knows he or she is going to be gone. My very first subbing job was a science class in a middle school. One of the students apparently didn’t like that day’s assignment, so he climbed out the ground floor window, raced across the newly cut grass field, and disappeared before I could even report him missing. (A vice principal had to go after him and haul him back to school–truth.) It was not an auspicious beginning.

I learned early to take a general lesson plan of activities with me which could be transformed into applications for half a dozen subjects and age-groups. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an effective stopgap I could use to cover for a teacher who hadn’t had time or inclination to leave a lesson plan on the desk. I also learned to check the grade book for help. Kids who were doing well in class were always willing to share what they knew should be happening; kids who were doing poorly seldom volunteered anything close to what the teacher expected.

One memorable day, I subbed for a high school choir teacher who had fallen unexpectedly ill. He left no instructions. So I took roll—that covered my total knowledge of what happened in an upper division  music class. Then I did the only thing that made sense to me. I assigned the students to perform a concert for an audience of one—me. There was some early disagreement about the what pieces to include in the recital, but I managed  to convince them that they should do all of their favorites—which totaled somewhere between 15 and 20 pieces in a 90-minute class. In the end, I was sorry it wasn’t longer. So were they.

But not all my subbing experiences ended on such a high note. I got a call from an English teacher whose mom was ill and needed to take a couple of days off. Her classroom was in a portable in the middle of a parking lot at the back of an old and seriously over-crowded high school. There were lesson plans for a couple of days—her sophomores were reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In college I’d been lucky enough to have a professor who required us to memorize 100 lines from each of a dozen of Shakespeare plays, so the students and I breezed through those first two days. At the end of the second day, the department chair came in to visit with me during a prep period. She seemed oddly subdued. The teacher I was subbing for couldn’t be back for at least two weeks, she said. Would I stay for that long? “Sure,” I agreed.

The next morning in first period there was an uneasy atmosphere which I couldn’t identify. A half dozen JV football players made up part of that class. The previous days they had been rowdy but good natured and very loud. This morning the class was silent. Not sullen or disrespectful. Watchful?  It was as if they were expecting something—and nobody had bothered to give me a clue about what?

It wasn’t till I got home that evening and picked up the newspaper that I understood. The teacher I was subbing for was an only child whose parents were elderly. Her mother had inoperable cancer; her father was physician. He couldn’t bear to watch his wife of many years suffer, so the day before, he had given her an overdose of meds to stop her pain. Then he put a gun to his head. This teacher had found them when she went over to check on her mom.

That night I created two weeks’ worth of lesson plans. We finished the tragedy of Julius Caesar. I made assignments, led discussions, graded papers, and every day I left a page of notes for the teacher about what we had covered in class. The department chair later told me I was the first sub she’d ever seen who had actually taken it upon herself to keep the class moving forward with the English department curriculum. Maybe? I don’t know. But every morning when I walked into that classroom, I remember thinking that no life is easy.

I never met that teacher in person. Two weeks later I left the school on a Friday afternoon. She returned to her classroom the following Monday. Now looking back, I wish I’d had the wisdom to help her students understand that–like the Shakespeare play we had read aloud in class—no one escapes tragedy. No one. Perhaps then I could have shared what I learned from that teacher whose face I had never seen. Courage is a powerful antidote for tragedy.