Last year during the sub shortage and many teachers catching illness, I dealt with a handful of subs. Many of my classmates and I had bad experiences. One sub was strict about the phone rule of leaving your phone on your desk while using the restroom. This was during my seventh period and many people always need to use the restroom during this time. She ended up taking the phones from the students’ desks and putting them in her pocket. From what we know, she received no warning or talk for that behavior. I have had plenty of subs who yell at us, and then use their phone while giving us nothing to do. Once, a sub even came forty minutes late. It was around forty-five degrees outside, so some of my classmates and I went to another teacher’s room to do work there. We received a text from a friend that she arrived in the classroom, so we walked in to her yelling at us and demanding that we have the other students come to class.
My experience isn’t out of the ordinary. We know there are many difficulties and shortages, but the student experience has been consistently poor. Summre Vallejo, a junior, saw it first hand as well.
“A lot of my experiences with subs have been negative because a lot of them take their position of authority as a sense as they can do anything they want,” Vallejo said.
Vallejo related that in her creative writing class, a sub was marking students absent if they took longer than five minutes to use the restroom. One girl was a victim of this. The teacher timed her as a minute late. This started an uproar, which resulted in the sub calling the office to bring two security guards to take the girl to the office.
Because of the pandemic, there has been a need for subs for the past year and a half. There have been many different subs coming to Logan to seek a job for the day. Teaching kids that one doesn’t have a connection with or never met before is stressful, but we are high schoolers, meaning we for the most part are mature and respectful towards subs. The majority of us do our work and don’t cause trouble for subs. Yet, subs often yell and argue with students, touch our private property, and sometimes even call for security.
On the other hand, Sophomore Maddy Dulce doesn’t see it that way and reminds us that there are different experiences.
“They (the substitute teachers) are really chill, and since they don’t really teach us and they only have to supervise us, we get to do whatever we want,” Dulce said. Some subs can be relaxed and let us talk while doing our work without saying anything to us.
In the end, it really depends on the sub and situation of the class. There is a sub shortage and many are stressed because of this but taking out their stress on students is uncalled for.
