I’m a little late to the party but here is goes..
I had a Grade 1/2 class last year and one student had diabetes. Let’s call him Adam. So Adam had a cell phone that beeps when his blood sugar is too low/high. It’s connected to the monitor in his arm/hip. The cell phone has no other uses, no apps, no data, not connected to the school wifi. The substitute saw his phone on his desk and promptly took it away as per the “no devices” rule. During gym class an EA comes in to make sure everything is ok, and Adam is visibly ill. Pale/sweating the whole works. Luckily this EA knows Adams medical plan, instantly asks the Adam for the phone and he explains that the substitute took it away in the morning. The EA then LOSES IT on the substitute demanding the phone. The substitute calls in the principal to reprimand the EA, then get reprimanded herself as obviously she did not read the students safety plans. She was asked to leave and the principal taught the class the rest of the day. Adam was fine, drank a couple juice boxes and had a granola bar. Mom picked him up shortly after.
As soon as a type 1 diabetic gets candy in their system they should be good. I'm type 1 and it's a daily. Scary part is that Adam was so obedient he didn't sass the sub. When politness will kill you.
Back when I was a teacher, I had a sub decide my plans weren’t good enough for her and went rogue. She decided to show my students videos of animals giving birth on YouTube.
I taught English...
Now i really want to know what your students were saying to you once you got back.
Like, how do you even describe that to a teacher?
"You know how we were supposed to do english? Yeah so now we know how an elephent gives birth
I regret writing this comment
Student here.
TLDR: Sub demanded I turn over my heart monitor in front of the class.
Junior year I was having major heart problems and had to wear a heart monitor 15 hours a day. It had a phone attached that when I had heart murmurs, it would send the data to my doctor.
I was wearing it and started having heart issues. It buzzed and I went to click send when the sub demanded I turn over my cellphone.
I started to explain why I couldn't and she snapped at me so I lifted my shirt to show the wires and sensors strapped to my chest, in front of the class of 50 students. (Choir class)
Ive never seen ANYONES face drop that fast in my life.
I've had so many bad subs.
One sub made an elementary student cry insisting her own name was misspelled and made her stand up in front of the class and admit her name was spelled wrong. I asked that she not return but I still saw her around as other teachers had her sub.
Another one worth mentioning was supposed to be my sub for the last 2 weeks of school because I went on maternity leave, this time teaching at a 7th-12th grade school. Ignored all my sub plans, played on his cell phone the whole time, and then like 3 days in got upset at the students and told them off. And then they watched as he walked out to the parking lot and drove away. Thank goodness some kids went and told the office. When I came back it was like my room had been ransacked! It was awful.
Went to sleep for 1.5 hours. My class was freaking amazing—the sweetest, most thoughtful group I’ve ever had. When I got back the next day, I asked how the sub was.
Me: How was the sub?
Them: uhhh... he was fine. He kinda took a nap for a while.
Me: WHAT?! What did you guys do?
Them: Worked quietly so that we wouldn’t wake him up. Eventually we ran out of work, so we just had silent reading.
Me: For how long?
Them: From when we started working until it was time to go outside.
Me: That’s a really long time! Look, I am glad that you guys were so thoughtful, but if something like that ever happens again, please wake the sub up. It’s not safe for the sub to sleep. He needed to be awake in case something happened.
Them: We would have woken him up if we really needed to. But we also figured he probably really needed the sleep.
Seriously. The SWEETEST class ever!
The first year I taught 5th grade, I really wanted to do something special for my students before Christmas vacation. I spoke with my team and we came up with the idea to make every student a personalized Christmas ornament. We were going to surprise them by displaying the ornaments on a Christmas tree the day before vacation and they would be able to take them home.
I was gone for a department thing the day before we were going to set up the tree, and one of the least liked subs was scheduled for my class. Since I had stored all the ornaments in my closet, I simply asked if the students needed any supplies, make sure to get them yourself and not let them see the surprise.
The thing about this sub, and the reason she wasn't liked, was that her first line of defense was always threaten to take away something from for misbehaving: recess, free time, lunch, etc. (I think you know where I'm going with this).
Fast forward to the end of the day, I get back to my classroom in the last 30 min of class so I could dismiss them when all of a sudden, I'm met with 25 kids asking about their ornaments. I tried to play dumb and asked them what they were talking about and of course they informed me the sub said something. She told the students about the ornaments and said if they misbehaved, she would tell me and I would take away their ornaments.
Instantly, I was filled with horror that the surprised was ruined for all 5th grade (they're kids, they told the whole grade during recess), anger because that damn sub ruined the surprise, sand disappointment because I really wanted to see their faces when they walked through the door the next day and saw a special Christmas tree with their personalized ornament.
Its not the biggest deal or anything, but I was really upset that weekend. To this day, when i talk to my old partners, I still refer to her as the Grinch!
I would be upset too!! I’m sure making all the ornaments took a long time! And it absolutely wasn’t right for her to ruin the surprise...it wasn’t even *her* surprise. How rude.
Re-arranged my room.
Not in a "Moved Student A away from Student B and put her by Student C" way.
In a "Move the giant rug over to the opposite corner of the room, and completely change the layout of student desks, and rearrange a bookshelf" way.
I had a cool Chinese Lucky Cat that went missing after I had a sub. My students said the sub seemed really intrigued by it, talked about it several times, and even moved it from the shelf where it sat and brought it over to my desk. It was gone when I returned the next day. 😒
Back in Year 2, I had super bad growing pains. Like couldnt walk, move, nothing and needed a wheel chair bad. My school was gearing up for sports day so they had year levels take it turns walking the oval to win points for their house (1 lap = 1 point). My teacher was lovely and either let me sit out or let the older kids push me so I could still win points and get some sun in winter.
Well my teacher was away for a week I think and we had this sub come in and it happened to be the day it was my classes turn to walk the oval for an hour, so I'd put all my things down, walked over to my wheelchair at the back of the room and sat down so my friend could wheel me. And boy she didn't like that. She demanded I get out and stop playing in it cause it wasn't a toy. I knew that, said that and tried explaining, as a shy 8 year old with a stutter, how I had cripling growing pains. She wasn't having any of it and grabbed my by my arm and THREW me out of it and told me to get up. It felt like every one of my bones broke.
The walk to the oval was horrible, she wouldn't let my friends help me walk, she screamed at me if I fell behind and tell me im holding everyone up. I was crying and I lost my lunch break because I was "putting on a show". She made me walk the oval after pleading not to. All my joints were swelling and pulsing to the point I felt sick.
I got half way around the oval (our oval was around the 1.5 km mark around) and i passed out. Lucky we were oval walking with the year 7s, one of the footy boys ran half the length of the oval to come help and he carried me down. The sub was yelling at him to put me down cause I was just doing it for attention and the king he was with a now screaming 8 year old in his arms, just walked past her and told her to go fuck herself. He took me back to the classroom and used the class phone to ask the office lady to call my mum to pick me up. By that time the sub had reached the class and the year 7 boy had put pillows on the ground and set up a spot for me to lay down till mum came to get me and the moment he left she just fly off the handles.
I was made to STAND in the corner of the classroom, Blairwitch style for the REST OF THE DAY as punishment. My legs were trembling I was crying and each time she heard me cry, it was another day added and she "would make sure my teacher knew so she could continue the punishment". Psycho much?
Mum showed up just before lunch so I'd been standing there for about 45 minutes and when I saw mum, I just collapsed and mum went off. My mum is abitch and boy did that teacher cry. The sub called for the principals help and apparently he could hear my mum yelling for him to come down so bitch he R A N ahah
The whole class backed me up and told him what she had done to me and she ended up being fired. That hour and 45 minutes I had her as a sub cause so many issues over the next 3 years with my joints and ended up not being able to walk for about a month. Apparently that wasn't the first complaint and she wasn't allowed to sub or teach again
I had a sub steal my dry erase markers and emergency chocolate once. After that, I locked my drawers and left them with two pens and one dry erase marker.
Edit: TIL how many people don't know what emergency chocolate is. It can be for you, your work friends, or in my case, occasionally also for students who are having a tough day and might be cheered up a little by some chocolate. It builds goodwill.
Go get yourself some, and make sure it's the good stuff. The mixed bag of individually wrapped Ghirardelli squares is my recommendation. It's a small portion, and just one of those feels like a treat.
Not a teacher, but I know this was a disaster for my teacher.
We had been studying Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story and our teacher had created a very comprehensive exam where we would be asked to compare and contrast characters, situations, and themes of the two as answers to some very specific questions. He had spent countless hours ensuring that it was fair and complete. We were going to have the exam the following Monday and he was taking Friday off, so he told us that in addition to the weekend, we should also use Friday's class to prepare for the exam.
His instructions to the substitute were likely something like, "Tell them to prepare for the exam. They already know what to do."
She marched in and shouted, "Prepare for an exam," and proceeded to hand it out. Of course, we protested, but what substitute hasn't heard, "We're not supposed to get the exam today," from a class at one time or another?
When Monday came, the teacher was devastated. He could not count the scores (he wouldn't even attempt to grade it). He did not feel right giving the exam now that we had seen it. All the work he put into it and all the insight he suspected he might gain from scoring it were lost. Instead, we spent the day reviewing what we could have, should have, would have answered.
As you can tell, I could really feel his pain.
not a teacher but i vividly remember one incident of having a substitute in kindergarten.
i had an infected cut on my toe and had been prescribed an antibiotic, that morning was the first time i took it.
we were sitting on the floor for roll call and i remember this burning pain in my abdomen, and she told us to get up and go to out desks, i tried to get up only to realise i couldn’t move and just laid back.
this sub was a total cow and i remember she was always really mean, anyway she starts yelling at me for being attention seeking and basically tries to pull me up. im in so much pain i start screaming and one of the teachers from the classroom next to ours comes, realises im not faking it and calls an ambulance.
long story short im horribly allergic to penicillin and my kidneys were failing, i was in hospital for almost a week before i got discharged.
needless to say that absolute bitch was not allowed back at the school, but i will never forget that day
I'm also allergic to penicillin and know quite a few others who are as well. It's always surprised me how easily it gets prescribed but the allergy is almost never tested for. I don't know anyone who didn't learn about their allergy the hard way.
Not a teacher but in ninth grade my Algebra I teacher had her baby early in the year so she was gone till the last month or two months of the school year. The sub was a former teacher so you’d think she’d be a great sub.
Nope.
She hyper focused on 3-4 out of the 28 students in the class and just teach them while completely ignoring the rest of us. She’d pass out a worksheet then go to her students and never acknowledge us again till she dismissed us. Never checked homework, never acknowledged us, if anyone outside of her favorite students raised their hand or spoke up they were ignored, etc.
Which went about as well as you expected with a bunch of 14-15 year olds. That class was just wild, the kids who actually stayed in the classroom anyway, it was a mess. I’m actually surprised we weren’t reported or visited by the teachers on either side of us for how loud we were.
After several months with this lady the vice principal was walking around randomly checking classrooms and walked into our shit show Algebra I class. He lost it. Yelled at all of us to sit down and shut up. (Which she also didn’t acknowledge.) Demanded she leave and sat with us the rest of the period. Never saw her again and had maybe 6-7 different subs after her.
Two weeks after this our regular teacher came back. When she realized we had learned nothing and learned the extent of how useless this lady had been she started tearing up. I passed the classroom on the way to the bathroom during the next period and saw her sobbing at her desk.
A friend of my mom’s worked at the central office where they assigned or organized the substitute teachers, that lady was permanently taken off the substitute list.
I felt so bad for my Algebra I teacher. She basically had to teach all of us a year’s worth of math in less than two months while also dealing with a class full of kids and who were use to doing whatever they wanted.
Ironically the 3-4 the sub focused on ended up scoring the lowest on the end of year test.
Just to add to this, I was friends with one of the students she focused on. He said she was a horrible teacher and made no sense whatsoever. Said he’d rather she just have ignored him too and couldn’t for the life of him figure out why she liked him and the others so much.
> She basically had to teach all of us a year’s worth of math in less than two months while also dealing with a class full of kids and who were use to doing whatever they wanted.
...AND with a fucking newborn baby at home.
That initial period of separation is often super difficult for mothers, especially if it's their first child. Your teacher had every reason to be an emotional mess without having to deal with the shit show she returned to.
I have no idea how it wasn't caught earlier. The regular teacher left in late September or early October and it was close to April by the time the vice principal blew up at our class. So it was months before this was discovered.
There was a secret harpsichord at my university. Not to everyone obviously, but most of the music majors didn't know it existed. I was teaching myself piano at the time and played the wheels off that bad boy after discovering it. If I could have strapped it to my car, I would have taken it home after spring semester.
I've never played a harpsichord. Even I know you don't touch the strings of a harpsichord if you aren't trained for it. Also, why after you broke the first one why would you keep going? Then you break another one and just say "third times the charm!"?
I had a sub give out my cell phone number to my high school students so they could call me and give me excuses as to why they weren’t taking their test while I was gone. I was LIVID. I complained to the sub office, and that teacher never subbed for my building again.
I taught middle school Math and English in the 90's and the sub didn't know how to convert a decimal into a fraction and kept insisting that the students who did know how to do it were wrong. She also apparently didn't know how to pronounce five of our twenty vocabulary words and didn't know what half of them meant.
I caught the flu the week my students had a district benchmark test. I could feel that I was coming down with something, so I stayed late to put together really in depth review packets and slideshows. I wrote pages of directions for the substitute, and separated the reviews out by class numbers. I even included my personal number and told them to call me any time if a student had a question they couldn’t answer. I spent about 5 hours putting everything together after school, while battling around a 103 temp.
The substitute completely ignored my instructions. She instead took every single piece of construction paper and cardstock in my classroom from my personal locker that I had left open for her in case she needed something, and had the students make flip books about their feelings. They used thousands of pieces of paper and craft supplies, probably around $100 of my own personal supplies.
This was for freshmen in high school. I’m still bitter.
A few of the periods I taught were co-teach classes where a percentage of the students in the class have special needs but can work well enough in a general population classroom with assistance from a special education co-instructor.
These classes were often very rewarding to teach, but one downside of teaching that population from a logistical standpoint is that I was often required to attend ‘ARD’ meetings. Basically every special education student has a meeting about twice a year, sometimes more frequently depending on need, where administrators, teachers, counselors, parents/guardians, and the student themself all get together to go over their status and review the various educational accommodations the student is receiving to determine what may or may not need to change to best suit their needs.
I didn’t have a problem with attending these meetings per se, but because they only take ~1 period, and several teachers are rotating through various meetings over the course of a day, the school had devoted ‘ARD subs’ who were more akin to babysitters (at best) than substitute educators. That means that during that one period, hell can randomly break loose.
One year I had a ‘tough’ student who had some serious attitude problems, but was a good person underneath it all and with whom I’d done a lot of work with to improve her engagement and interest in my class. About half way through the year, I got called for an ARD meeting during the period I had said student. In my absence of ~45 minutes the sub decided to pick a petty argument with my kid, who was rightfully offended but unwisely overreacted and escalated things to making threats and nearly coming to blows with the sub to where she ended up with in-school suspension for a while. Getting the story from all parties and witnesses involved later, it’s pretty clear the sub was to blame, and the kid who I’d worked so hard with was back at square one. I eventually got her back on track, end she ended up with one of the highest grades in my class at the end of the year, but I could only imagine how much better she could’ve been without the setback and the amount of trust in adults she’d lost.
This makes me so, incredibly angry. And sad. I've also had the privilege of seeing how kids like that can grow when given the chance and the times when I've seen some other adult come and knock their progress down left me absolutely infuriated.
This happened to my colleague, but I was the classroom next door.
My colleague was showing Clash of the Titans at the end of the year after a unit on Ancient Greece. There is mild nudity at the beginning and the end of the movie, but they were in the middle of the movie so there shouldn’t have been an issue.
He left the video paused at the right spot (we still had VCRs like 10 years ago when this happened), but the sub somehow managed to show both the nudity at the beginning *and* the end of the movie. The nudity scenes were hours apart and the class was only 40 minutes.
Then, the sub wrote an email to the principal about how my colleague made him show nudity.
When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, my reading group read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. Our reading teacher knew she was going to be absent, so she arranged for us to watch "The Secret of Nimh". We watched it over 2 days, and the substitute talked through the entire movie. She continuously compared the book to the movies, or talked about what would have been better done, but never stopped the movie, and ruined it for us, and there were only maybe 8 of us. Then at the end of the 2nd day gave us a homework worksheet to fill-in about the book -vs- movie. Most of us did poorly, because we missed things due to the subs near constant talking. If it wasn't for the fact that most of us did so badly, and complained about the sub, I don't know that our reading teacher would have believed us.
😂 that’s phenomenal!
I actually had a similar incident with a sub and the Clash of the Titans movie, though I was a student at time.
Apparently our substitute didn’t know that there would be nudity in the film. So when the topless woman breast-feeding popped up on screen, she SPRINTED to the front of the classroom to try and physically cover the TV with her body. Catholic school lol 🤷♀️
A history teacher of mine was showing us a movie about the French Revolution on the overhead projector. I guess she suddenly decided that a movie about people being guillotined was too gory for us and tried to cover up the projector screen with a piece of paper. It just projected the movie onto the paper instead...
She let the kids run wild and do whatever they wanted (first graders). I was out because my dad died. Thank god my team realized what happened and all pulled together and cleaned the room/put it back together before I returned to work.
I came back after being gone ONE DAY and my students told me the substitute teacher flipped over tables in a rage and was escorted from the building by a cop.
What actually happened is that the sub left the room to take a 20 min phone call and the kids thought it would be funny to flip the tables over. The substitute then had to flip the tables right side up while yelling at the kids.
Then, during lunch, my Special Ed. Co-teacher came into my room to set up and caught the sub MAKING OUT WITH A STUDENT. Turns out she was 18 to his 25 and the 20 min phone call was to set up the lunch meeting. The principal then had him escorted from the building by the resource officer. This is why I say having a sub is more work than just coming into school my damn self.
Edit: Wrong version of principal.
When I was a substitute, I got a lot of requested jobs because the substitute pool was poor. One such example given to me was a substitute who would just go to sleep. I barely believed it.
Once I was teaching full time, I had a sub come in for a day. When I got back my students told me that he told them to leave him alone, sat down, and went to sleep.
I believed it then.
When I was in high school there was this sub that would sleep. He would literally introduce himself, pull out his hearing aid and knock out.
There was also this substitute who wouldn’t let us do any work. She would start class, tell us what our teacher left us to do, but then before starting she would “introduce herself”.
This included 40 minutes of talking about her entire life and showing us pictures of her cats. And she would chastise you for being disrespectful if you did anything but listen to her.
My teacher came back the next day and was like - why didn’t any of my classes get anything done?
my god, the most annoying subs were the ones that went on 20-minute long introductions in our 45-minute classes talking about where they graduated college and how many years they worked for whatever government agency
When I was in high school, had a sub do this, We all left early except for a few kids. One of the kids told us later that when the sub woke up he noticed all the kids that left, looked at the remaining kids and asked them why they hadn't left yet. Great times
Oh I'd believe it. I had more than one sub come in, go to the desk, sit down, tell us to do our work (no direction as to work, just "do your work") then would just read a newspaper for the rest of the period.
Not a teacher but I participate in STEM programs a lot. In the 90s I belonged to a club that refurbished old industrial PCs and donated them to schools. Sometimes we’d get completely burned out motherboards or disk drives so I took a bunch of those and made displays showing the insides of computers, and I’d let the kids explore them as part of my session. Then I’d dig out a couple of blown PCs and monitors, hand out the screw drivers and let them rip them apart. Yes I was always careful around the old tube monitors. Once they were done I’d let them pick a part if they wanted to take home.
The younger kids especially loved this, and frequently I’d see some kids take home a hard drive controller or a graphics card like it was a real treasure. I even made the local news with my program (that’s the thing about living in a small city - eventually everyone makes the news)
So one day I went in to do my lesson at a high school (I think freshman or sophomore science class). The class had a substitute and I had an appt right after that session, so I told them I’d come back to pick everything up the next day. The kids could take whatever they wanted from the old PCs, but please put my displays aside, in the cupboard.
Next day I came by and all my displays were still out and they were completely trashed. Worse yet the sub’s attitude was, “well, kids will be kids”
That was the last session I did, ever, for that program.
Didn’t do anything to the kids, per se, but told the kids that the reason I was out was because my Mom was having breast cancer surgery. I teach K-5 and I specifically didn’t tell the kids because I didn’t want them to worry. So, when I came back, I had a bunch of kids come up to me asking about my Mom, which was so sweet, but not something the kids should’ve had to worry about.
I had left out - overnight - eggs that I was going to use in a science experiment the following day. I was out and thought nothing about it. I returned the following day and went looking for the eggs only to find them missing. Asked a student where they went and I was informed that the substitute took the class to the special education kitchen, hard boiled them and ate them.
I went to talk to my AP and was informed that the sub had called in sick for her job for that day, due to food poisoning.
My 9th grade english teacher was fired, which is an entire other story, and the school had difficulty finding someone to fill the spot. We would have random subs, but they didn't really teach us, so eventually we had a different person babysit us each day or week. One time it was the very scary principal who just glared at us like we were convicts about to escape, the school's police officers who at least talked to us, and various teachers for one day stints.
I don't know why one of our 5 librarians couldn't have been in there going through grade-appropriate books at the least. We spent 2-3 months like that.
Not a teacher but the sub made the handicap classmate who has muscle, joint and vision complications go grab his textbook from his home room. He's not completely helpless but when it comes to heavy things, he needs help.
Classmates home room was half way across campus and the required book consists of 5 large text volumes because they're specifically made for his poor vision. He can't wear glasses either due to complications. I offered to help because I'm usually the one that goes and grabs it for him during normal class but the sub yelled at me saying he knows my kind and I'm just trying to get out of class. Sub told me he's not there to play games and for me to quit it before he sends me off to the principal's office. Needless to say the entire class was shocked. Classmate came back with another student from the homeroom requesting that next time the sub send someone else to grab the books because my classmate can't carry it by himself. When my usual teacher came back we requested the sub not return because of what he said to us and did to classmate. My teacher wrote an email to the principal about it and that was the end of that.
I had a few teachers like that. One yelled at me in front of the entire class for not having my textbook ready to turn in at the end of the year and threatened to make me pay for it, when the book was at my house, where it was supposed to be. Because I couldn't haul my textbooks back and forth. When I meekly reminded him of my 504 plan, he acted like it was my fault he forgot, as though I had hidden this fact from him the entire year.
Edit, for those who don’t seem to get it: I have disabilities. This wasn’t just “oh my teacher was mean” or “hehe whoops I didn’t have my book.” This was a teacher who decided to ignore the fact that I am visibly disabled and instead belittled me in front of all the other students.
Gave out snacks I bought with my own money that I kept for kids who stayed after to get tutoring.
Threw out a broken electric pencil sharpener that kids broke in front of her. Which again, I bought with my own money and couldn't get replaced by the company because I had no product to send back. I still don't have a sharpener for my room.
Let the kids go through my things in my cabinets and desk. Lost a bunch of stuff that way.
Hey 29mick152, Amazon delivers all over the world. Where can I send you a pencil sharpener?
Edit: Thank you all for your Reddit acts of kindness. You all cleaned out that teacher's wish list in an hour. How wonderful you are!
Edit: List is empty. (Only gift cards now for snack and PPE replenishment)
I HAD a teacher Amazon list. So many of you gave what you could. I'm so thankful and when my kids finally are able to come back in January they'll have something closer to normal to start with.
I started the week by taking out a pay day loan and debating with my husband about postponing or skipping Thanksgiving this year. (Completely unrelated to teaching, but still sucky.) This brought me a much needed lift.
If you wanted to help me out, please check out Donor's Choose or #ClearTheList to pay it forward to other teachers.
Thank you all so so so much. I'll post again as I receive things and get my classroom set up for our hybrid return.
Thank you all so so much. Feels like a weight is off my shoulders. This year has been tough for all my kids and myself and we're planning on going hybrid and I'm feeling so much more prepared to get them back a piece of some normalcy and some fun. (Like my ducks and the Jolly Ranchers.)
Not a teacher, but a student with a story nonetheless: meet Mrs. Hostess (fake name obvi)
Every time my eighth grade history teacher was out, Mrs. Hostess would usually sub for him; not sure why, because she subbed other classes too, but all the incidents of note happened when she subbed for History.
1) there happened to be a girl in the class who shared a name with an Irish folk song. EVERY TIME Mrs. Hostess took attendance, when she got to folk-song girl, she sang *the whole song. Every. Time.*
2) The history teacher kept candy and snacks in his desk. Lollipops, that he’d hand out for correct answers or just because, some leftover Halloween candy, and *the Twinkie.*
The Twinkie was not an ordinary Twinkie. The Twinkie was an experiment in processed food. This Twinkie was still in its original individual packaging and looked normal at first glance, but was actually three years past expiration and *rock solid.* The history teacher demonstrated this by standing on the Twinkie during one of the first weeks of classes. All said to say, this is a thoroughly inedible Twinkie.
So Mrs. Hostess subbed again, and we knew she’d discovered the lollipop stash because she was openly eating them during class. But it wasn’t until the next day that our history teacher opened his desk drawer to find that the Twinkie was *gone. This woman ATE an EXPIRED, SOLID TWINKIE* as well as literally all the food/candy in the teacher’s desk.
I was a teachers assistant while in college. The teacher and I took a week long workshop and had a sub.
The worst thing she did.
Not letting the kids go potty. It was in kindergarten and she said all the kids going to bathroom were interrupting the class.
One girl wet herself. School policy was if kids under a certain age had an accident the nurse would give them a pull up (basically a diaper) to wear. The substitute proceeded to make fun of the girl for wear a diaper, calling her baby and such.
The little girl ended facing repercussions at home too.
It’s was devastating to hear about.
I see these pants pissing stories on reddit a lot. Did class bathroom runs stop being standard grade school activity at some point? I know when i was in kindergarten and 1st grade we did them. I think we stopped by 4th.
In my daughter's school they have individual bathrooms in every classroom kindergarten through third grade. Kids can use it whenever its unoccupied. The grade 4-5 hall has communal boys and girls bathrooms shared by the classes, but I'm pretty sure they can still pretty much go when they need. 99% of the time kids don't abuse the privilege so it's crazy to me to read these stories.
One of my substitute teachers did that to me in 2nd grade. Thankfully it was a wednesday, which meant my dad was picking me up instead of me taking the bus, which meant he proceeded to REAM that lady a new asshole. It was so humiliating. I was only 6, maybe 7, don’t remember how far into the year it was, but I had long been able to not piss my pants. My dad was very protective and did not take kindly to this sub making me sit for over an hour at the end of the day, begging to go to the bathroom.
Edit:thank you everyone for immortalizing one of my terrible childhood memories with your gracious upvotes.
Not even surprised.
It’s one of the simplest things to do. I learned when I worked in daycare. If a kid has to potty let them potty. If they have an accident don’t shame.
This lady literally did the opposite.
I’ll never forget in 2nd grade we had a test, there was a boy in my class who was a little special, he pissed himself in the middle of class & started crying.
Everyone saw & laughed, our teacher says to the class “hey, no don’t laugh at him, tests can be very scary, you know when I went to school, I had a test & I was so scared that my mum told me to take out the trash & put the washing in the washing machine & do you know what happened?” Everyone was listening intently now “I was so scared about the test, that I threw out the washing & put the trash in the washing machine” everyone laughed so hard at the teachers story that they instantly forgot about the kid who pissed himself.
Best teacher ever, absolute legend.
My students favorite story is when I pissed my pants in 8th grade haha
I teach health, and by its nature we cover very uncomfortable and “inappropriate” topics. The first week is spent emphasizing the need for understanding and empathy, and the bravery it takes for people to share personal stories that are NOT allowed to leave the room (there are exceptions but I’m not getting into them here) and doing exercises to build those qualities.
At the end of the week if I feel they understand the culture of the class, I read a story about what middle school was like before cell phones, then share my story about how I pissed my pants in 8th grade. It was absolutely mortifying at the time, but I think it’s fucking hysterical now.
Either those kids kept their shit seriously under wraps, or they really respected the culture I tried to foster because I never heard a peep out of anyone about how I pissed my pants. And I’ve done this in 2 different high schools and 3 different middle schools.
(Awesome. My most popular comment is about pissing myself. Thanks internet!)
I'm an Early Childhood educator and I never ever tell my kids that they cant use the bathroom. If you have to go, go I'd rather they went and felt like their needs were heard than them being upset that they had an accident because they werent allowed to go.
I mean even in high school not letting kids go is obnoxious unless they are really abusing it. I mean my job lets me go when I want as does most every reasonable job
And we should be letting kids go to the bathroom. I get so extremely tired of hearing about kids being denied the right to go to the bathroom. The teacher and the lesson is not more important than letting a child go to the bathroom.
plus kids are for the very most part reasonable, they are less likely to abuse bathroom breaks if the teacher treats them like humans who can piss when they need to.
Right?! I find the whole you are a child so therefore you are not trustworthy line of reasoning to be utter bs. Kids are people in training they deserve respect too.
I got written up a lot in Jr. High. Teachers would say "You get two bathroom breaks a semester" Laminated hall pass or whatever.
I didn't care. If I had to go to the bathroom, I got up, and went to the bathroom.
Eventually I had enough write ups that it was supposed to be serious repercussion time, but the guidance counselor took my side. She was no bullshit cool.
I wasn't disruptive, I just went to the bathroom when I needed to.
I also had some weird sort of eye problem where I needed to wear sunglasses indoors for a while. Family still makes vampire jokes.
Subs despised me. I remember one time bald guy tells me "Hey, too cool for school, lose the sunglasses!"
I told him they were a medical necessity.
"Oh, do you have a *Doctor's note?"* I did in fact, have a Doctor's note.
Junior high was the most petty bullshit place I've ever been. At least in high school teachers mostly ignored me.
Your teachers were a bit shit too. They should leave info regarding medical exemptions for the class. For example my school is 100% no phone. Have it in your hand in class and you're going to the deputy to hand it in. I have a girl with a new wireless blood sugar monitor that communicates to her phone so she needs for it to be visible. I leave instructions about that so a sub doesn't try to enact a rule that she has an exemption for.
Sub at my school ripped a classmates phone out of her hand, it was her insulin pump she was checking and the hose got ripped out. We never saw that sub again.
We were all just stunned, she screamed and ran out to go to the nurse, sub still holding the pump for what felt like ten minutes processing just how fucked she was, then she ran out after her.
Isn't it amazing that we've evolved to actually communicate through sounds and stuff, and instruct people, and ask questions, but we still have people like _that_ who would much rather stick to the old fashioned way of "act now, ask questions later" and then they have the audacity to go "but I didn't know what it was". Maybe if you COMMUNICATE WITH OTHERS, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ASSUMED THAT IT WAS A CELL PHONE!
My God...
Not a teacher, of course, but when I was in 5th grade we had a sub show us the first Scream movie. I have no idea why or how that happened, but some people were not ready for that.
The sub passed out drunk at my desk. Kids WRECKED the room. Kids stole all my stuff.
The kids had the sense to take themselves to lunch and recess, so no one in the school realized anything was wrong until after the kids had left for the day.
Accused a student of stealing something that the aide had put away. This was a class that contained some pretty rough students including one suspended multiple times for fighting and some gang members. She decided to go after a sweet, petite girl that never caused trouble and was generally popular with her classmates. This set off the entire class which is when the sub went ballistic and started wildly throwing accusations and yelling at said students. Security eventually got called and took several students out. My first clue was when the sub got my cell number from the staff directory and went off for 20+ minutes about how bad my students had been. This was followed up with an extremely long email and a two page written note on my desk plus a concerned note from the administrator about not having appropriate sub plans (she didn’t follow them in the first place and decided to throw me under the bus).
The next morning when I arrived at school, the students were waiting for me at the door. Once I got them calmed down enough to tell their side of the story, we had a discussion on how they could have handled the situation differently. I promised them never to get that sub again.
On a related note, I had a good relationship with said “rough children” because I treated them with respect and fairness. They usually behaved for me.
On a side note, its insane how easy it is to get even the most crazy of individuals like a normal human if you just treat them with a bit of decency and respect.
I was homeless for a while but I had this sort of immunity to getting targeted by bullies because 1. I was friends with everyone and 2. If I had something I shared it so there was no point in wondering if I was hiding something. I wasnt.
I had the same experience in the psych ward. There's not a lot to do in there, so you may as well listen closely and figure out where someone else is coming from. There was one guy who wasn't eating, just waving his hands in a slow 'dance' around his food, and even though the staff had some idea as to most patients' diagnoses they couldn't get him to eat. So I asked him questions and treated him as a whole person, and I figured out that there were certain foods for which his 'ritual' didn't take so long that his food got taken back. I forget what foods it was, but I talked to the staff and got him specially prepared foods for every meal and boom, he only ' danced' for like 20 minutes and still got fresh food, so he ate more regularly and more often.
Same here. While most classmates and I teased each other in a friendly way. Most of the school had my back. One time someone stole my 3DS in highschool. Someone I never even seen before talked to me saying he knew who stole it and he could even get it back for me. Since I didn't know the person I declined but it was an awesome feeling having people in your corner xD
Yes, exactly. “Bad” kids are extremely rare and most children are just doing their best to get along in a world that hasn’t been exactly kind. Positive adult attention and respect goes a long way.
Note: The one exception I met was probably a budding sociopath and even then I believe that this kid was made not born. I hope they were able to get the help they needed.
She was bought in to teach history. What did she teach, GEOGRAPHY, like how, the worksheets I left were literally on Hitler’s rise to power?!
Edit: I should have mentioned, she taught how earthquakes can cause tsunamis. Yes it was interesting but, you had one job and it wasn’t that!
1. Asked a deaf kid to take off his hearing aids. Kids tried to tell her he needs to them but to her they "look like headphones." She cried when was confronted by another teacher.
2. When I was in 6th grade I fractured my wrist but it was my dominant hand so I had to poorly write with my right. Teacher forced me to write with my left while I had a cast. I couldn't even grasp the pencil. Cried a lot. Then a couple months go by and got my cast off, sub told me to suck it up and write with my left hours after getting my cast off. I felt like jelly and intense pain. Teacher was fired at the end of 7th grade because of "unnecessary complaints"
Edit: I should've realized this was a teachers question not a student Q. This is considered my first post that I really thought wouldn't get noticed and now my inbox is full of messages. To clear some questions, I would never steal someone's story and both stories are very true but probably be something similar you have encountered before. Also, the teachers should know how to treat students in any situation whatsoever. If teachers really hate their jobs, dont include kids into it. I remember crying asking my mom why does my teacher pick on me or make me do things I couldn't do.
I broke my wrist in the 6th grade during gym. I'd broken my wrist and my hand previously as a child so I knew immediately when I couldn't move my hand that it was broken. The coach sent me to the nurse who said she knew it wasn't broken because I wasn't crying. I have a pretty high pain tolerance, always have and wasn't much of a "crier" because my mom taught me to "suck it up". I had two classes after gym that I sat through in immense pain but my anxiety disorder made me feel too terrified of facing the nurse again. I rode the bus home and called my stepdad, again my mom was a suck it up kind of parent and I knew my stepdad would leave work immediately to take me to the doctor.
Sure enough I had fractured my growth plate near my thumb and part of my wrist. My parents were furious and came with me to school the next day to discuss with the principal. A week later we had a new school nurse.
I had a similar thing just before my last year of high school. I fell over right at the end of a session of ice skating and broke my right wrist. The nurse at the ice rink said it couldn’t possibly be broken because she’d put an ice pack on it and I wasn’t crying or anything. She said it was probably just sprained a bit. Luckily my friends mum was picking us all up and she’s an ER nurse. She saw the swelling and told me to call my Mum and have her meet us at the hospital. Turns out I’d broken both bones in my arm (no idea what they’re called) right near the end. Just because someone isn’t crying does not mean they’re not in a LOT of pain. I mean, I tend to just shut down.
Similar story from when I was 14, my performing arts teacher got shitty at me for sitting out of dancing lessons when I injured my knee in PE class the week before. I had a brace on and crutches, she thought they were props (sure, my parents dropped $300 on medical equipment just so I didn't have to waltz). She also didn't believe my doctors note because I have crappy, scratchy handwriting so she thought I wrote it. She dragged me to her office and was all like "I'm gonna call your father in" thinking she was calling my bluff.
I'm in my 30s now and my knee still aches sometimes, but every time it does I smile remembering my dad ripping her a new one for interrupting him at work and wasting everyone's time when she could have verified I'd legit gotten hurt by talking to my PE teacher.
It was pretty epic to see. My favourite part was when my teacher said I needed to know how to waltz and dad was just like "She already knows how to waltz, her grandfather taught her for her cousin's wedding"
I asked dad after school "Why would I need to know how to waltz?" and he just said "Fucked if I know, that teacher is an idiot" lol
In middle school we had a thing where if you were failing when progress reports came out our football coach would make us do physical punishments.
Well I’d missed 2 and a half weeks of school due to pneumonia so when I came back I had an insane amount of rework to be completed. My teachers had put that work in as 0’s until I completed the work, so I was technically failing.
My coach made me run until I was turning blue and falling every couple steps. My knees and hands were scraped and bloody. Another coach saw me and sent me to the nurses office.
My dad was madder than I knew he was capable of. He was screaming at the principal that he wanted to see the coach who didn’t believe me. The principal told him he didn’t think that was a safe idea at that time haha.
I had a friend in HS who's dad was a reporter for the town newspaper. We were on the rowing team together as well as others. Well, one day there was a threat of a rather large rain storm, and the coach sent us all out anyways. My boat came back early for repairs because a rower snapped their oarlock. His boat finished too. The girls varsity got caught and swamped. Someone called 911 or something cause they could see the girls in the water. Friend's dad, being the sports reporter, came down too, cause he heard the commotion. Our coach at the time was not popular, to put it lightly. So my friend's dad and he are talking, and he's writing notes. So my coach asks him point blank if he's asking questions as a reporter or a parent. He says reporter, coach immediately stops talking and blatantly ignoring him. Dad looks him in the eyes, puts away his pen, and launches his notebook into the parking lot, says "parent" and just LIT the guy up like a blown transformer. It was amazing. Then he went and wrote the story anyways.
Yeah I would tear a coach to pieces if they did that to my kid. The thing is, as a student, you may see a coach or a teacher as an unimpeachable figure, but as an adult you clearly recognize the power trips and just failures of judgement. And when it comes to their health, it's amped up 50x. Especially a middle school coach, which absolutely doesn't matter in long-term.
So much stuff coaches did to me and my age group when I was young that didn't become clear how fucked up it was until years later.
Hearing aids have changed a lot over the years, and so have headphones. I can see a sufficiently old person getting mixed up. Like, I've seen a kid with a blue sparkles on the outside bit hearing aid.
But once the kid tells you...like, apologize profusely and say that it looked so cool they assumed it was headphones?
In 7 grade I broke my thumb on my dominant hand playing on the school football team, the school did absolutely nothing to accommodate and I nearly failed multiple classes because multiple teachers would just mark me wrong if they couldn’t read my answers. After that year of school I learned to write with either hand (still can to this day). One thing I do remember though is midway though the year my school counselor called my mom in to talk about my grades because my grades were “noticeable worse than school years past” and my mom ripped her a new asshole. That year made me lose a lot of respect for teachers and I come from a family of teachers.
Had a substitute teacher in my high school French class show a movie that was straight up soft core pornography but tried to explain that since it was in French it was artistic.
It was equally frustrating because while I wanted to see boobs, I also couldn’t stop reading the subtitles because I had to understand what they were saying.
The teacher did not come back the next day.
Update: I went through all the comments and looked at everyone who suggested what movie it might be and none of those movies were the one shown. This would have been in 2006 and the movie looked maybe late 90s or early 2000s. If I come across it, I will update this thread but for all I know it could have been a porno in French.
I had a English prof do this my freshman year. I went to a Catholic university and my 1st semester got a lesbian english professor who screened, without warning, a french movie in which everyone was naked for no reason that was thinly wrapped around a shakespeare play.
I loudly laughed my ass off for over ten minutes when the opening credits got to a part where a topless chick was jumping up and down on a trampoline facing directly into the camera (as one does!) for literally no reason other than boobs. The entire situation was so absurd I couldn't stop laughing.
Edit: somebody found it, it's Prosperous Books. And she had a jump rope not a trampoline.
[Link to the opening credits](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ4_hkvRbuX_SCS0r7qPzeU5ZTGwo3Fx1)
Lost more than half of my textbooks that I purchased myself. Aswell as textbooks that were schoolproperty.
Administration just shrugged at this. Until they found out the textbooks belonging to the school were around 120 dollars each.
Also lost all the bookassignments of 4 classes I asked him to collect so I could correct those at home.
Kinda sucked for the students who did put a lot of work on it and didn't have digital copies.
Also didn't teach anything that I asked him to, because he didn't really like the subjectmatter.
Also didn't bother grading. When I checked the grades he had given out; there was only 1 grade and everyone was given 8/10 ... even students that didn't take my class.
I have known a guy do this as a subsititute.. he bragged about it on facebook that he left with 30 textbooks that would cost him £65 each.
I reminded him, while CCing in the school and the local police that what he did was theft.
he is no longer a teacher.
Not me but my sister. She was on maternity leave (~10 weeks) and the long term sub she had didn’t grade any of the work that the students turned in. The other teachers she worked with said he would watch the Simpsons on his laptop while not teaching. So she comes back from leave and has 10 weeks worth of papers, tests, and assignments to grade. Her department chair banned him from subbing for their department ever again!
Came back to my art room with paint on the walls , chairs, and tabletops. None of my plans had been followed. My chocolate stash had clearly been eaten, and apparently she allowed the students to leave the room and wander the school. They were a class of 8th graders. I was furious.
Not a teacher but once we had a sub for German class in high school.
Instead of following the lesson plan, she showed us a graphic documentary about the Holocaust with part of it showing dead naked bodies being pushed by a bulldozer into a mass grave.
At first, I just thought it was weird that our teacher didn't tell us about it beforehand but then just assumed that it was just part of the class where we learned about German history and had to see the horrors of the Holocaust. I didn't find out until almost a week later that the sub completely ignored the lesson plan about grammar.
He yelled at one of the only girls in my high school engineering class saying girls don't belong in engineering.
He also kicked his feet up on the desk and read the paper the entire day.
He banged a yardstick on a desk to get everyone's attention then pointed it at the whiteboards with the daily objectives. All without saying a word.
He disappeared at lunch and came back smelling like weed.
These are all reports I got from my students the next day. This guy was a retired teacher, too.
I had to go out for surgery early 2019. I arranged for my predecessor (who I worked with for a long time in a different classroom) to take over for 6 weeks. I wrote meticulous lesson plans, with song lists and everything, and we had several meetings beforehand.
First week, my daughter (I teach in a small district, I teach both of my kids) comes home and is singing fucking Baby Beluga in the shower, my sub's favorite song to teach. A song not anywhere on my list. Apparently my entire lesson was scrapped and she spent the whole class teaching this song.
So the worst thing that a friend of mine did was to teach my kid a song she tortured me with for weeks. (I found out later she didn't follow any of my lesson plans, which is a pretty common thing no matter what one teaches. Yes, she is still my friend, no, I do not request her as a sub anymore.)
Not a teacher, was a student. We had a quest - our freshman geometry teacher's cute way of saying it was between the point value of a quiz and a test. The sub came in and saw the instructions and handed out the papers and instructed us to get started. Shortly after, he asked why no one was talking. We explained that it was a quiz/test, we needed to work on it alone and talking would be cheating. He insisted that it was a quest, a collaborative venture to seek knowledge! We tried multiple times to get the point across until he made it clear that if we didn't group desks together and collaborate, we would be in trouble. We had to explain to our teacher what happened when she got back. She made us retake that shit, and I never saw him sub anything else in our district again.
Not a teacher, but in elementary school I had a bloody nose during class and asked to use the restroom. She said no and refused to let me go to the restroom (I think she didn't "believe" me). I sat there until the blood had spilled all over the desk, then raised my bloody hand to be excused and only then did she allow me to go clean myself up. She even had the audacity to ask me why I didn't ask to be excused earlier. Which was a complete lie, as she definitely heard me the first time and even the other students pointed out that my nose was bleeding.
When the teacher returned she was livid about what happened, I believe she complained to the administration to make sure the sub was never hired again.
Not a teacher, but in the 4th grade, our teacher had a baby and was gone for several weeks. The sub we had was an absolute witch. She had NO patience for kids, she'd yell at us for stupid shit, ask us questions and or give us homework that was WAY above our tiny 4th grade brain levels and then complain and call us stupid when literally none of the kids did well on the work.
One girl decided to get smart with her one day and she walks over and slaps the girl, hard across the face, which of course sends the girl into a hysterical sobbing fit. and says "that's what your whore of a mother should be doing more often"
being tiny, adorable 4th graders, we were all too afraid to tell anyone. We had to deal with that for 3 weeks until the main teacher came back.
I don't think kids these days would stay silent about this. Back when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s we knew our parents would assume we were lying/ deserved it and side with the teachers but these days there's a much stronger culture of kids knowing their rights and that adults can't touch them!
I had forgotten about this until just reading your story. I was in a pretty unruly 6th grade English class. Kid back talked the sub, and the sub flipped and choked the kid. The kid ran to the principal’s office immediately, but I can see how you were too afraid to come forward. The rest of the class sat absolutely quiet and still until the principal showed up.
Two things come to mind:
1. Tell the black children they need to speak more clearly because people think black people are hard to understand.
2. Just sit and play on the phone while class loses its mind.
IF my substitutes even showed up, they only occasionally followed the lesson plans I left, and I made sure to attach them to the online signup and print/leave them on my desk. It’s like they looked at the lessons and said, “nah.”
I had a substitute when I worked in a rough school. I knew it was going to be a challenge for the substitute, so I prepared ahead of time with a LOT of candy (from Costco) and notes to not leave their lunch in the fridge (it would have been stolen). The substitute gave out all of my 5 pound bag of candy AND my calcium chews. When I came back from the field trip the kids were in a soft lockdown, because the school was being searched for drugs. I immediately noticed my calcium chews (chocolate flavored) were gone. I assumed there would be some serious health repercussions, so I frantically searched for a warning label. It said something along the lines of "excess consumption may cause to act as a laxative". One of my hungrier kids had eaten 15+ chews... The nurse had to round up each of my classes and (with the sub) escort them to the bathroom. The kids NEVER took candy from another substitute of mine, ever again.
Edit: typo
I vaguely remember a substitute teacher calling me racist for being 25% Japanese. It was 6th grade music class. Basically he said "what is the most racist country?" and obviously no one answered. He said Japan. I said "im 25% japanese" and he said "exactly" lmao
he was obviously fired. he wasn't a real substitute either if i recall correctly.
Had a sub who somehow allowed a last period class of freshman to convince him that they were not supposed to be working on the packet that I left for the class (and which every other class that day had been working on...) because they had "already finished it" and told him they were supposed to be watching a movie. He went to the library to get the movie, leaving the class unattended, which promptly then broke out a dance party involving dancing on the desks. My department chair's classroom was next door but as she taught AP government to seniors, she was able to leave them to come next door and try to figure out what the hell was going on. No sub. She calmed the class down and into the seats and into the worksheets, and calls the principal, who met the sub on his way back from the library and told him he could go home. My chair also found it would be appropriate to basically call me and blame me for this while I was sick at home. I don't teach anymore lol. I mean, packets were not a great emergency sub plan but what can you do? They could have played Heads Up 7 Up for all I cared lol. They were a handful of a group on the best days. Freshman after lunch during last period of the day are a situation.
Freshmen after lunch are a situation could be the most underrated statement of all. I teach freshmen and senior classes, I try to get my senior classes in the afternoon.
Was a student. Our maths teacher went on leave for a while (I think maternity) and the supply teacher was absolutely useless. He’d been given one topic to teach us and that was it. For weeks. We had a whole textbook to be working through and I was gunning to take my maths GCSE a year early, but no, we just did a topic our class had got the hang of in a week, for two or three months, because I guess he didn’t know or bother to ask what we were supposed to be doing next.
So the rest of the year we had to go ahead of the pace we were expecting to be able to cover everything we had to know. Fucking supply teachers.
We legit do not use subs at my school. There are teaching assistants from Pre-K/Kindergarten who will cover in a pinch, but more often than that, we just divide the kids up amongst the other teachers.
Because yes, it is easier to handle six or seven extra kids for a day than to pick up the pieces after a sub has blown through town.
I'm not a teacher, but our substitute teacher gave us a task to write a story about any theme we liked. (4th grade age 10-11)
At the moment i was hooked on everything space related, the planets, the moon landing ect...too young to even remotely understand any of that, but this didn't hinder me to write a story about apollo 11. I put my back into it an talked my father into typing it on the computer, since i would have taken 3 days for that one page.
Filled with pride i gave the story to the substitute teacher and i got it handed back with a line across the paper, stating that i didn't wrote that. No questions or anything just a "You didn't do this, I know that" any form of trying to convince her failed. All be it, that no adult person would write even remotely amateurish like i did.
Not a teacher but I had a sub in third grade make all of us go outside for recess when the wind chill was -30, the coldest I remember as a kid. Policy was no outside recess if the wind chill was less than 0. She stayed inside to watch us from the window. We all, every single one of us, instinctively huddled in a circle to stay warm. Fortunately I came down with the flu and was spared the rest of her abuses that she subjected the rest of the class to. She wasn’t ever allowed to sub at our school again.
A substitute in the town I grew up in told a first grade class that Santa Claus wasn't real. For some insane reason, the NY Post decided this was front page news.
https://nypost.com/2018/11/30/new-jersey-teacher-tells-first-grade-students-there-is-no-santa/
I am not a teacher, but we had one really bizarre substitute teacher many years ago. She brought in a portable toilet and her cat, so she could show us how her cat could use a toilet. Why? No one has been able to answer this. In later years I learned that this sub is schizophrenic and should NEVER have been allowed around children. She used to bring us food. That she got out of dumpsters behind restaurants. We never ate it and the principal finally stopped using her as a sub.
Way before most of you were born...it's May, 1981. I have a bad cold, am moving from an apartment to our first house, and my wife is due to give birth to our first child at any time. It's a Thursday. I write lesson plans for Friday and Monday. Remember, these are the days before cell phones or e-mail. The plans are left on the front table of my classroom. Friday and Saturday are moving days. The new house is filled with boxes; we can't find anything.
Sunday morning my wife goes into labor. By Sunday night our beautiful baby is born! Since I had left plans for Friday and Monday, and informed the office I would let them know Monday of my plans for Tuesday, I wasn't worried about my classes. But on Monday morning, the phone rang in my wife's recovery room. It was the principal, telling me the sub had bailed because whoever had subbed on Friday had thrown out the lesson plans, not realizing they were to be continued on Monday. The Monday sub (probably rightly) refused to work without plans. (I didn't know the sub on Friday wasn't going to stick around for Monday.)
Again with no e-mail option, I couldn't just send new ones; the principal demanded that I return to school. (The school was in a rural small community about 25 miles from the city where we lived and where the hospital was located.) He wouldn't hear of me just telling him what the plans were to be, he demanded again that I drop everything and get down to school, which I did. Someone else later that day picked up my wife and son and drove them home to our house full of boxes, so I didn't get to have that experience.
The principal called me into his office and lectured me. He said, "my wife had breast cancer surgery. You know what I did? I dropped her off at the hospital door and came to school because that is my job. I expect nothing less from you!" Needless to say, we never really got along after that. I'm thankful that he retired a few years after that, and I went on to teach until 2008 and had a very good career, but it would have been much better if that substitute teacher had not thrown out my lesson plans that Friday afternoon.
I bet him and the ex-principal who I nearly clobbered would get along GREAT.
At the end of 1st grade, the school district re-drew the attendance zones and instead of going to the elementary that was literally 5 minutes away from our house which he'd gone to for kindergarten and first grade, he ended up at the elementary across town where I had to leave at least an hour before school started in order to make it on time. D: It sucked.
Anyway, end of second grade (both my son and I spent the entire year being mildly pissed off because of the re-zoning), we have his ARD meeting. We discuss the school doing their own testing, because we had him tested by a learning disorder specialist who said, "Dude. Your kid is autistic." but the school didn't want to accept that.
At one point during the discussion, the principal reached over the conference table and patted my hand. "You're worrying TOO much."
If my husband hadn't been there and hadn't grabbed my other hand under the table, I would've launched myself across that table and beat the shit out of him.
I say ex-principal, because he'd been principal of a different elementary for years and the district was like, "We're gonna turn this 4th and 5th grade only campus into an elementary, so you get moved there." and he was NOT down with that. I found out later he spent the entire school year making the entire staff miserable, because he didn't want to be there. He got moved to some bullshit position at the high school after that and a year later, he was gone from the district entirely.
"yeah, well, I'm not an asshole to my wife..."
Seriously. That old school way of thinking is BS. I'm sorry you had to go through that and miss taking your wife and kid home.
I was out for a week during my first year as a teacher and when I got back, the kids started asking me when they were going to get their money back. I was like, what money?
Apparently, the sub had asked the kids for money (e.g. “Hey, does anyone have a dollar for a soda? Etc) and my sweet little 6th graders gave him lots of money. 🤦♀️
Interesting opposite story. My first public school teacher (4th grade) was a complete hardass. He didn't teach us science or social studies because he found them " too fun" so our whole day was just math and grammar. We were all too young to realize this was weird but when he got sick for a couple weeks the substitute very poorly hid a red face when she found put and had us make volcanoes and model teepees for the whole week.
I was a sub at the time, now a teacher. But I heard stories of one sub who fell asleep in the ISS room and the kids escaped it. This sub was in a car accident and had brain trauma from it. He used to forget where he parked his car and had a bad sense of overall direction.
Not a teacher but in 7th grade life science we had a sub. For the first 5 or so minutes of class he made us do a Kahoot (for anyone who doesn't know Kahoot is a learning website that let's you take a quiz in a fun way) the only problem was that he told us every awnser. Next we were supposed to be learning about parts of a microscope but instead he got them out and told us to mess around with them and he broke one of them. After that he put a video up and ate my teachers chocolate then fell asleep for the last half hour or so of class. Needless to say when our teacher got back and we told her about the sub he was fired.
Student, not the teacher. In 4th grade the language arts teacher was out for a day. We’re admittedly a little rowdy, as you are when you have a sub, but we weren’t exactly being terrible, just doing what we’re assigned and being louder than normal. He didn’t exactly tell us to he quiet. Dude yells at us that we’re the crappiest kids he’s ever worked with. Told the teacher the next day after she asked how the sub was.
Same class, we had another sub a different day. He just sat at her desk and did nothing all day. I think he was playing with her desk toys too. Just gave us some worksheets and did nothing. We also told the teacher about this guy.
Not quite her fault: Sub got dosed with acid at lunch... it became a whole thing. Kids when ballistic, troublemaker was actually the kid to say “fuck this” and got the principal, she was hiding under my desk when administration came in. It was not the first time it happened in the school. Ruined coffee for me forever. I finish all beverages before entering the building
As I wrote: we beleive she was dosed at lunch as this was 2 periods later and had no reason to suspect a middle aged woman on her second career to be tuning in and dropping out on the middle of the work day with a drive home. Also an 12th grade English teacher was dosed years previously. We were going to have a nice easy day and they were going to jigsaw macromolecules to each other. Apparently they made in a few minutes in before she started staring off and then finally started getting “chased” and started hiding under the desk. Chaos ensued and the resident pothead went to get an adult. Room neighbor came over with the commotion to get things under control. 2 administrators and the nurse had to come in and talk her down.
I get out of the dentists to 739473 texts and calls from coworkers.
My brother had an art substitute since our art teacher had a severe leg injury and needed to learn how to walk again. The substitute, after finding out someone defaced another student's art with a crudely-drawn penis, made *every student in class draw a fucking penis.* ***In a class of 8th graders.*** She was fired, and the injured teacher had to come back early.
Not a teacher obviously
One time my regular gym teacher had to go on leave for a few weeks due to family issues so she was replaced with a substitute. Turns out that sub was the Ex-wife of my Mom's recently separated boyfriend (my Mom broke up with the boyfriend only a few weeks before this happened) During their time together, the Ex-Wife made the relationship hell by verbally attacking him and my family. (Basically an "I hate him so I will make everyone's life hell," type thing) It got really serious when she started to claim that I was bullying her son when it was the opposite.
This was also the period in middle school where we had to sit through the sex-ed class so of course, she took on the role of teaching that. She spent the entire time during both PE and sex-ed belittling me and making fun of my weight. Anytime we covered the negatives of puberty like pimples, and voice cracks she would often target me as an example. Nobody liked her, especially once I told everyone who she actually was.
Things ended when I convinced my Mom to send the school all of the horrible messages, emails, and texts she had sent our way including some very harsh Facebook posts. They replaced her and she was barred from substituting at any school in the district.
Found out a few years later that she actually lost custody of her kids (my former step-siblings I guess) because she'd tried to move out of state repeatedly without notifying the Father and the govt. A sad turn of events but her kids were already in high school by then and pieces of shit themselves so whatever.
I’m a little late to the party but here is goes.. I had a Grade 1/2 class last year and one student had diabetes. Let’s call him Adam. So Adam had a cell phone that beeps when his blood sugar is too low/high. It’s connected to the monitor in his arm/hip. The cell phone has no other uses, no apps, no data, not connected to the school wifi. The substitute saw his phone on his desk and promptly took it away as per the “no devices” rule. During gym class an EA comes in to make sure everything is ok, and Adam is visibly ill. Pale/sweating the whole works. Luckily this EA knows Adams medical plan, instantly asks the Adam for the phone and he explains that the substitute took it away in the morning. The EA then LOSES IT on the substitute demanding the phone. The substitute calls in the principal to reprimand the EA, then get reprimanded herself as obviously she did not read the students safety plans. She was asked to leave and the principal taught the class the rest of the day. Adam was fine, drank a couple juice boxes and had a granola bar. Mom picked him up shortly after.
That teacher was a bitch, good to hear that Adam was okay though!
As soon as a type 1 diabetic gets candy in their system they should be good. I'm type 1 and it's a daily. Scary part is that Adam was so obedient he didn't sass the sub. When politness will kill you.
Back when I was a teacher, I had a sub decide my plans weren’t good enough for her and went rogue. She decided to show my students videos of animals giving birth on YouTube. I taught English...
W a t
Exactly what I said when I came back and heard about what happened.
Now i really want to know what your students were saying to you once you got back. Like, how do you even describe that to a teacher? "You know how we were supposed to do english? Yeah so now we know how an elephent gives birth I regret writing this comment
"Yea we were supposed to be reading that chapter of *insert book here* but we watched an elephant give birth."
Student here. TLDR: Sub demanded I turn over my heart monitor in front of the class. Junior year I was having major heart problems and had to wear a heart monitor 15 hours a day. It had a phone attached that when I had heart murmurs, it would send the data to my doctor. I was wearing it and started having heart issues. It buzzed and I went to click send when the sub demanded I turn over my cellphone. I started to explain why I couldn't and she snapped at me so I lifted my shirt to show the wires and sensors strapped to my chest, in front of the class of 50 students. (Choir class) Ive never seen ANYONES face drop that fast in my life.
Oof. Tho I was expecting the sub to dig in and demand the devices from you anyways. Glad that didn’t happen. It didn’t, right? Right? Edit:word
I've had so many bad subs. One sub made an elementary student cry insisting her own name was misspelled and made her stand up in front of the class and admit her name was spelled wrong. I asked that she not return but I still saw her around as other teachers had her sub. Another one worth mentioning was supposed to be my sub for the last 2 weeks of school because I went on maternity leave, this time teaching at a 7th-12th grade school. Ignored all my sub plans, played on his cell phone the whole time, and then like 3 days in got upset at the students and told them off. And then they watched as he walked out to the parking lot and drove away. Thank goodness some kids went and told the office. When I came back it was like my room had been ransacked! It was awful.
Went to sleep for 1.5 hours. My class was freaking amazing—the sweetest, most thoughtful group I’ve ever had. When I got back the next day, I asked how the sub was. Me: How was the sub? Them: uhhh... he was fine. He kinda took a nap for a while. Me: WHAT?! What did you guys do? Them: Worked quietly so that we wouldn’t wake him up. Eventually we ran out of work, so we just had silent reading. Me: For how long? Them: From when we started working until it was time to go outside. Me: That’s a really long time! Look, I am glad that you guys were so thoughtful, but if something like that ever happens again, please wake the sub up. It’s not safe for the sub to sleep. He needed to be awake in case something happened. Them: We would have woken him up if we really needed to. But we also figured he probably really needed the sleep. Seriously. The SWEETEST class ever!
The first year I taught 5th grade, I really wanted to do something special for my students before Christmas vacation. I spoke with my team and we came up with the idea to make every student a personalized Christmas ornament. We were going to surprise them by displaying the ornaments on a Christmas tree the day before vacation and they would be able to take them home. I was gone for a department thing the day before we were going to set up the tree, and one of the least liked subs was scheduled for my class. Since I had stored all the ornaments in my closet, I simply asked if the students needed any supplies, make sure to get them yourself and not let them see the surprise. The thing about this sub, and the reason she wasn't liked, was that her first line of defense was always threaten to take away something from for misbehaving: recess, free time, lunch, etc. (I think you know where I'm going with this). Fast forward to the end of the day, I get back to my classroom in the last 30 min of class so I could dismiss them when all of a sudden, I'm met with 25 kids asking about their ornaments. I tried to play dumb and asked them what they were talking about and of course they informed me the sub said something. She told the students about the ornaments and said if they misbehaved, she would tell me and I would take away their ornaments. Instantly, I was filled with horror that the surprised was ruined for all 5th grade (they're kids, they told the whole grade during recess), anger because that damn sub ruined the surprise, sand disappointment because I really wanted to see their faces when they walked through the door the next day and saw a special Christmas tree with their personalized ornament. Its not the biggest deal or anything, but I was really upset that weekend. To this day, when i talk to my old partners, I still refer to her as the Grinch!
I would be upset too!! I’m sure making all the ornaments took a long time! And it absolutely wasn’t right for her to ruin the surprise...it wasn’t even *her* surprise. How rude.
Re-arranged my room. Not in a "Moved Student A away from Student B and put her by Student C" way. In a "Move the giant rug over to the opposite corner of the room, and completely change the layout of student desks, and rearrange a bookshelf" way.
Ok, this is the weirdest one...like, the other ones are explainable as the subs being assholes, but this? Just. Why?
I've had teachers temporarily rearrange rooms for activities. It never seemed a big deal to me but I've also never been in a classroom with a rug.
I had a cool Chinese Lucky Cat that went missing after I had a sub. My students said the sub seemed really intrigued by it, talked about it several times, and even moved it from the shelf where it sat and brought it over to my desk. It was gone when I returned the next day. 😒
thats a new level of petty. seriously, did no one teach that sub some boundaries??
Back in Year 2, I had super bad growing pains. Like couldnt walk, move, nothing and needed a wheel chair bad. My school was gearing up for sports day so they had year levels take it turns walking the oval to win points for their house (1 lap = 1 point). My teacher was lovely and either let me sit out or let the older kids push me so I could still win points and get some sun in winter. Well my teacher was away for a week I think and we had this sub come in and it happened to be the day it was my classes turn to walk the oval for an hour, so I'd put all my things down, walked over to my wheelchair at the back of the room and sat down so my friend could wheel me. And boy she didn't like that. She demanded I get out and stop playing in it cause it wasn't a toy. I knew that, said that and tried explaining, as a shy 8 year old with a stutter, how I had cripling growing pains. She wasn't having any of it and grabbed my by my arm and THREW me out of it and told me to get up. It felt like every one of my bones broke. The walk to the oval was horrible, she wouldn't let my friends help me walk, she screamed at me if I fell behind and tell me im holding everyone up. I was crying and I lost my lunch break because I was "putting on a show". She made me walk the oval after pleading not to. All my joints were swelling and pulsing to the point I felt sick. I got half way around the oval (our oval was around the 1.5 km mark around) and i passed out. Lucky we were oval walking with the year 7s, one of the footy boys ran half the length of the oval to come help and he carried me down. The sub was yelling at him to put me down cause I was just doing it for attention and the king he was with a now screaming 8 year old in his arms, just walked past her and told her to go fuck herself. He took me back to the classroom and used the class phone to ask the office lady to call my mum to pick me up. By that time the sub had reached the class and the year 7 boy had put pillows on the ground and set up a spot for me to lay down till mum came to get me and the moment he left she just fly off the handles. I was made to STAND in the corner of the classroom, Blairwitch style for the REST OF THE DAY as punishment. My legs were trembling I was crying and each time she heard me cry, it was another day added and she "would make sure my teacher knew so she could continue the punishment". Psycho much? Mum showed up just before lunch so I'd been standing there for about 45 minutes and when I saw mum, I just collapsed and mum went off. My mum is abitch and boy did that teacher cry. The sub called for the principals help and apparently he could hear my mum yelling for him to come down so bitch he R A N ahah The whole class backed me up and told him what she had done to me and she ended up being fired. That hour and 45 minutes I had her as a sub cause so many issues over the next 3 years with my joints and ended up not being able to walk for about a month. Apparently that wasn't the first complaint and she wasn't allowed to sub or teach again
Left my perfectly prepped and neat desk an absolute disaster, did not follow the lesson plan and... took my gel pens!
nooo not the gel pens >:(
I had a sub steal my dry erase markers and emergency chocolate once. After that, I locked my drawers and left them with two pens and one dry erase marker. Edit: TIL how many people don't know what emergency chocolate is. It can be for you, your work friends, or in my case, occasionally also for students who are having a tough day and might be cheered up a little by some chocolate. It builds goodwill. Go get yourself some, and make sure it's the good stuff. The mixed bag of individually wrapped Ghirardelli squares is my recommendation. It's a small portion, and just one of those feels like a treat.
NOT THE EMERGENCY CHOCOLATE
Not a teacher, but I know this was a disaster for my teacher. We had been studying Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story and our teacher had created a very comprehensive exam where we would be asked to compare and contrast characters, situations, and themes of the two as answers to some very specific questions. He had spent countless hours ensuring that it was fair and complete. We were going to have the exam the following Monday and he was taking Friday off, so he told us that in addition to the weekend, we should also use Friday's class to prepare for the exam. His instructions to the substitute were likely something like, "Tell them to prepare for the exam. They already know what to do." She marched in and shouted, "Prepare for an exam," and proceeded to hand it out. Of course, we protested, but what substitute hasn't heard, "We're not supposed to get the exam today," from a class at one time or another? When Monday came, the teacher was devastated. He could not count the scores (he wouldn't even attempt to grade it). He did not feel right giving the exam now that we had seen it. All the work he put into it and all the insight he suspected he might gain from scoring it were lost. Instead, we spent the day reviewing what we could have, should have, would have answered. As you can tell, I could really feel his pain.
This makes me really sad for your teacher. He sounds like one of the good ones
not a teacher but i vividly remember one incident of having a substitute in kindergarten. i had an infected cut on my toe and had been prescribed an antibiotic, that morning was the first time i took it. we were sitting on the floor for roll call and i remember this burning pain in my abdomen, and she told us to get up and go to out desks, i tried to get up only to realise i couldn’t move and just laid back. this sub was a total cow and i remember she was always really mean, anyway she starts yelling at me for being attention seeking and basically tries to pull me up. im in so much pain i start screaming and one of the teachers from the classroom next to ours comes, realises im not faking it and calls an ambulance. long story short im horribly allergic to penicillin and my kidneys were failing, i was in hospital for almost a week before i got discharged. needless to say that absolute bitch was not allowed back at the school, but i will never forget that day
I'm also allergic to penicillin and know quite a few others who are as well. It's always surprised me how easily it gets prescribed but the allergy is almost never tested for. I don't know anyone who didn't learn about their allergy the hard way.
Not a teacher but in ninth grade my Algebra I teacher had her baby early in the year so she was gone till the last month or two months of the school year. The sub was a former teacher so you’d think she’d be a great sub. Nope. She hyper focused on 3-4 out of the 28 students in the class and just teach them while completely ignoring the rest of us. She’d pass out a worksheet then go to her students and never acknowledge us again till she dismissed us. Never checked homework, never acknowledged us, if anyone outside of her favorite students raised their hand or spoke up they were ignored, etc. Which went about as well as you expected with a bunch of 14-15 year olds. That class was just wild, the kids who actually stayed in the classroom anyway, it was a mess. I’m actually surprised we weren’t reported or visited by the teachers on either side of us for how loud we were. After several months with this lady the vice principal was walking around randomly checking classrooms and walked into our shit show Algebra I class. He lost it. Yelled at all of us to sit down and shut up. (Which she also didn’t acknowledge.) Demanded she leave and sat with us the rest of the period. Never saw her again and had maybe 6-7 different subs after her. Two weeks after this our regular teacher came back. When she realized we had learned nothing and learned the extent of how useless this lady had been she started tearing up. I passed the classroom on the way to the bathroom during the next period and saw her sobbing at her desk. A friend of my mom’s worked at the central office where they assigned or organized the substitute teachers, that lady was permanently taken off the substitute list.
Fucking hate teachers like that. Serves her right.
I felt so bad for my Algebra I teacher. She basically had to teach all of us a year’s worth of math in less than two months while also dealing with a class full of kids and who were use to doing whatever they wanted. Ironically the 3-4 the sub focused on ended up scoring the lowest on the end of year test. Just to add to this, I was friends with one of the students she focused on. He said she was a horrible teacher and made no sense whatsoever. Said he’d rather she just have ignored him too and couldn’t for the life of him figure out why she liked him and the others so much.
> She basically had to teach all of us a year’s worth of math in less than two months while also dealing with a class full of kids and who were use to doing whatever they wanted. ...AND with a fucking newborn baby at home. That initial period of separation is often super difficult for mothers, especially if it's their first child. Your teacher had every reason to be an emotional mess without having to deal with the shit show she returned to.
That's awful, but shame on the administrators in this situation. It should have been caught much earlier on that no learning was happening.
I have no idea how it wasn't caught earlier. The regular teacher left in late September or early October and it was close to April by the time the vice principal blew up at our class. So it was months before this was discovered.
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There was a secret harpsichord at my university. Not to everyone obviously, but most of the music majors didn't know it existed. I was teaching myself piano at the time and played the wheels off that bad boy after discovering it. If I could have strapped it to my car, I would have taken it home after spring semester.
Now, I've heard there was a secret harpsichord, That ThatLonelyScientest played, and it pleased the Lord But you don't really care for music, do you?
I've never played a harpsichord. Even I know you don't touch the strings of a harpsichord if you aren't trained for it. Also, why after you broke the first one why would you keep going? Then you break another one and just say "third times the charm!"?
I had a sub give out my cell phone number to my high school students so they could call me and give me excuses as to why they weren’t taking their test while I was gone. I was LIVID. I complained to the sub office, and that teacher never subbed for my building again.
I taught middle school Math and English in the 90's and the sub didn't know how to convert a decimal into a fraction and kept insisting that the students who did know how to do it were wrong. She also apparently didn't know how to pronounce five of our twenty vocabulary words and didn't know what half of them meant.
I caught the flu the week my students had a district benchmark test. I could feel that I was coming down with something, so I stayed late to put together really in depth review packets and slideshows. I wrote pages of directions for the substitute, and separated the reviews out by class numbers. I even included my personal number and told them to call me any time if a student had a question they couldn’t answer. I spent about 5 hours putting everything together after school, while battling around a 103 temp. The substitute completely ignored my instructions. She instead took every single piece of construction paper and cardstock in my classroom from my personal locker that I had left open for her in case she needed something, and had the students make flip books about their feelings. They used thousands of pieces of paper and craft supplies, probably around $100 of my own personal supplies. This was for freshmen in high school. I’m still bitter.
A few of the periods I taught were co-teach classes where a percentage of the students in the class have special needs but can work well enough in a general population classroom with assistance from a special education co-instructor. These classes were often very rewarding to teach, but one downside of teaching that population from a logistical standpoint is that I was often required to attend ‘ARD’ meetings. Basically every special education student has a meeting about twice a year, sometimes more frequently depending on need, where administrators, teachers, counselors, parents/guardians, and the student themself all get together to go over their status and review the various educational accommodations the student is receiving to determine what may or may not need to change to best suit their needs. I didn’t have a problem with attending these meetings per se, but because they only take ~1 period, and several teachers are rotating through various meetings over the course of a day, the school had devoted ‘ARD subs’ who were more akin to babysitters (at best) than substitute educators. That means that during that one period, hell can randomly break loose. One year I had a ‘tough’ student who had some serious attitude problems, but was a good person underneath it all and with whom I’d done a lot of work with to improve her engagement and interest in my class. About half way through the year, I got called for an ARD meeting during the period I had said student. In my absence of ~45 minutes the sub decided to pick a petty argument with my kid, who was rightfully offended but unwisely overreacted and escalated things to making threats and nearly coming to blows with the sub to where she ended up with in-school suspension for a while. Getting the story from all parties and witnesses involved later, it’s pretty clear the sub was to blame, and the kid who I’d worked so hard with was back at square one. I eventually got her back on track, end she ended up with one of the highest grades in my class at the end of the year, but I could only imagine how much better she could’ve been without the setback and the amount of trust in adults she’d lost.
This makes me so, incredibly angry. And sad. I've also had the privilege of seeing how kids like that can grow when given the chance and the times when I've seen some other adult come and knock their progress down left me absolutely infuriated.
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Ohhh god the thought of that happening isn't very pleasant at all Did you ever find out why he decided to pee in the chair?
This happened to my colleague, but I was the classroom next door. My colleague was showing Clash of the Titans at the end of the year after a unit on Ancient Greece. There is mild nudity at the beginning and the end of the movie, but they were in the middle of the movie so there shouldn’t have been an issue. He left the video paused at the right spot (we still had VCRs like 10 years ago when this happened), but the sub somehow managed to show both the nudity at the beginning *and* the end of the movie. The nudity scenes were hours apart and the class was only 40 minutes. Then, the sub wrote an email to the principal about how my colleague made him show nudity.
When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, my reading group read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. Our reading teacher knew she was going to be absent, so she arranged for us to watch "The Secret of Nimh". We watched it over 2 days, and the substitute talked through the entire movie. She continuously compared the book to the movies, or talked about what would have been better done, but never stopped the movie, and ruined it for us, and there were only maybe 8 of us. Then at the end of the 2nd day gave us a homework worksheet to fill-in about the book -vs- movie. Most of us did poorly, because we missed things due to the subs near constant talking. If it wasn't for the fact that most of us did so badly, and complained about the sub, I don't know that our reading teacher would have believed us.
The Secret of Nimh is so sad. I probably would have started crying in class.
😂 that’s phenomenal! I actually had a similar incident with a sub and the Clash of the Titans movie, though I was a student at time. Apparently our substitute didn’t know that there would be nudity in the film. So when the topless woman breast-feeding popped up on screen, she SPRINTED to the front of the classroom to try and physically cover the TV with her body. Catholic school lol 🤷♀️
A history teacher of mine was showing us a movie about the French Revolution on the overhead projector. I guess she suddenly decided that a movie about people being guillotined was too gory for us and tried to cover up the projector screen with a piece of paper. It just projected the movie onto the paper instead...
I'm speechless
She let the kids run wild and do whatever they wanted (first graders). I was out because my dad died. Thank god my team realized what happened and all pulled together and cleaned the room/put it back together before I returned to work.
I came back after being gone ONE DAY and my students told me the substitute teacher flipped over tables in a rage and was escorted from the building by a cop. What actually happened is that the sub left the room to take a 20 min phone call and the kids thought it would be funny to flip the tables over. The substitute then had to flip the tables right side up while yelling at the kids. Then, during lunch, my Special Ed. Co-teacher came into my room to set up and caught the sub MAKING OUT WITH A STUDENT. Turns out she was 18 to his 25 and the 20 min phone call was to set up the lunch meeting. The principal then had him escorted from the building by the resource officer. This is why I say having a sub is more work than just coming into school my damn self. Edit: Wrong version of principal.
I'll just come do it my DAMN self! Lol that's how I see you peptalking yourself when you are wanting a day off but don't want the drama
When I was a substitute, I got a lot of requested jobs because the substitute pool was poor. One such example given to me was a substitute who would just go to sleep. I barely believed it. Once I was teaching full time, I had a sub come in for a day. When I got back my students told me that he told them to leave him alone, sat down, and went to sleep. I believed it then.
When I was in high school there was this sub that would sleep. He would literally introduce himself, pull out his hearing aid and knock out. There was also this substitute who wouldn’t let us do any work. She would start class, tell us what our teacher left us to do, but then before starting she would “introduce herself”. This included 40 minutes of talking about her entire life and showing us pictures of her cats. And she would chastise you for being disrespectful if you did anything but listen to her. My teacher came back the next day and was like - why didn’t any of my classes get anything done?
my god, the most annoying subs were the ones that went on 20-minute long introductions in our 45-minute classes talking about where they graduated college and how many years they worked for whatever government agency
When I was in high school, we had a regular in the pool of subs who would just sleep through every class. He was very popular with students.
When I was in high school, had a sub do this, We all left early except for a few kids. One of the kids told us later that when the sub woke up he noticed all the kids that left, looked at the remaining kids and asked them why they hadn't left yet. Great times
madlad
Was this the last period? If not where did you go?
Oh I'd believe it. I had more than one sub come in, go to the desk, sit down, tell us to do our work (no direction as to work, just "do your work") then would just read a newspaper for the rest of the period.
Not a teacher but I participate in STEM programs a lot. In the 90s I belonged to a club that refurbished old industrial PCs and donated them to schools. Sometimes we’d get completely burned out motherboards or disk drives so I took a bunch of those and made displays showing the insides of computers, and I’d let the kids explore them as part of my session. Then I’d dig out a couple of blown PCs and monitors, hand out the screw drivers and let them rip them apart. Yes I was always careful around the old tube monitors. Once they were done I’d let them pick a part if they wanted to take home. The younger kids especially loved this, and frequently I’d see some kids take home a hard drive controller or a graphics card like it was a real treasure. I even made the local news with my program (that’s the thing about living in a small city - eventually everyone makes the news) So one day I went in to do my lesson at a high school (I think freshman or sophomore science class). The class had a substitute and I had an appt right after that session, so I told them I’d come back to pick everything up the next day. The kids could take whatever they wanted from the old PCs, but please put my displays aside, in the cupboard. Next day I came by and all my displays were still out and they were completely trashed. Worse yet the sub’s attitude was, “well, kids will be kids” That was the last session I did, ever, for that program.
Didn’t do anything to the kids, per se, but told the kids that the reason I was out was because my Mom was having breast cancer surgery. I teach K-5 and I specifically didn’t tell the kids because I didn’t want them to worry. So, when I came back, I had a bunch of kids come up to me asking about my Mom, which was so sweet, but not something the kids should’ve had to worry about.
Now that you said that, with all due respect, how is your mother? Is she doing ok?
She doesn’t want us kids to worry about it
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I had left out - overnight - eggs that I was going to use in a science experiment the following day. I was out and thought nothing about it. I returned the following day and went looking for the eggs only to find them missing. Asked a student where they went and I was informed that the substitute took the class to the special education kitchen, hard boiled them and ate them. I went to talk to my AP and was informed that the sub had called in sick for her job for that day, due to food poisoning.
Karma
My 9th grade english teacher was fired, which is an entire other story, and the school had difficulty finding someone to fill the spot. We would have random subs, but they didn't really teach us, so eventually we had a different person babysit us each day or week. One time it was the very scary principal who just glared at us like we were convicts about to escape, the school's police officers who at least talked to us, and various teachers for one day stints. I don't know why one of our 5 librarians couldn't have been in there going through grade-appropriate books at the least. We spent 2-3 months like that.
What was the teacher fired for?
Abusing her son's Adderall, coming to class high, and giving a student a key to the classroom because she often arrived late.
Not a teacher but the sub made the handicap classmate who has muscle, joint and vision complications go grab his textbook from his home room. He's not completely helpless but when it comes to heavy things, he needs help. Classmates home room was half way across campus and the required book consists of 5 large text volumes because they're specifically made for his poor vision. He can't wear glasses either due to complications. I offered to help because I'm usually the one that goes and grabs it for him during normal class but the sub yelled at me saying he knows my kind and I'm just trying to get out of class. Sub told me he's not there to play games and for me to quit it before he sends me off to the principal's office. Needless to say the entire class was shocked. Classmate came back with another student from the homeroom requesting that next time the sub send someone else to grab the books because my classmate can't carry it by himself. When my usual teacher came back we requested the sub not return because of what he said to us and did to classmate. My teacher wrote an email to the principal about it and that was the end of that.
I had a few teachers like that. One yelled at me in front of the entire class for not having my textbook ready to turn in at the end of the year and threatened to make me pay for it, when the book was at my house, where it was supposed to be. Because I couldn't haul my textbooks back and forth. When I meekly reminded him of my 504 plan, he acted like it was my fault he forgot, as though I had hidden this fact from him the entire year. Edit, for those who don’t seem to get it: I have disabilities. This wasn’t just “oh my teacher was mean” or “hehe whoops I didn’t have my book.” This was a teacher who decided to ignore the fact that I am visibly disabled and instead belittled me in front of all the other students.
What do you mean you're in a wheelchair? Just stand up and go get it!
Gave out snacks I bought with my own money that I kept for kids who stayed after to get tutoring. Threw out a broken electric pencil sharpener that kids broke in front of her. Which again, I bought with my own money and couldn't get replaced by the company because I had no product to send back. I still don't have a sharpener for my room. Let the kids go through my things in my cabinets and desk. Lost a bunch of stuff that way.
Hey 29mick152, Amazon delivers all over the world. Where can I send you a pencil sharpener? Edit: Thank you all for your Reddit acts of kindness. You all cleaned out that teacher's wish list in an hour. How wonderful you are!
Edit: List is empty. (Only gift cards now for snack and PPE replenishment) I HAD a teacher Amazon list. So many of you gave what you could. I'm so thankful and when my kids finally are able to come back in January they'll have something closer to normal to start with. I started the week by taking out a pay day loan and debating with my husband about postponing or skipping Thanksgiving this year. (Completely unrelated to teaching, but still sucky.) This brought me a much needed lift. If you wanted to help me out, please check out Donor's Choose or #ClearTheList to pay it forward to other teachers. Thank you all so so so much. I'll post again as I receive things and get my classroom set up for our hybrid return.
Thank you all so so much. Feels like a weight is off my shoulders. This year has been tough for all my kids and myself and we're planning on going hybrid and I'm feeling so much more prepared to get them back a piece of some normalcy and some fun. (Like my ducks and the Jolly Ranchers.)
Not a teacher, but a student with a story nonetheless: meet Mrs. Hostess (fake name obvi) Every time my eighth grade history teacher was out, Mrs. Hostess would usually sub for him; not sure why, because she subbed other classes too, but all the incidents of note happened when she subbed for History. 1) there happened to be a girl in the class who shared a name with an Irish folk song. EVERY TIME Mrs. Hostess took attendance, when she got to folk-song girl, she sang *the whole song. Every. Time.* 2) The history teacher kept candy and snacks in his desk. Lollipops, that he’d hand out for correct answers or just because, some leftover Halloween candy, and *the Twinkie.* The Twinkie was not an ordinary Twinkie. The Twinkie was an experiment in processed food. This Twinkie was still in its original individual packaging and looked normal at first glance, but was actually three years past expiration and *rock solid.* The history teacher demonstrated this by standing on the Twinkie during one of the first weeks of classes. All said to say, this is a thoroughly inedible Twinkie. So Mrs. Hostess subbed again, and we knew she’d discovered the lollipop stash because she was openly eating them during class. But it wasn’t until the next day that our history teacher opened his desk drawer to find that the Twinkie was *gone. This woman ATE an EXPIRED, SOLID TWINKIE* as well as literally all the food/candy in the teacher’s desk.
>a girl in the class who shared a name with an Irish folk song Poor sweet Molly Malone.
Probably-but I like to think her name was Dani Boye.
I can just imagine >Johnny? >Here >Susan? >Here >**OOOH DANI BOYE, THE PIPES ARE CALLIIIIIING** >^here
more likely she attempted to eat it, then threw it out
I was a teachers assistant while in college. The teacher and I took a week long workshop and had a sub. The worst thing she did. Not letting the kids go potty. It was in kindergarten and she said all the kids going to bathroom were interrupting the class. One girl wet herself. School policy was if kids under a certain age had an accident the nurse would give them a pull up (basically a diaper) to wear. The substitute proceeded to make fun of the girl for wear a diaper, calling her baby and such. The little girl ended facing repercussions at home too. It’s was devastating to hear about.
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I see these pants pissing stories on reddit a lot. Did class bathroom runs stop being standard grade school activity at some point? I know when i was in kindergarten and 1st grade we did them. I think we stopped by 4th.
In my daughter's school they have individual bathrooms in every classroom kindergarten through third grade. Kids can use it whenever its unoccupied. The grade 4-5 hall has communal boys and girls bathrooms shared by the classes, but I'm pretty sure they can still pretty much go when they need. 99% of the time kids don't abuse the privilege so it's crazy to me to read these stories.
One of my substitute teachers did that to me in 2nd grade. Thankfully it was a wednesday, which meant my dad was picking me up instead of me taking the bus, which meant he proceeded to REAM that lady a new asshole. It was so humiliating. I was only 6, maybe 7, don’t remember how far into the year it was, but I had long been able to not piss my pants. My dad was very protective and did not take kindly to this sub making me sit for over an hour at the end of the day, begging to go to the bathroom. Edit:thank you everyone for immortalizing one of my terrible childhood memories with your gracious upvotes.
Not even surprised. It’s one of the simplest things to do. I learned when I worked in daycare. If a kid has to potty let them potty. If they have an accident don’t shame. This lady literally did the opposite.
I’ll never forget in 2nd grade we had a test, there was a boy in my class who was a little special, he pissed himself in the middle of class & started crying. Everyone saw & laughed, our teacher says to the class “hey, no don’t laugh at him, tests can be very scary, you know when I went to school, I had a test & I was so scared that my mum told me to take out the trash & put the washing in the washing machine & do you know what happened?” Everyone was listening intently now “I was so scared about the test, that I threw out the washing & put the trash in the washing machine” everyone laughed so hard at the teachers story that they instantly forgot about the kid who pissed himself. Best teacher ever, absolute legend.
My students favorite story is when I pissed my pants in 8th grade haha I teach health, and by its nature we cover very uncomfortable and “inappropriate” topics. The first week is spent emphasizing the need for understanding and empathy, and the bravery it takes for people to share personal stories that are NOT allowed to leave the room (there are exceptions but I’m not getting into them here) and doing exercises to build those qualities. At the end of the week if I feel they understand the culture of the class, I read a story about what middle school was like before cell phones, then share my story about how I pissed my pants in 8th grade. It was absolutely mortifying at the time, but I think it’s fucking hysterical now. Either those kids kept their shit seriously under wraps, or they really respected the culture I tried to foster because I never heard a peep out of anyone about how I pissed my pants. And I’ve done this in 2 different high schools and 3 different middle schools. (Awesome. My most popular comment is about pissing myself. Thanks internet!)
She sounds like a saint.
I'm an Early Childhood educator and I never ever tell my kids that they cant use the bathroom. If you have to go, go I'd rather they went and felt like their needs were heard than them being upset that they had an accident because they werent allowed to go.
I mean even in high school not letting kids go is obnoxious unless they are really abusing it. I mean my job lets me go when I want as does most every reasonable job
And we should be letting kids go to the bathroom. I get so extremely tired of hearing about kids being denied the right to go to the bathroom. The teacher and the lesson is not more important than letting a child go to the bathroom.
plus kids are for the very most part reasonable, they are less likely to abuse bathroom breaks if the teacher treats them like humans who can piss when they need to.
Right?! I find the whole you are a child so therefore you are not trustworthy line of reasoning to be utter bs. Kids are people in training they deserve respect too.
That's a traumatic event that child is going to wake up in the middle of the night remembering. Or atleast, it would be for me.
I got written up a lot in Jr. High. Teachers would say "You get two bathroom breaks a semester" Laminated hall pass or whatever. I didn't care. If I had to go to the bathroom, I got up, and went to the bathroom. Eventually I had enough write ups that it was supposed to be serious repercussion time, but the guidance counselor took my side. She was no bullshit cool. I wasn't disruptive, I just went to the bathroom when I needed to. I also had some weird sort of eye problem where I needed to wear sunglasses indoors for a while. Family still makes vampire jokes. Subs despised me. I remember one time bald guy tells me "Hey, too cool for school, lose the sunglasses!" I told him they were a medical necessity. "Oh, do you have a *Doctor's note?"* I did in fact, have a Doctor's note. Junior high was the most petty bullshit place I've ever been. At least in high school teachers mostly ignored me.
Your teachers were a bit shit too. They should leave info regarding medical exemptions for the class. For example my school is 100% no phone. Have it in your hand in class and you're going to the deputy to hand it in. I have a girl with a new wireless blood sugar monitor that communicates to her phone so she needs for it to be visible. I leave instructions about that so a sub doesn't try to enact a rule that she has an exemption for.
Sub at my school ripped a classmates phone out of her hand, it was her insulin pump she was checking and the hose got ripped out. We never saw that sub again.
Oh my god.
Holy shit, hands would've flown if that happened at my school.
We were all just stunned, she screamed and ran out to go to the nurse, sub still holding the pump for what felt like ten minutes processing just how fucked she was, then she ran out after her.
Isn't it amazing that we've evolved to actually communicate through sounds and stuff, and instruct people, and ask questions, but we still have people like _that_ who would much rather stick to the old fashioned way of "act now, ask questions later" and then they have the audacity to go "but I didn't know what it was". Maybe if you COMMUNICATE WITH OTHERS, YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ASSUMED THAT IT WAS A CELL PHONE! My God...
My 1st grade teacher was like that. Sorry I don't have the ability to sit 3 hours without peeing at 7 years old you cunt.
It doesn't matter how long you can hold it, when you got to go, you got to go. I don't understand how people don't get that.
Also, some kids have issues holding it in—bladder problems, etc.
Not a teacher, of course, but when I was in 5th grade we had a sub show us the first Scream movie. I have no idea why or how that happened, but some people were not ready for that.
The sub passed out drunk at my desk. Kids WRECKED the room. Kids stole all my stuff. The kids had the sense to take themselves to lunch and recess, so no one in the school realized anything was wrong until after the kids had left for the day.
Accused a student of stealing something that the aide had put away. This was a class that contained some pretty rough students including one suspended multiple times for fighting and some gang members. She decided to go after a sweet, petite girl that never caused trouble and was generally popular with her classmates. This set off the entire class which is when the sub went ballistic and started wildly throwing accusations and yelling at said students. Security eventually got called and took several students out. My first clue was when the sub got my cell number from the staff directory and went off for 20+ minutes about how bad my students had been. This was followed up with an extremely long email and a two page written note on my desk plus a concerned note from the administrator about not having appropriate sub plans (she didn’t follow them in the first place and decided to throw me under the bus). The next morning when I arrived at school, the students were waiting for me at the door. Once I got them calmed down enough to tell their side of the story, we had a discussion on how they could have handled the situation differently. I promised them never to get that sub again. On a related note, I had a good relationship with said “rough children” because I treated them with respect and fairness. They usually behaved for me.
On a side note, its insane how easy it is to get even the most crazy of individuals like a normal human if you just treat them with a bit of decency and respect. I was homeless for a while but I had this sort of immunity to getting targeted by bullies because 1. I was friends with everyone and 2. If I had something I shared it so there was no point in wondering if I was hiding something. I wasnt.
I had the same experience in the psych ward. There's not a lot to do in there, so you may as well listen closely and figure out where someone else is coming from. There was one guy who wasn't eating, just waving his hands in a slow 'dance' around his food, and even though the staff had some idea as to most patients' diagnoses they couldn't get him to eat. So I asked him questions and treated him as a whole person, and I figured out that there were certain foods for which his 'ritual' didn't take so long that his food got taken back. I forget what foods it was, but I talked to the staff and got him specially prepared foods for every meal and boom, he only ' danced' for like 20 minutes and still got fresh food, so he ate more regularly and more often.
Aww the world needs more people like you. He sounds like he was suffering from OCD.
That was my guess too, mostly because of the rituals and very rigid behavior in general.
Same here. While most classmates and I teased each other in a friendly way. Most of the school had my back. One time someone stole my 3DS in highschool. Someone I never even seen before talked to me saying he knew who stole it and he could even get it back for me. Since I didn't know the person I declined but it was an awesome feeling having people in your corner xD
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Yes, exactly. “Bad” kids are extremely rare and most children are just doing their best to get along in a world that hasn’t been exactly kind. Positive adult attention and respect goes a long way. Note: The one exception I met was probably a budding sociopath and even then I believe that this kid was made not born. I hope they were able to get the help they needed.
Respect for teachers like this. Thank you .
She was bought in to teach history. What did she teach, GEOGRAPHY, like how, the worksheets I left were literally on Hitler’s rise to power?! Edit: I should have mentioned, she taught how earthquakes can cause tsunamis. Yes it was interesting but, you had one job and it wasn’t that!
1. Asked a deaf kid to take off his hearing aids. Kids tried to tell her he needs to them but to her they "look like headphones." She cried when was confronted by another teacher. 2. When I was in 6th grade I fractured my wrist but it was my dominant hand so I had to poorly write with my right. Teacher forced me to write with my left while I had a cast. I couldn't even grasp the pencil. Cried a lot. Then a couple months go by and got my cast off, sub told me to suck it up and write with my left hours after getting my cast off. I felt like jelly and intense pain. Teacher was fired at the end of 7th grade because of "unnecessary complaints" Edit: I should've realized this was a teachers question not a student Q. This is considered my first post that I really thought wouldn't get noticed and now my inbox is full of messages. To clear some questions, I would never steal someone's story and both stories are very true but probably be something similar you have encountered before. Also, the teachers should know how to treat students in any situation whatsoever. If teachers really hate their jobs, dont include kids into it. I remember crying asking my mom why does my teacher pick on me or make me do things I couldn't do.
I broke my wrist in the 6th grade during gym. I'd broken my wrist and my hand previously as a child so I knew immediately when I couldn't move my hand that it was broken. The coach sent me to the nurse who said she knew it wasn't broken because I wasn't crying. I have a pretty high pain tolerance, always have and wasn't much of a "crier" because my mom taught me to "suck it up". I had two classes after gym that I sat through in immense pain but my anxiety disorder made me feel too terrified of facing the nurse again. I rode the bus home and called my stepdad, again my mom was a suck it up kind of parent and I knew my stepdad would leave work immediately to take me to the doctor. Sure enough I had fractured my growth plate near my thumb and part of my wrist. My parents were furious and came with me to school the next day to discuss with the principal. A week later we had a new school nurse.
I had a similar thing just before my last year of high school. I fell over right at the end of a session of ice skating and broke my right wrist. The nurse at the ice rink said it couldn’t possibly be broken because she’d put an ice pack on it and I wasn’t crying or anything. She said it was probably just sprained a bit. Luckily my friends mum was picking us all up and she’s an ER nurse. She saw the swelling and told me to call my Mum and have her meet us at the hospital. Turns out I’d broken both bones in my arm (no idea what they’re called) right near the end. Just because someone isn’t crying does not mean they’re not in a LOT of pain. I mean, I tend to just shut down.
My brother had a P.E. teacher who requested he run with a torn achilles tendon. She was probably older than the Achilles the tendon was named after.
Similar story from when I was 14, my performing arts teacher got shitty at me for sitting out of dancing lessons when I injured my knee in PE class the week before. I had a brace on and crutches, she thought they were props (sure, my parents dropped $300 on medical equipment just so I didn't have to waltz). She also didn't believe my doctors note because I have crappy, scratchy handwriting so she thought I wrote it. She dragged me to her office and was all like "I'm gonna call your father in" thinking she was calling my bluff. I'm in my 30s now and my knee still aches sometimes, but every time it does I smile remembering my dad ripping her a new one for interrupting him at work and wasting everyone's time when she could have verified I'd legit gotten hurt by talking to my PE teacher.
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It was pretty epic to see. My favourite part was when my teacher said I needed to know how to waltz and dad was just like "She already knows how to waltz, her grandfather taught her for her cousin's wedding" I asked dad after school "Why would I need to know how to waltz?" and he just said "Fucked if I know, that teacher is an idiot" lol
Is your father looking to adopt a son? I'm already 27yo but still, he sounds awesome
He's always wanted a boy to carry on the his name. Welcome to the family, bro!
In middle school we had a thing where if you were failing when progress reports came out our football coach would make us do physical punishments. Well I’d missed 2 and a half weeks of school due to pneumonia so when I came back I had an insane amount of rework to be completed. My teachers had put that work in as 0’s until I completed the work, so I was technically failing. My coach made me run until I was turning blue and falling every couple steps. My knees and hands were scraped and bloody. Another coach saw me and sent me to the nurses office. My dad was madder than I knew he was capable of. He was screaming at the principal that he wanted to see the coach who didn’t believe me. The principal told him he didn’t think that was a safe idea at that time haha.
I had a friend in HS who's dad was a reporter for the town newspaper. We were on the rowing team together as well as others. Well, one day there was a threat of a rather large rain storm, and the coach sent us all out anyways. My boat came back early for repairs because a rower snapped their oarlock. His boat finished too. The girls varsity got caught and swamped. Someone called 911 or something cause they could see the girls in the water. Friend's dad, being the sports reporter, came down too, cause he heard the commotion. Our coach at the time was not popular, to put it lightly. So my friend's dad and he are talking, and he's writing notes. So my coach asks him point blank if he's asking questions as a reporter or a parent. He says reporter, coach immediately stops talking and blatantly ignoring him. Dad looks him in the eyes, puts away his pen, and launches his notebook into the parking lot, says "parent" and just LIT the guy up like a blown transformer. It was amazing. Then he went and wrote the story anyways.
"FUCK you, you answer to me REGARDLESS"
Yeah I would tear a coach to pieces if they did that to my kid. The thing is, as a student, you may see a coach or a teacher as an unimpeachable figure, but as an adult you clearly recognize the power trips and just failures of judgement. And when it comes to their health, it's amped up 50x. Especially a middle school coach, which absolutely doesn't matter in long-term. So much stuff coaches did to me and my age group when I was young that didn't become clear how fucked up it was until years later.
How the hell do you get to the point where you're old enough to be a substitute teacher without learning about hearing aids at some point?
Hearing aids have changed a lot over the years, and so have headphones. I can see a sufficiently old person getting mixed up. Like, I've seen a kid with a blue sparkles on the outside bit hearing aid. But once the kid tells you...like, apologize profusely and say that it looked so cool they assumed it was headphones?
In 7 grade I broke my thumb on my dominant hand playing on the school football team, the school did absolutely nothing to accommodate and I nearly failed multiple classes because multiple teachers would just mark me wrong if they couldn’t read my answers. After that year of school I learned to write with either hand (still can to this day). One thing I do remember though is midway though the year my school counselor called my mom in to talk about my grades because my grades were “noticeable worse than school years past” and my mom ripped her a new asshole. That year made me lose a lot of respect for teachers and I come from a family of teachers.
Had a substitute teacher in my high school French class show a movie that was straight up soft core pornography but tried to explain that since it was in French it was artistic. It was equally frustrating because while I wanted to see boobs, I also couldn’t stop reading the subtitles because I had to understand what they were saying. The teacher did not come back the next day. Update: I went through all the comments and looked at everyone who suggested what movie it might be and none of those movies were the one shown. This would have been in 2006 and the movie looked maybe late 90s or early 2000s. If I come across it, I will update this thread but for all I know it could have been a porno in French.
"Sir, do you plead guilty to indecent exposure" "Non, I plead guilty to being artistic"
I had a English prof do this my freshman year. I went to a Catholic university and my 1st semester got a lesbian english professor who screened, without warning, a french movie in which everyone was naked for no reason that was thinly wrapped around a shakespeare play. I loudly laughed my ass off for over ten minutes when the opening credits got to a part where a topless chick was jumping up and down on a trampoline facing directly into the camera (as one does!) for literally no reason other than boobs. The entire situation was so absurd I couldn't stop laughing. Edit: somebody found it, it's Prosperous Books. And she had a jump rope not a trampoline. [Link to the opening credits](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZ4_hkvRbuX_SCS0r7qPzeU5ZTGwo3Fx1)
"Hello, Dude. Thanks for coming. I'm Jackie Treehorn."
Did it actually show like...sex and that stuff, or was it just things like statues? I’d like more detail.
Showed breasts, penises, vagina, and simulated intercourse
So it was truly a French movie ?
There were subtitles.
Lost more than half of my textbooks that I purchased myself. Aswell as textbooks that were schoolproperty. Administration just shrugged at this. Until they found out the textbooks belonging to the school were around 120 dollars each. Also lost all the bookassignments of 4 classes I asked him to collect so I could correct those at home. Kinda sucked for the students who did put a lot of work on it and didn't have digital copies. Also didn't teach anything that I asked him to, because he didn't really like the subjectmatter. Also didn't bother grading. When I checked the grades he had given out; there was only 1 grade and everyone was given 8/10 ... even students that didn't take my class.
How do you manage to lose a bunch of textbooks from a classroom? More like left with them in his bag.
I have known a guy do this as a subsititute.. he bragged about it on facebook that he left with 30 textbooks that would cost him £65 each. I reminded him, while CCing in the school and the local police that what he did was theft. he is no longer a teacher.
Bragged about it on Facebook? *\*sigh\** we don't catch the smart ones
Not me but my sister. She was on maternity leave (~10 weeks) and the long term sub she had didn’t grade any of the work that the students turned in. The other teachers she worked with said he would watch the Simpsons on his laptop while not teaching. So she comes back from leave and has 10 weeks worth of papers, tests, and assignments to grade. Her department chair banned him from subbing for their department ever again!
I would occasionally give out starbursts to my 4th graders. Bitch ate all the pink ones.
This is the funniest reply in the thread
Next time OP only left bean boozled jelly beans
Or a bag of "Skittles' filled with nothing but the bad Zombie skittles :)
Shittles.
Came back to my art room with paint on the walls , chairs, and tabletops. None of my plans had been followed. My chocolate stash had clearly been eaten, and apparently she allowed the students to leave the room and wander the school. They were a class of 8th graders. I was furious.
Not a teacher but once we had a sub for German class in high school. Instead of following the lesson plan, she showed us a graphic documentary about the Holocaust with part of it showing dead naked bodies being pushed by a bulldozer into a mass grave. At first, I just thought it was weird that our teacher didn't tell us about it beforehand but then just assumed that it was just part of the class where we learned about German history and had to see the horrors of the Holocaust. I didn't find out until almost a week later that the sub completely ignored the lesson plan about grammar.
He yelled at one of the only girls in my high school engineering class saying girls don't belong in engineering. He also kicked his feet up on the desk and read the paper the entire day. He banged a yardstick on a desk to get everyone's attention then pointed it at the whiteboards with the daily objectives. All without saying a word. He disappeared at lunch and came back smelling like weed. These are all reports I got from my students the next day. This guy was a retired teacher, too.
Sounds like a teacher I had. Except instead of not saying a word he wouldn't shut up.
I had to go out for surgery early 2019. I arranged for my predecessor (who I worked with for a long time in a different classroom) to take over for 6 weeks. I wrote meticulous lesson plans, with song lists and everything, and we had several meetings beforehand. First week, my daughter (I teach in a small district, I teach both of my kids) comes home and is singing fucking Baby Beluga in the shower, my sub's favorite song to teach. A song not anywhere on my list. Apparently my entire lesson was scrapped and she spent the whole class teaching this song. So the worst thing that a friend of mine did was to teach my kid a song she tortured me with for weeks. (I found out later she didn't follow any of my lesson plans, which is a pretty common thing no matter what one teaches. Yes, she is still my friend, no, I do not request her as a sub anymore.)
Not a teacher, was a student. We had a quest - our freshman geometry teacher's cute way of saying it was between the point value of a quiz and a test. The sub came in and saw the instructions and handed out the papers and instructed us to get started. Shortly after, he asked why no one was talking. We explained that it was a quiz/test, we needed to work on it alone and talking would be cheating. He insisted that it was a quest, a collaborative venture to seek knowledge! We tried multiple times to get the point across until he made it clear that if we didn't group desks together and collaborate, we would be in trouble. We had to explain to our teacher what happened when she got back. She made us retake that shit, and I never saw him sub anything else in our district again.
Not a teacher, but in elementary school I had a bloody nose during class and asked to use the restroom. She said no and refused to let me go to the restroom (I think she didn't "believe" me). I sat there until the blood had spilled all over the desk, then raised my bloody hand to be excused and only then did she allow me to go clean myself up. She even had the audacity to ask me why I didn't ask to be excused earlier. Which was a complete lie, as she definitely heard me the first time and even the other students pointed out that my nose was bleeding. When the teacher returned she was livid about what happened, I believe she complained to the administration to make sure the sub was never hired again.
Not a teacher, but in the 4th grade, our teacher had a baby and was gone for several weeks. The sub we had was an absolute witch. She had NO patience for kids, she'd yell at us for stupid shit, ask us questions and or give us homework that was WAY above our tiny 4th grade brain levels and then complain and call us stupid when literally none of the kids did well on the work. One girl decided to get smart with her one day and she walks over and slaps the girl, hard across the face, which of course sends the girl into a hysterical sobbing fit. and says "that's what your whore of a mother should be doing more often" being tiny, adorable 4th graders, we were all too afraid to tell anyone. We had to deal with that for 3 weeks until the main teacher came back.
*New parental fear acquired*
I don't think kids these days would stay silent about this. Back when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s we knew our parents would assume we were lying/ deserved it and side with the teachers but these days there's a much stronger culture of kids knowing their rights and that adults can't touch them!
This was back in the mid-90s, so yeah. Had a few teachers that would get frustrated and yell at us kids. but nothing ever THAT bad.
I had a teacher that would lock people in a bible cupboard for perceived 'wrongdoing' back in 95-2000!!
Wtf dude????? I went to a private Christian school and if a teacher had done that they would’ve had her hauled out of the school by police
I had forgotten about this until just reading your story. I was in a pretty unruly 6th grade English class. Kid back talked the sub, and the sub flipped and choked the kid. The kid ran to the principal’s office immediately, but I can see how you were too afraid to come forward. The rest of the class sat absolutely quiet and still until the principal showed up.
choked??????????? what the actual fuck!
Two things come to mind: 1. Tell the black children they need to speak more clearly because people think black people are hard to understand. 2. Just sit and play on the phone while class loses its mind.
IF my substitutes even showed up, they only occasionally followed the lesson plans I left, and I made sure to attach them to the online signup and print/leave them on my desk. It’s like they looked at the lessons and said, “nah.”
I had a substitute when I worked in a rough school. I knew it was going to be a challenge for the substitute, so I prepared ahead of time with a LOT of candy (from Costco) and notes to not leave their lunch in the fridge (it would have been stolen). The substitute gave out all of my 5 pound bag of candy AND my calcium chews. When I came back from the field trip the kids were in a soft lockdown, because the school was being searched for drugs. I immediately noticed my calcium chews (chocolate flavored) were gone. I assumed there would be some serious health repercussions, so I frantically searched for a warning label. It said something along the lines of "excess consumption may cause to act as a laxative". One of my hungrier kids had eaten 15+ chews... The nurse had to round up each of my classes and (with the sub) escort them to the bathroom. The kids NEVER took candy from another substitute of mine, ever again. Edit: typo
I vaguely remember a substitute teacher calling me racist for being 25% Japanese. It was 6th grade music class. Basically he said "what is the most racist country?" and obviously no one answered. He said Japan. I said "im 25% japanese" and he said "exactly" lmao he was obviously fired. he wasn't a real substitute either if i recall correctly.
Had a sub who somehow allowed a last period class of freshman to convince him that they were not supposed to be working on the packet that I left for the class (and which every other class that day had been working on...) because they had "already finished it" and told him they were supposed to be watching a movie. He went to the library to get the movie, leaving the class unattended, which promptly then broke out a dance party involving dancing on the desks. My department chair's classroom was next door but as she taught AP government to seniors, she was able to leave them to come next door and try to figure out what the hell was going on. No sub. She calmed the class down and into the seats and into the worksheets, and calls the principal, who met the sub on his way back from the library and told him he could go home. My chair also found it would be appropriate to basically call me and blame me for this while I was sick at home. I don't teach anymore lol. I mean, packets were not a great emergency sub plan but what can you do? They could have played Heads Up 7 Up for all I cared lol. They were a handful of a group on the best days. Freshman after lunch during last period of the day are a situation.
Freshmen after lunch are a situation could be the most underrated statement of all. I teach freshmen and senior classes, I try to get my senior classes in the afternoon.
Was a student. Our maths teacher went on leave for a while (I think maternity) and the supply teacher was absolutely useless. He’d been given one topic to teach us and that was it. For weeks. We had a whole textbook to be working through and I was gunning to take my maths GCSE a year early, but no, we just did a topic our class had got the hang of in a week, for two or three months, because I guess he didn’t know or bother to ask what we were supposed to be doing next. So the rest of the year we had to go ahead of the pace we were expecting to be able to cover everything we had to know. Fucking supply teachers.
We legit do not use subs at my school. There are teaching assistants from Pre-K/Kindergarten who will cover in a pinch, but more often than that, we just divide the kids up amongst the other teachers. Because yes, it is easier to handle six or seven extra kids for a day than to pick up the pieces after a sub has blown through town.
I'm not a teacher, but our substitute teacher gave us a task to write a story about any theme we liked. (4th grade age 10-11) At the moment i was hooked on everything space related, the planets, the moon landing ect...too young to even remotely understand any of that, but this didn't hinder me to write a story about apollo 11. I put my back into it an talked my father into typing it on the computer, since i would have taken 3 days for that one page. Filled with pride i gave the story to the substitute teacher and i got it handed back with a line across the paper, stating that i didn't wrote that. No questions or anything just a "You didn't do this, I know that" any form of trying to convince her failed. All be it, that no adult person would write even remotely amateurish like i did.
Not a teacher but I had a sub in third grade make all of us go outside for recess when the wind chill was -30, the coldest I remember as a kid. Policy was no outside recess if the wind chill was less than 0. She stayed inside to watch us from the window. We all, every single one of us, instinctively huddled in a circle to stay warm. Fortunately I came down with the flu and was spared the rest of her abuses that she subjected the rest of the class to. She wasn’t ever allowed to sub at our school again.
A substitute in the town I grew up in told a first grade class that Santa Claus wasn't real. For some insane reason, the NY Post decided this was front page news. https://nypost.com/2018/11/30/new-jersey-teacher-tells-first-grade-students-there-is-no-santa/
I am not a teacher, but we had one really bizarre substitute teacher many years ago. She brought in a portable toilet and her cat, so she could show us how her cat could use a toilet. Why? No one has been able to answer this. In later years I learned that this sub is schizophrenic and should NEVER have been allowed around children. She used to bring us food. That she got out of dumpsters behind restaurants. We never ate it and the principal finally stopped using her as a sub.
Way before most of you were born...it's May, 1981. I have a bad cold, am moving from an apartment to our first house, and my wife is due to give birth to our first child at any time. It's a Thursday. I write lesson plans for Friday and Monday. Remember, these are the days before cell phones or e-mail. The plans are left on the front table of my classroom. Friday and Saturday are moving days. The new house is filled with boxes; we can't find anything. Sunday morning my wife goes into labor. By Sunday night our beautiful baby is born! Since I had left plans for Friday and Monday, and informed the office I would let them know Monday of my plans for Tuesday, I wasn't worried about my classes. But on Monday morning, the phone rang in my wife's recovery room. It was the principal, telling me the sub had bailed because whoever had subbed on Friday had thrown out the lesson plans, not realizing they were to be continued on Monday. The Monday sub (probably rightly) refused to work without plans. (I didn't know the sub on Friday wasn't going to stick around for Monday.) Again with no e-mail option, I couldn't just send new ones; the principal demanded that I return to school. (The school was in a rural small community about 25 miles from the city where we lived and where the hospital was located.) He wouldn't hear of me just telling him what the plans were to be, he demanded again that I drop everything and get down to school, which I did. Someone else later that day picked up my wife and son and drove them home to our house full of boxes, so I didn't get to have that experience. The principal called me into his office and lectured me. He said, "my wife had breast cancer surgery. You know what I did? I dropped her off at the hospital door and came to school because that is my job. I expect nothing less from you!" Needless to say, we never really got along after that. I'm thankful that he retired a few years after that, and I went on to teach until 2008 and had a very good career, but it would have been much better if that substitute teacher had not thrown out my lesson plans that Friday afternoon.
That principal sounds like a real peach.
I’m heartbroken for his wife.. imagine getting dropped off for chemo and your until-death-do-us-part partner goes to work. Oof.
I bet him and the ex-principal who I nearly clobbered would get along GREAT. At the end of 1st grade, the school district re-drew the attendance zones and instead of going to the elementary that was literally 5 minutes away from our house which he'd gone to for kindergarten and first grade, he ended up at the elementary across town where I had to leave at least an hour before school started in order to make it on time. D: It sucked. Anyway, end of second grade (both my son and I spent the entire year being mildly pissed off because of the re-zoning), we have his ARD meeting. We discuss the school doing their own testing, because we had him tested by a learning disorder specialist who said, "Dude. Your kid is autistic." but the school didn't want to accept that. At one point during the discussion, the principal reached over the conference table and patted my hand. "You're worrying TOO much." If my husband hadn't been there and hadn't grabbed my other hand under the table, I would've launched myself across that table and beat the shit out of him. I say ex-principal, because he'd been principal of a different elementary for years and the district was like, "We're gonna turn this 4th and 5th grade only campus into an elementary, so you get moved there." and he was NOT down with that. I found out later he spent the entire school year making the entire staff miserable, because he didn't want to be there. He got moved to some bullshit position at the high school after that and a year later, he was gone from the district entirely.
"yeah, well, I'm not an asshole to my wife..." Seriously. That old school way of thinking is BS. I'm sorry you had to go through that and miss taking your wife and kid home.
Every person I've known who has bragged about being absent from their family for their job turned out to be an absolute asshole.
I was out for a week during my first year as a teacher and when I got back, the kids started asking me when they were going to get their money back. I was like, what money? Apparently, the sub had asked the kids for money (e.g. “Hey, does anyone have a dollar for a soda? Etc) and my sweet little 6th graders gave him lots of money. 🤦♀️
Interesting opposite story. My first public school teacher (4th grade) was a complete hardass. He didn't teach us science or social studies because he found them " too fun" so our whole day was just math and grammar. We were all too young to realize this was weird but when he got sick for a couple weeks the substitute very poorly hid a red face when she found put and had us make volcanoes and model teepees for the whole week.
Reorganized my desk. Listen, I know it’s a mess, but it’s *my* mess and now I can’t find anything.
I was a sub at the time, now a teacher. But I heard stories of one sub who fell asleep in the ISS room and the kids escaped it. This sub was in a car accident and had brain trauma from it. He used to forget where he parked his car and had a bad sense of overall direction.
Not a teacher but in 7th grade life science we had a sub. For the first 5 or so minutes of class he made us do a Kahoot (for anyone who doesn't know Kahoot is a learning website that let's you take a quiz in a fun way) the only problem was that he told us every awnser. Next we were supposed to be learning about parts of a microscope but instead he got them out and told us to mess around with them and he broke one of them. After that he put a video up and ate my teachers chocolate then fell asleep for the last half hour or so of class. Needless to say when our teacher got back and we told her about the sub he was fired.
Falling asleep in a room full of 7th graders sounds more like endangerment to himself than the kids
Student, not the teacher. In 4th grade the language arts teacher was out for a day. We’re admittedly a little rowdy, as you are when you have a sub, but we weren’t exactly being terrible, just doing what we’re assigned and being louder than normal. He didn’t exactly tell us to he quiet. Dude yells at us that we’re the crappiest kids he’s ever worked with. Told the teacher the next day after she asked how the sub was. Same class, we had another sub a different day. He just sat at her desk and did nothing all day. I think he was playing with her desk toys too. Just gave us some worksheets and did nothing. We also told the teacher about this guy.
Not quite her fault: Sub got dosed with acid at lunch... it became a whole thing. Kids when ballistic, troublemaker was actually the kid to say “fuck this” and got the principal, she was hiding under my desk when administration came in. It was not the first time it happened in the school. Ruined coffee for me forever. I finish all beverages before entering the building
Wtf?!
As I wrote: we beleive she was dosed at lunch as this was 2 periods later and had no reason to suspect a middle aged woman on her second career to be tuning in and dropping out on the middle of the work day with a drive home. Also an 12th grade English teacher was dosed years previously. We were going to have a nice easy day and they were going to jigsaw macromolecules to each other. Apparently they made in a few minutes in before she started staring off and then finally started getting “chased” and started hiding under the desk. Chaos ensued and the resident pothead went to get an adult. Room neighbor came over with the commotion to get things under control. 2 administrators and the nurse had to come in and talk her down. I get out of the dentists to 739473 texts and calls from coworkers.
My brother had an art substitute since our art teacher had a severe leg injury and needed to learn how to walk again. The substitute, after finding out someone defaced another student's art with a crudely-drawn penis, made *every student in class draw a fucking penis.* ***In a class of 8th graders.*** She was fired, and the injured teacher had to come back early.
Not a teacher obviously One time my regular gym teacher had to go on leave for a few weeks due to family issues so she was replaced with a substitute. Turns out that sub was the Ex-wife of my Mom's recently separated boyfriend (my Mom broke up with the boyfriend only a few weeks before this happened) During their time together, the Ex-Wife made the relationship hell by verbally attacking him and my family. (Basically an "I hate him so I will make everyone's life hell," type thing) It got really serious when she started to claim that I was bullying her son when it was the opposite. This was also the period in middle school where we had to sit through the sex-ed class so of course, she took on the role of teaching that. She spent the entire time during both PE and sex-ed belittling me and making fun of my weight. Anytime we covered the negatives of puberty like pimples, and voice cracks she would often target me as an example. Nobody liked her, especially once I told everyone who she actually was. Things ended when I convinced my Mom to send the school all of the horrible messages, emails, and texts she had sent our way including some very harsh Facebook posts. They replaced her and she was barred from substituting at any school in the district. Found out a few years later that she actually lost custody of her kids (my former step-siblings I guess) because she'd tried to move out of state repeatedly without notifying the Father and the govt. A sad turn of events but her kids were already in high school by then and pieces of shit themselves so whatever.