Liberia RPCV Dick Haws says: It was back in 1968 and I was finishing up two years of teaching elementary school in the Peace Corps in West Africa - and New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles came knocking. Those cities couldn't find enough teachers to teach in their inner-city schools, so they were recruiting Peace Corps from Africa. They apparently believed that if you had taught black kids in Africa, you could teach black kids in America.
Haws: My life as a substitute teacher
By Dick Haws
June 10, 2005
I'm happy to see that one proposed cut that won't be made in the Ames school budget next year is a reduction in pay for substitute teachers. Substitute teachers provide the fingers in the dike. We can never pay them enough. We have special days for mothers and fathers. We should do the same for substitute teachers.
I know what I'm talking about because I was a substitute teacher many years ago.
It was back in 1968 and I was finishing up two years of teaching elementary school in the Peace Corps in West Africa - and New York City, Philadelphia and Los Angeles came knocking. Those cities couldn't find enough teachers to teach in their inner-city schools, so they were recruiting Peace Corps from Africa. They apparently believed that if you had taught black kids in Africa, you could teach black kids in America.
So, I signed up for New York City and soon found myself assigned to Wadleigh Intermediate School, IS 88, a sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade school of about 800 on the east side of Harlem.
I was one of three old Peace Corps teachers sent to Wadleigh - but none of us started out as we had expected, as regular classroom teachers with our own homerooms and our own classes. Instead, unbeknownst to us, we had been hired as AQTs - Above Quota Teachers. I had never heard the term, but I quickly learned that it meant we were permanent substitute teachers assigned to Wadleigh to handle the daily teacher vacancies. There were always a lot of teachers absent at Wadleigh. Out of a faculty of about 50, at least five teachers were gone every day. It was a tough school. I never lacked for work.
On my first day I drew electric shop, but, because I wasn't licensed in electric shop, the students and I weren't allowed to enter the classroom. Instead, we milled around out in the hall, trying to read from a workbook filled with biographies about electricity's greats. Not too electrifying.
As soon as I was finished with the electric shop assignment, I got "strings." That's right "strings." I didn't know a stringed instrument from string cheese. Again, the students and I found ourselves prevented from entering the classroom, this time because I wasn't licensed in strings. So I tried to keep them occupied by reading short biographies of Brahms, the Temptations and Frank Zappa. I survived it.
In that junior high school's pecking order, we AQTs weren't even as high as the school's bottom rung. The students knew it. They knew we were cannon fodder. They knew we didn't know the rules, that we didn't know the curriculum, that we didn't know them, that we'd be gone to the next classroom the next day. So, they took advantage of us. At least most of them did.
Wadleigh was a school in which every student was "tracked. The "8-College Bounds" were at the top. They were eighth-graders who had been identified as being the best college material. Each of them was sponsored by an American corporation and was going to be sent off to an exclusive New England prep school in the ninth grade, and from there they were expected to go to college - most likely to the Ivy League. They were a joy to teach.
But I also had the "8-17s," which meant they were at the bottom of the eighth grade - the 17th level. They had fallen so low because they couldn't read, or were discipline problems, or were freshly arrived immigrants who knew little English and not much about regular school attendance. They were a load. They had the habit of pretending to trip over themselves as they entered the classroom, crashing into me, almost knocking me over. I came out of my time with them black and blue.
But as the weeks went by and I rambled from classroom to classroom to classroom, across every grade level and every subject, the students began to know me and I began to know them. They let me know they couldn't believe what ugly clothes I wore. I came to be known to them as "Mr. Stay-Pressed," and I often heard that name echoing down the hall as I hustled off to my next assignment.
They also learned that if they behaved, I'd let them sing "Cloud Nine" in class, even though it had nothing to do with any assignment. You had this stiff white guy from rural Nebraska up there in these ugly clothes letting much of it hang out with "You can be what you want to be. You ain't got no responsibility. I'm feelin' fine on Cloud Nine." You needed to be there to understand, but I think it helped all of us get through the day.
At the end of the first semester, a permanent position at Wadleigh opened up and I became a regular sixth-grade social studies teacher. Gone were my days as an AQT, and although I confess I don't think much learning took place while I was substituting in those Wadleigh's classrooms, I do believe I helped keep the place from exploding.
And there's some value in that.
Dick Haws taught journalism at Iowa State University for 21 years. He can be reached at dhaws@iastate.edu
©Ames Tribune 2005
