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As my job hunt this summer after completion of the masters degree did not go as planned, I have put in to sub in the area. I've been approved for one district and have applications in at two more with a few more to get done once my MN license is approved. I had my first experience taking a high school P.E. class this past Friday.

Have any of you subbed before? What advice would you have for me while I do this? I know what I would hope for from the the subs in my classroom, but I don't know if the academic core classes would have different expectations. I've already made contact with a few of the music teachers, who were pretty happy to find out there is an actual music sub, but I'm guessing I won't get a whole lot of time in the music classes.

My ideal would be if I could sub in the P.E. classes 2-3 days a week so that I might actually get some exercise as i'm so unmotivated to do it on my own, and then sub in the music classrooms the other days.

Thanks for the good laugh Bloke. I did prove to the students that I had on Friday that I'm not the sub they can mess with. I have good classroom management skills and am not intimidated by the students so I don't feel that will be too much of a problem. I also realize that there's always something I can learn.

Curmudgeon, thank you. You summed about just about exactly what I'm thinking. As far as the "don't be too good so they won't hire you full-time" I see your point, but as the new jobs start opening up, I won't be limiting my applications to this area so hopefully it won't hurt me too much. There will be at least one full-time band opening in this area for the next academic year with one of the director's retiring, so you're point may be valid though.

I just discovered a new fact about subbing, if I want to work the next day, I should not part ways with my phone between 4:30-10:00 in the evenings even for the 2 minutes it takes to take the trash outside. I missed "the call" this evening when I took the trash out so lesson learned. The good news this time is that its a 3 day weekend so I have one more day between me and a work day to get a call or for somebody to request on the website.

I subbed for a few weeks before getting a long-term sub job that eventually became a full-time job. I don't know how the sub system works where you are, but here in Lincoln it's a computer system and each sub has their own number. I was able to get a lot of music sub jobs by emailing every music teacher whose email address I could find on the school websites and telling them that I was a recent graduate and that I would be happy to sub for any music class and left my sub number so they could request me specifically. For the two weeks I subbed I only did three days in a regular classroom, the rest were all music jobs, which was nice.

After those two weeks I landed a long-term sub job where the band director was having health issues. I subbed there from the beginning of March to the end of the school year. The next school year she took a leave of absence for which I subbed the whole year. She then decided to resign and they gave me the job!

For those few classroom jobs I got I would always leave detailed notes about what happened during the day and my sub number if they liked me and wanted to call me again.

Good luck!

While several bits of good advice have been given here already, I'd like to echo the fact that there are school districts out there that will NOT hire their substitutes as full time teachers because they have such a hard time finding substitutes at all. I know - I've seen and been cheated by them. Do NOT let yourself get pigeon-holed into such a situation. If a district you sub in passes you over for a full time position for no justifiable reason, do NOT sub in that district any more. I completely left substituting to make my point with administrators - I didn't spend all those thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in college getting my BA in Music Education to be a substitute. I got it to be Band Director!

Conn 2J CC wrote:While several bits of good advice have been given here already, I'd like to echo the fact that there are school districts out there that will NOT hire their substitutes as full time teachers because they have such a hard time finding substitutes at all. I know - I've seen and been cheated by them. Do NOT let yourself get pigeon-holed into such a situation. If a district you sub in passes you over for a full time position for no justifiable reason, do NOT sub in that district any more. I completely left substituting to make my point with administrators - I didn't spend all those thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in college getting my BA in Music Education to be a substitute. I got it to be Band Director!

+1

While not a band director, I did substitute teach for 7 years before I got full time work. If I hadn't gotten work in the fall of '87, I would have made new plans.

The first four years, I was in one school district almost exclusively. I did everything. The HS had a "Practical Forest Agriculture" where kids were taken out and taught how to fall and limb trees, do heavy trimming and practice for something called FFA Logging Rodeo. This involved climbing trees with spurs and throwing axes. I was out of my mind to do the gig but actually was kind of fun. The bus took us to one worksite and the kids piled out, got the saws and gear out and fell five or six trees which must have been planned previously. The kids limbed the trees, put the brush in a pile, dumped some gas on it and threw in a match. I was 23 years old, fresh out of school and wanted to make a good impression by taking anything. I was out of my mind.

One good thing there was they had a 100 member marching band which regularly won the contests. So, they were pretty self sufficient with the band leadership which the director instituted. I had talked to the director the day before and he said I could march the band in the streets if I wanted to. I just had to call the cops to tell them we were going to do it and they would do their traffic thing. So, there it was. 100 piece marching band which sounded excellent, drum majors who knew what to do, police escort in the streets. The band marched and I marched in the front swinging the big baton like I knew what I was doing but I really didn't have a clue. Good times.

I was brought in for interviews six times for jobs I was well qualified to do and usually was the second choice. The laugher was the person who finished first in one of the interviews couldn't do the job, was put on leave and I finished the year for her. Finally got smart, left the district and worked in three others and got a second night job and only worked things I wanted to work. I had been pretty nieve about the "Work hard, be loyal, get a job" aspect of the thing but we all learn.

In the end, it was a positive because I really learned to teach and think on my feet. I rarely had discipline problems, partially because I am a big dude with a big voice. The kids eventually learned that they could mess with me exactly once. I had good classes because I actually tried to teach something and hold them accountable for their actions.