The life of the supply teacher (anywhere, but especially in Britain) is not an easy one. For the first five weeks of the school year Jenn and I received a collective three days of supply work. As you can imagine this was quite a frustrating period for us. Being a supply teacher means that you have to be on call every morning and when you are ready to work every morning but never receive a call to go, life can be quite unbearable. What is more three days of work in five weeks is just not enough to allow any family to survive. As the days ticked on therefore, we found our resources, meager to begin with, dwindling to next to nothing. Our emotions at the time oscilated between frustration, hope, despair, and desperation and we seriously considered just packing it all in and heading back to Canada.
That was of course until a few weeks ago. On a Wednesday morning I got a call at 8:30 to take a train to a nearby city (like going from Toronto to Mississauga) for a school that started at 8:50. Needless to say I was late, which of course meant I had no time to look over the plans for the day or mentally prepare for the daily grind of teaching small children. I got through it however and was even asked back the next day. Through a chance coincidence I was already working the next day so I deftly suggested they try my wife as she was available. This move turned into two and a half days of work for Jenn over the next couple of days. The school I worked at on Thursday ended up offering me a full-time maternity cover that starts it December and runs through July, news that brought us a great deal of hope for this year to come. As the school wanted to acclimatize me to the school culture as soon as possible, they called up both Friday and Monday morning with daily supply work. By Tuesday morning I had worked four straight days and was preparing myself to complete all the workday jobs I had neglected while working when another call came in at 8:20 for a school that was forty minutes away on the bus. In the span of one week we had gone from three days of work to ten and a half with a coming full-time job to boot. Needless to say it was quite a thrilling, hectic, and exhausting week.
Although elated to finally be able to pay the bills I can’t help but still dread the morning routine. Since we so rarely get jobs in advance, every morning we wake up unsure of whether it will be a long boring day at home or a last minute call telling us we have work. I wake first at around seven and begin to prepare for the day as if I was going to work. I shower, shave, dress, and then sit around waiting for a phone call. Sometimes the phone call does come and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s of course, usually at the moment when I’ve decided that our agency isn’t going to call and start planning what I’m going to do that day instead, that they do call. Often I’m told to go half way across the city in half an hour, an impossible feat at the best of times but a Herculean task when faced with the Birmingham bus system during rush hour. Late calls such as these, which I might point out are the only calls we get, are frustrating beyond belief as you can imagine. What might be worst than receiving the late morning call however, is getting all ready to go to work but never receiving a call at all. Let’s just say the morning routine is not my favourite part about being a supply teacher.
Supplying teaching in England also brings its own unique quirks as well. Although I’m unlikely to have a basketball thrown at me, or to be spit on (as my aunt has experienced in Canada) I am still faced with the normal bad behaviour that awaits any supply teacher in a new classroom. This type of bad behaviour is augmented by the poor planning that is often found in classrooms in this country. So much of what is taught in school here is regulated by the government that I’ve found most teachers don’t even bother to make a lesson plan beyond the daily learning objective, as I suppose they have to teach the same thing year after year. This, I suppose, is fine for teachers familiar with the system already but it leaves a poor Canadian supply teacher like myself a little lost as to how to turn one sentence on a piece of paper into an hour long lesson (especially when one tries to do it on the fly after arriving 20 minutes late). In addition to this interesting lack of planning, school work in British schools has a slightly different flavour than in Canada. Over here every last stitch of work done by the children is supposed to be marked daily and assessed for learning, this of course means long days for supply teachers who don’t have the luxury of taking marking home. It also means that no work that is assigned in class carries over into homework for the children as it has to be marked at the end of the day. This might seem like a good idea until you consider that this means that school children don’t have the natural motivation of not wanting to have homework to drive them to work hard in school nor do they have work to complete when they finish work in another subject early. This of course leads to many kids simply sitting around and talking in class without really accomplishing much other than driving their teachers crazy. As I said, teaching over here is a completely new ballgame.
We are stuck therefore I guess, between a desire to work to pay the bills, fund some traveling, and alleviate boredom, and a desire to stay at home to avoid the trials and tribulations of being a supply teacher at all costs. I guess yet again we can’t win but hopefully we will find a happy balance soon that will allow us to keep our sanity while providing hilarious stories which we can in turn pass on to you, … if we ever get the time that is.
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