With the passing of 2011, I have now been a substitute teacher pretty much as long as I have ever been anything else professionally in my life. And I love what I do. The sad part is, at least in Michigan, I am the state of the educational art. I hear from full-time teachers constantly about their friends or children who rack up thousands of dollars in student loans to become teachers, only to graduate, and not be able to find jobs. At least not in Michigan. What, then, do these friends and children do? They substitute teach. Oh, sure, frequently, they get the gigs in districts I can't because I'm not certified, but they're doing the same thing I am. Burdened by a bigger mountain of accrued debt than me. Much as I have ever bit*hed about how debt-laden I am, particularly in this economy, relatively speaking, it's small potatoes. And I'm working on it continuing to get smaller. I'm not upside-down on a house, wading in business losses, and as bad as the economy has been, I've managed to stay afloat, day-by-day, for the last four years. I bothers me when I hear from students constantly...."another sub?! I've had subs every hour today!" Perhaps its just a matter of creating a generation of students who can more easily cope with such transience where their educators are concerned, but it still takes me multiple visits to a particular school to develop any kind of rapport with the students. The kind your average full-time teacher probably develops in the first week or two with a given class. On the up-side, I have actually been able to develop a rapport with certain students, usually because they started the relationship by pi**ing me off until they realized that I meant business. That I cared if they learned, even if they didn't. I've been advising student teachers lamenting the fact that they can't find work to consider teaching English in Asia, like I did. It's God-awful sad that I should have to give anyone this kind of advice, but frankly, it amounts to going where the jobs are. The sad truth is we've given away the American industrial economy, and it's taken most of the rest of America down with it. Until we make that particular comeback, nothing is going to change.
And I know what at least a few are probably thinking. I don't intend to ever stop learning, I would simply die if that were the case. But between the economy and the fact that I still haven't finished paying for my Bachelor's, one that probably served me less well than it might have, had I made more enlightened choices while I was still young enough for it to make a difference, I admit I'm a little gun-shy about going further into hock for an education at this point. The education I have continues to serve me, day-after-day, I'm proud not only that I have my Bachelor's, but that I passed my Michigan Test for Teacher Certification in Basic Skills and English (but not in Journalism, my major, which I think only really serves to prove how night-and-day different journalism is from the way it was taught to me.) Bottom line? Further education is simply not cost-effective in my particular time and place. But I could never be a good teacher if I figured education could ever stop. Allow me the luxury of being at least a little intelligent about all this, though, will ya?