There’s No Substitute for Teaching Experience

I came into the room on Monday and surveyed the casualties. Some were shriveled; others, waterlogged and moldy. A single lima bean on a damp paper towel had sprouted roots and leaves. It was yet another well-intentioned but misbegotten lesson from the callow substitute.

And perhaps an apt metaphor for how my class, several weeks after their beloved teacher departed on maternity leave, was faring under my tutelage. I was one of 3,000 subs in the Los Angeles Unified School District on an emergency credential. With no training and only a year of private high school teaching under my belt, I had become a second-grade teacher overnight.

There was a brief honeymoon after my arrival in February at the school, located in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Reseda. Where orange and walnut groves, pumpkin and tomato fields once flourished, some 500 kids, many designated at risk for failure, were struggling to get an education.

The passing weeks brought bad weather and behavior problems. Two children had a parent in jail, one’s mom had been there, and they all acted as you might expect under the circumstances: excitable, withdrawn or needy. One emotionally disturbed boy struck other children, picked trash off the carpet and ate it. Two boys exhibited symptoms of attention deficit disorder--an attention span even shorter than the rest of the class.

I couldn’t turn my back on the class for a minute, for fear of some crisis.

The nadir came during one of El Nino’s finest, when thunder and lightening reduced a group of girls to tears. Nothing I could say was comforting. I stood by helpless, my inexperience laid bare. Finally they became distracted by playing with a pet rodent someone had brought for sharing. I began to count the remaining days of my incarceration.

Still, I was determined the class would not be deprived. I organized a Valentine party, taught them to draw leprechauns, made tissue paper flowers in spring, bought them jellybeans and Easter grass. The most innocent projects often got a streetwise twist. Two boys attired their cottontailed construction paper Easter bunnies in LAPD SWAT team gear, complete with guns, grenades and a detachable helicopter.

You had to laugh. The same high spirits and rambunctiousness that were unnerving during math and language could be refreshing in their artwork. In one project, they were supposed to paste interlocking shapes on a page but instead reveled in the discovery of objects they could make by cutting folded paper. They made masks and headdresses and glasses, and they wore them.

It was hard to get angry at their rule-breaking when you understood the motivation. I caught one of my wilder boys writing a letter instead of doing his work. “Dear baby,” it said, addressed to his sickly newborn brother. During educational TV programs, several kids took out the silkworms being used in a science project and started toying with them. (One girl named her listless worm Jack and his mate Rose after the characters in “Titanic”). They took their worms to lunch, tearing mulberry leaves off the trees to feed them. They caressed them. I couldn’t imagine privileged children taking such pleasure with these creatures.

Finally, signs appeared that I was getting through to the class. Gleefully they came to me with books from the library on bees, vegetables, the sea, all units we were studying. They blossomed on a cooperative writing assignment I improvised and didn’t even want to go out to recess.

One timid girl from El Salvador who spent the mornings doing bilingual language arts in the classroom next to mine suddenly began reading and writing second-grade English. She insisted on being in our readers theater version of “Stone Soup,” which we triumphantly presented to the “real” teacher when she visited with her baby. No one wriggled or stumbled over their lines.

I even found a way to damage-control the lima bean lesson. As a teacher had informed me that the school water was deleterious to plants, I was reluctant to start another project. Instead, the students wrote in their journals about the paper towel lima bean’s fateful end. They also wrote that they were taking home three more beans in soil and promised to give them plenty of sunlight and water. Two weeks later, I had beaming children bringing in their thriving plants.

Finally, it was the last day of school. We had music and too many sweets at our party. The bilingual teacher’s aides taught the class some Latin dance moves. I’m enjoying my vacation, but I’ll tell you this: When the bell rang, they took their portfolios, their report cards and my heart.