Getting a Sub

What no one tells first year teachers is how hard it is to be absent and how you really should complete those emergency sub plans the school asks for at the beginning of the year.

I kept putting off turning in the five days of emergency sub plans that my one school asked for. Partly because I had no idea what to plan and partly because all the sub plan books I looked at seemed so generic that the kids would be bored and it would have nothing to do with what we were learning at that time.

While I imagined myself as the teacher whose sub plans would be exciting and relevant to what we are learning, I have learned my lesson that having generic emergency sub plans is better than not having any sub plans. When you get sent home by your principal because your sinus infection makes you look and feel like death, the last thing you want to be doing while you are laying on the couch slowly dying is type a sub plan.

And I don't know about anyone else, but it was so hard to accept that I was trusting my students to behave without me there.