Our Substitute Teacher Hit a Milestone: How One Classroom Found What Really Works
I was standing outside my classroom with a coffee that had gone cold, watching Ms. Herrera unpack her bag. She was the third substitute in three weeks. The first one left a note saying “I will not be returning.” The second one we lost on the second day when someone set the trash can on fire. This one, Ms. Herrera, had a folder decorated with rainbow stickers and a lanyard full of key rings that jangled when she walked. I didn’t get my hopes up.
Inside, the kids were doing that thing they do with subs—testing boundaries, pretending not to hear, and Marcus had already moved his desk two inches closer to the window just to see if she’d say anything. She didn’t. She just pulled out a chart and started reading names.
The milestone came at 9:12 in the morning. It wasn’t a big thing. Ms. Herrera asked a question about fractions, and Marcus’s hand went up. Not a wave, just a low, flat hand at shoulder height. She called his name, and he said, “I think you divide the denominator.” Which was right. And she said, “That’s exactly it,” and then she moved on. No sticker, no applause, no “I’m so proud of you.” Just a simple recognition. But for a kid who, three weeks ago, threw a chair at the last sub, this counted as a peace treaty.
Later, another sub expressed surprise when I said this was progress. “He just answered a question,” she said. But she didn’t see the muscles in Marcus’s jaw, how he hadn’t realized he’d done it. And she didn’t see the rest of the class exhale, because when Marcus is calm, the room is calm. That’s the real milestone.
So why did it happen? I wish I could say it was some magical technique, but it was mostly preparation. The first time a sub walks in, they have nothing. They see thirty faces and the note from the regular teacher. We changed that. Instead of just leaving an attendance sheet, we left a one-page guide. It didn’t only have procedures. It had names and two facts about each kid. Marcus’s fact was “knows everything about deserts. Ask about the MGV.” The MGV is a Mars rover, but I wrote “Mars rover” because I didn’t want a sub to think it was a movie.
We also stopped the staff from popping in. There’s a natural instinct to check on a sub, hover by the door, just in case. But hovering signals to kids that the sub is in charge—which is what they need to see. So we made a rule: if it’s an emergency, you can text, but no walk-throughs for the first hour. It felt like throwing a child into the deep end, honestly. But the sub needs to establish presence, and the kids need to see themselves responding to that person, not waiting for me to return.
The other thing was seating. Marcus was sitting on the side near the window, which is the worst spot for him. For him, it’s like being next to an open door—his attention just leaks out. So before Ms. Herrera came, we moved his desk to the front row, but we didn’t say it was for behavior. We said it was because he was having trouble seeing the board. Which was a lie, but he bought it because the board is actually glary at that angle.
Ms. Herrera, to her credit, did something that I need to mention. When she read the one-page guide, she could have joked about the Martian rover or asked, “Mars rover, really?” She didn’t. She just used it. At one point during a lesson on percentages, she said, “Marcus, what percentage of the Mars rover’s time do you think is spent waiting for commands?” That’s not in the curriculum, but it’s why she had a working class.
For the whole first week, I watched her do small things that I knew would help. She let the class move their chairs to the carpet for read-aloud even though the seating chart didn’t allow it. She didn’t raise her voice once. When Jackson accidentally knocked over a bin of pencils, she said, “That’s why we don’t keep pencils in buckets,” and then she spent a minute helping him pick them up instead of making a big deal out of it. The kids still weren’t hers yet, but the tension was gone. They were just doing their day.
There’s a moment in every sub’s journey where they stop being “the sub” and start being the teacher. It’s not a ceremony. It’s when a kid says, “Ms. Herrera, you said you’d show us how to do the long division,” and she says, “Oh right, I did,” and the class waits for her—not because they’re compliant but because they’re curious. That happened on Thursday.
Now the “Yay all of us” part: This morning, the principal sent a note to the staff saying Ms. Herrera was staying on for another month. I forwarded it to the parents in my weekly email, with one line: “Our sub hit another milestone.” I got three replies. Two were thumbs-up emojis. The third was from Marcus’s mom, who said, “He talked about fractions at dinner last night. I almost dropped the lasagna.” That’s the whole victory.
But I want to be honest about what this milestone wasn’t. It wasn’t a transformation. Marcus still didn’t turn in his science homework on Friday. He still rolled his eyes when I asked him to move his jacket. The class still gets loud in the hallway, and I still repeat myself like a broken radio. Ms. Herrera isn’t a miracle worker; she’s just a person who was given a few tools and enough space to use them.
What I’ve learned from all this—and it’s not a new idea—is that substitute teachers are treated like furniture. They get a bare desk and a key, no context, no relationships. And kids know that. They wait for the adult in the room to seem like they actually belong there. If we want kids to trust a new adult, we have to set that adult up with something real: names, details, stories. And we also have to step back. It’s tempting to micromanage. But the more we hover, the more kids see the sub as a placeholder. So I’m learning to let go.
This doesn’t always work. I’ve had subs who looked at the one-page guide and never used it. I’ve had subs who did everything right and still got eaten alive by sixth period. Ms. Herrera seems different, but that might be because Marcus answered one question. Or because she smiled when she said “Mars rover.” Or because we moved a desk with the wrong excuse.
Tomorrow there will be another milestone, or not. There will be a day when someone forgets her name again, or a fire drill, or a tough question about percentages that derails the whole lesson. But tonight, I’ll take the win. We all will. Because when an adult who was just a stranger twenty days ago gets a kid to talk about fractions at dinner, that’s not the sub’s victory. It’s the whole room’s.
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