No Substitute For A Good Backfiring Firing Scheme

My first real teaching job, after a few years of substitute teaching, was at a very small school. Out of about sixty teachers, serving all ages from kindergarten to high school, I was the only teacher there with less than ten years of full-time teaching experience. Of course, I was expected to magically be at the same level as all the other teachers, despite it being my first real teaching job.

The school decided halfway through the year that I wasn’t doing well enough, and they pulled my classes from me in an attempt to get me to quit. They kept me on as, basically, a warm body who could step in to substitute teach if other teachers were gone, tutor kids one-on-one if they were struggling in their regular classes, or help with various administrative “busy work” tasks. But it was obvious that I was supposed to resign because I wasn’t teaching.

The joke was on them. I had an apartment lease, so I still needed the job, and I actually enjoyed all those random tasks more than I enjoyed the actual teaching; it was all the fun of working with the kids every day without any of the headache of writing lessons, grading papers, etc.