When I was in college I was a DJ performing on the radio and in the clubs.
One of the principals of being a successful DJ knows how to read the room. You might play a set of the songs that a crowd loved one weekend, but those same songs could people off the dance floor the next weekend.
Stand-up comedians are the same way.
Where a set of jokes might kill during the 8PM show, those same jokes may fall flat at the 10PM show.
Being a teacher has a lot of these same principals.
Unless you are assigned for consecutive days, where students become familiar with you, walking in as a substitute teacher is like the first day of school every day.
On the first day of school, a teacher meets their students for the first time, but by the end of the month that same teacher realizes what buttons to push to help their students succeed.
My personality is quite fun loving and relaxed, but I realized quickly that my personality may work on some grades and classes, but fail miserably in others.
I taught a high school English class where some kids were disruptive as we read stories out loud. Luckily for me, my humor helped me calm those students down and in fact one of those disruptive students actually read in class for the first time!
However, a few periods later, my humor did not save me.
The assignment was the same, but tactic I used to get the students to read did not work. Where In the last class I had a few kids talking, in this class kids were actually going to sleep!
I was at my wits end, when the teaching assistant told me that this particular class likes to stand up and read the story as a play than to sit in their seat and the read the book out loud.
I quickly pivoted and asked for volunteers to perform the story as a play. Surprisingly enough I had more kids than parts.
Although the class only performed only a couple of pages of the book that information from the teaching assistant saved what would have been a wasteful day in class.
While most teachers leave notes to let you know what works in particular classes, sometimes subs are left to figure out what motivates a class by themselves without the help of a fairy godmother aka teaching assistant.
Like DJ’s and stand-up comedians, the ability of a teacher to read a class room takes years to perfect, but for subs, years are reduced to precious minutes to quickly figure or may not work in a classroom.
For substitute teachers, what method do you use to connect with your students? (I like to hear the good, the bad and the ugly).
For long time teachers, how long to did it take to figure out what works best in your classroom and what happens if you can’t connect to your students?
