By Adam Crohn

I want to preface this piece/post/rant by saying that I firmly believe that teachers should be paid more than doctors, more than congress folks, more than actors, and definitely more than Kanye West. Teachers have always been some of the greatest influencers, and today, when some people actually have the word “Influencer” as a job title on their resume, I think we should all take a step back and reasses what influence we’re valuing over others.

I’ve been hearing that the job market is great almost every day for the past year or so. Something else I’ve been hearing for the last year or so is the crickets in response to all the resumes I’ve been sending out. It would be so nice if these out-of-touch talking heads and heads of states, when talking about how good the numbers look, would try to live a day in the shoes of someone actually on the job hunt. Yes, retail and service industry jobs might be on the rise, but I already gave 13 years of my life to restaurants, and I’m lucky I made it out with my soul intact.

I’m a college grad with a BA in Communications. I’ve been running my own small art business in toy design for the last decade, responsible for everything from product design to project management, social media presence, and everything else that comes with a one-man operation. At the same time, I’ve produced and hosted three podcasts, been a project manager for a comic book store, and even walked dogs, juggling all of it just to make ends meet. And my ends haven’t met since the COVID pandemic.

So, in the meantime, as a stopgap and attempt to not get evicted, I got certified as a substitute teacher for the public school district I live in, so far, sticking with K-8. And it’s an absolute bananas, Wild West, Squidgame playground.

I’m not sure whether to call it a culture shock or just a life shock, but things have changed, and I don’t think for the better. It’s way too easy to write off what I’m about to say as an age thing because I think most people will agree that once the iPhone came out in 2007, and smartphones were in everyone’s pockets around 2008, the world changed in the biggest way since the industrial revolution. And it has kept changing at a faster pace every year since.

When I first walked into a classroom as a sub this past February, the first thing I noticed was that every room had a giant TV and YouTube was already on the screen. Every student had access to a mini laptop, and their phones were in their pockets. Some might chalk this up to just where education is at in American society today, and that these are the necessary tools for kids to keep pace and thrive in today’s society. Which is sad on its own if you think about the dependency of it all. But then I started to see the cracks in their attempt at evolution.

In most classes, subs serve as backups for an assistant who’s out or assisting the assistant who takes the lead when the main teacher is out. And in most cases, I noticed that the kids were less dependent on the technology than the teachers were. I couldn’t believe how phoned-in some of these teacher’s teaching was, and how handcuffed they’d become to the tech. And it really showed when the tech didn’t work. But I don’t think I can blame the teacher entirely because in most cases, they’re doing what’s expected of them as deemed so by some board, and if they make it to the end of the day still remembering their own name, then they’re doing well. To add insult to injury, if the kids had a computer in front of them, most if not all were switching between tabs to hide that they’re actually playing Galaga, or watching Taylor Swift and Beyonce on YouTube.

This brings me to hands down the hardest part about being a teacher today, and that’s just keeping order in the classroom. Trying to keep them on task, or trying to keep their attention on you, much less on their assignment, is mission nearly impossible. And most of that struggle comes from the lack of discipline, which should be coming from the top down, outside of the individual schools. The amount of coddling I’ve witnessed is bananas. I’ve seen the main teachers in their own classrooms that they’ve been in for years, with kids they’ve been with for months, lose their shit and stop the class over one student that clearly doesn’t want to be there and is incapable of being reached, just to throw their hands up and sit in silence until the kid realizes the teacher’s tantrum is all about them. It’s very sad that we allow the few to ruin the many. I’ve also seen substitutes that run the class like a dictator to avoid the previously described situation, bringing 7th graders to tears because they had a question during a video about the video in an attempt to understand the video better.

Looking back on my own education, I feel like it’s a fair assessment to say that 80% of the time the teacher kept fair and kind order in the classroom, and that the kids mostly respected the teacher, the classroom, other students, and themselves. Today, I’d say that percentage is around 50-60%. I feel like I came in at a time when the technology that was intended to elevate learning is now “old hat” and taken for granted by the students and the teachers, becoming just a distraction to the students, and a crutch for some teachers, that is mandated by the state in an effort to appear to be something they are not. This motion has sacrificed practicality, logic and common sense, respect, and free thinking.

But I feel (and I’m not the only one) the biggest hindrance to schools and teaching today, and the worst disadvantage a kid has going into the classroom, is the lack of, or severely subpar parenting at home. It seems like so many of these kids are lacking the fundamental basics that should prepare them for a school setting so that school can then prepare them for the parts of life that exist outside of the home. School shouldn’t be responsible for preparing you for ALL of life. I feel like if I could be a fly on the wall in any one of these kids’ homes, any random day would go something like this: Wake up, you have to eat something before you leave for school in 20 minutes! Cut to definitely no shower, and the kid cramming 3 bags of chips, 2 candy bars, 3 bags of some kind of sour gummies, and 2 cans of soda into their backpack, all of which they consume during class (and are allowed to) while the teacher is trying to deal with their sugar highs and then sugar crashes, and the distraction “cool food” presents, much less, teach them something. Then they eat some kind of breaded brown food, milk, and “fruit” marinated in some sugar liquid and go beat each other up on the playground. Then back to class where all they can do is think about getting home where mom and dad won’t be back for several hours, and they can consume more sugar. When mom and dad do get home, if they make dinner at all, the kid doesn’t eat it unless it’s garbage food, and they spend the rest of the night on their phone, investing in what Instagram and TikTok algorithms are showing them because they have no interests of their own to search out, and after maybe 4 hours of sleep, rinse and repeat.

At least that’s the vibe I get from the majority of what these kids are giving off. Over the years I’ve been in an educator position from time to time. I taught pre-school for a year in 2007, during the pandemic in 2020-2022 I taught virtual classes in design to grade-schoolers, , chess and pee-wee sports somewhere in there, and now with subbing in the public schools, the visible effect of fundamental parenting is rarely seen. The majority of them come to school with no sense of respect for any aspect of their lives, including themselves. And the schools are so overwhelmed with the amount of students, that educating them is a far third place behind managing their behavior, and making sure they don’t walk face first into a wall, period, but if they’re lucky, it’s because they don’t know how to tie their shoes.

Yes, it’s sad, embarrassing, and completely bonkers at times, especially if you’re subbing for a kindergarten or first grade class and manage to lose the attention of just one kid. Because once you lose one of those kids, you lose them all. The entire class turns into Kindergarten Cop, and yes, they’re all horrible.

But there are those rare moments when, as a sub, you actually get to teach something. You reach a kid and you see a cog start to turn in their brain, and the rust cracks off as it triggers another wheel, which brings a tiny smile to their face, and the world feels correct for just a second. I’ll leave you with this rare experience…

I was subbing for a teacher whose 7th-grade classes were studying public speaking and poetry. But in the first period I was just assisting the teacher’s aide who was leading the class, so I was pretty much just another warm body in the room, observing. This TA simply showed three videos on YouTube, one of which he showed twice, and then gave a literal two-minute summary ending in my least favorite, and the most useless and lazy, phrase “You know what I mean?” And then gave them the rest of the period to play on the laptops and eat the rest of the snacks they brought. When we came back after lunch, and for the rest of the day, I was going to be leading that same class by myself with no TA or any other teachers in the room. So, I taught. I followed the lesson plan left by the main teacher, and we watched the videos. But afterward, and for the rest of the class, we talked about what we had watched. I got my degree in Communications for a reason. I like talking with people, I like trying to understand them and gaining new and different perspectives. And I love it when you get to witness someone else have a mental breakthrough.

So, after the videos, I asked the class what they thought about spoken poetry, and how they felt about public speaking. Getting up in front of a crowd is daunting for most people. I struggled big-time with it when I was young, and it wasn’t until I was a singer in a band in high school that I started to enjoy it. But even today, I still get nervous and jittery. My eyes water and I get chills. But if I’m doing it, it’s because I want to and have something to say.

It was great to see how many of these kids had something to say about the videos and just speaking at all, but it takes someone actually asking them. There was one girl who had her head low and was slouched in her chair most of the class, but she had her hand up. I called on her and she said that she absolutely hated talking in front of a group. That she was terrified of it. I asked her politely to speak up a bit so that I could hear her from my desk, and she did, and she kept talking. Then I asked if she could just sit up in her chair so the kids on the other side could hear her better. Instead, she stood right up. She kept talking. She was very articulate and was clearly passionate about what she was saying, but most of it was why she hated speaking to a group, that it made her nervous, and really scared her. By the time she was done, she’d spoken for a solid three minutes. She sat back down and I told her “Congratulations. You just successfully spoke publicly to a group of 30 people, and you did it really well.” The entire class started clapping for her, and her face could not have been a happier one.

I don’t know where this subbing thing is going. It’s a minimum wage job and very part-time, with no benefits, and exhausting. And it may have been a different game when I was growing up, or even up until the early 2000s, but I feel like today’s teacher is in over their head, for the most part. Most of them seem like frustrated ghosts of what they once were, and I don’t think what they thought they were setting out to accomplish and share as a teacher is possible anymore. I realize my perspective on parents may sound a bit harsh considering the times. Everything designed to make our lives simpler seems to just make life more complicated. I get it. And there are tons of great parents out there, and teachers as well. But the Education system is and should be a symbiotic relationship involving the parents. But of all the “broken systems” that folks love to talk about, the Education system should be far and above the priority to fix. And I believe it’s mostly because of a system that is trying to please social movements and crowds and parents who aren’t truly involved in these kids’ lives at fundamental levels, and base their involvment from afar.

But hey, I don’t have kids of my own, so there’s really no way I could ever understand…