"He Was Escorted From The Building By A Cop": 30 Terrible Things Substitute Teachers Did

I had a cool Chinese Lucky Cat that went missing after I had a sub. My students said the sub seemed really intrigued by it, talked about it several times, and even moved it from the shelf where it sat and brought it over to my desk. It was gone when I returned the next day. 😒.

Lost more than half of my textbooks that I purchased myself. Aswell as textbooks that were schoolproperty.

Administration just shrugged at this. Until they found out the textbooks belonging to the school were around 120 dollars each.

Also lost all the bookassignments of 4 classes I asked him to collect so I could correct those at home.
Kinda sucked for the students who did put a lot of work on it and didn't have digital copies.

Also didn't teach anything that I asked him to, because he didn't really like the subjectmatter.

Also didn't bother grading. When I checked the grades he had given out; there was only 1 grade and everyone was given 8/10 ... even students that didn't take my class.

She let the kids run wild and do whatever they wanted (first graders). I was out because my dad died. Thank god my team realized what happened and all pulled together and cleaned the room/put it back together before I returned to work.

Two things come to mind:

1. Tell the black children they need to speak more clearly because people think black people are hard to understand.

2. Just sit and play on the phone while class loses its mind.

I've had so many bad subs.

One sub made an elementary student cry insisting her own name was misspelled and made her stand up in front of the class and admit her name was spelled wrong. I asked that she not return but I still saw her around as other teachers had her sub.

Another one worth mentioning was supposed to be my sub for the last 2 weeks of school because I went on maternity leave, this time teaching at a 7th-12th grade school. Ignored all my sub plans, played on his cell phone the whole time, and then like 3 days in got upset at the students and told them off. And then they watched as he walked out to the parking lot and drove away. Thank goodness some kids went and told the office. When I came back it was like my room had been ransacked! It was awful.

Not a teacher but in 7th grade life science we had a sub. For the first 5 or so minutes of class he made us do a Kahoot (for anyone who doesn't know Kahoot is a learning website that let's you take a quiz in a fun way) the only problem was that he told us every awnser. Next we were supposed to be learning about parts of a microscope but instead he got them out and told us to mess around with them and he broke one of them. After that he put a video up and ate my teachers chocolate then fell asleep for the last half hour or so of class. Needless to say when our teacher got back and we told her about the sub he was fired.

Re-arranged my room.

Not in a "Moved Student A away from Student B and put her by Student C" way.

In a "Move the giant rug over to the opposite corner of the room, and completely change the layout of student desks, and rearrange a bookshelf" way.

Not a teacher but I participate in STEM programs a lot. In the 90s I belonged to a club that refurbished old industrial PCs and donated them to schools. Sometimes we’d get completely burned out motherboards or disk drives so I took a bunch of those and made displays showing the insides of computers, and I’d let the kids explore them as part of my session. Then I’d dig out a couple of blown PCs and monitors, hand out the screw drivers and let them rip them apart. Yes I was always careful around the old tube monitors. Once they were done I’d let them pick a part if they wanted to take home.

The younger kids especially loved this, and frequently I’d see some kids take home a hard drive controller or a graphics card like it was a real treasure. I even made the local news with my program (that’s the thing about living in a small city - eventually everyone makes the news)

So one day I went in to do my lesson at a high school (I think freshman or sophomore science class). The class had a substitute and I had an appt right after that session, so I told them I’d come back to pick everything up the next day. The kids could take whatever they wanted from the old PCs, but please put my displays aside, in the cupboard.

Next day I came by and all my displays were still out and they were completely trashed. Worse yet the sub’s attitude was, “well, kids will be kids”

That was the last session I did, ever, for that program.

Had a sub who somehow allowed a last period class of freshman to convince him that they were not supposed to be working on the packet that I left for the class (and which every other class that day had been working on...) because they had "already finished it" and told him they were supposed to be watching a movie. He went to the library to get the movie, leaving the class unattended, which promptly then broke out a dance party involving dancing on the desks. My department chair's classroom was next door but as she taught AP government to seniors, she was able to leave them to come next door and try to figure out what the hell was going on. No sub. She calmed the class down and into the seats and into the worksheets, and calls the principal, who met the sub on his way back from the library and told him he could go home. My chair also found it would be appropriate to basically call me and blame me for this while I was sick at home. I don't teach anymore lol. I mean, packets were not a great emergency sub plan but what can you do? They could have played Heads Up 7 Up for all I cared lol. They were a handful of a group on the best days. Freshman after lunch during last period of the day are a situation.

Was a student. Our maths teacher went on leave for a while (I think maternity) and the supply teacher was absolutely useless. He’d been given one topic to teach us and that was it. For weeks. We had a whole textbook to be working through and I was gunning to take my maths GCSE a year early, but no, we just did a topic our class had got the hang of in a week, for two or three months, because I guess he didn’t know or bother to ask what we were supposed to be doing next.

So the rest of the year we had to go ahead of the pace we were expecting to be able to cover everything we had to know. F*****g supply teachers.