My Envelopment as a Teacher, Part Two: Just a Sub

Adjusting to street navigation in an even bigger town proved to be rather daunting. I relied heavily on Byron for right turn-left turn play-by-plays every time I went somewhere. At the same time, I was adjusting to living with another family—with different schedules, habits, and ideas about raising children. Though we thought we’d made a forward-looking decision, after a few months I began to feel that all stability had slipped away.

Byron wanted a job that would give him Sundays off—church had always been a major source of stability and purpose for us. He began working at Waremart, but Sundays off would not be a likely proposition for a while. After a brief stint there, he landed a job as a school bus driver. It was a rather thankless job, to say the least, but he had Sundays off—and a regular schedule. With much trepidation, I began to look for work, but I didn’t have much confidence in securing a teaching job—especially since the school year had already started. I finally settled on a job at a daycare center. It was a low point for me—not what I had been trained for at all—but it felt safe.

I soon learned that a class full of 18-20 two-year-olds is not at all “safe.” Though I liked the kids, I longed for a different environment. I wasn’t really sure what that was, but it had to be more fulfilling. Sure, I was doing a good service—taking kids to the bathroom, changing their pull-ups, rubbing their backs at naptime, serving them snack, singing songs with them—but it wasn’t where I fit. And it didn’t seem right that I was caring for other people’s children while missing my own little girl, who was then almost a year and a half. We had found an excellent childcare provider, so that was some consolation, but I knew I couldn’t keep doing this long-term.

After six months of living with our friends, the relationship had become strained. Though we’d planned for a year, we felt it best to find our own place…quickly. So we moved into a very spacious three-bedroom apartment. Thinking we could handle one roommate better than three, we invited a co-worker of mine to move in with us and share rental costs. I ended my brief employment at the daycare and began substitute teaching for the Beaverton School District.

My certification allowed me to teach some high school classes, so I sort of ran the gamut. Most of the time, I would have a job secured the night before—there was an automated system that would call; jobs could be easily accepted or declined. If something sounded too scary to me, I generally would decline it. But then I felt guilty. So I ended up taking a few jobs that were way outside my comfort zone, like teaching sophomore boys’ P.E. It proved to be somewhat disastrous because I couldn’t monitor the locker room.

I plugged away and tried to work at least three days per week. Sometimes that was a real strain. It was nice when I got a couple long-term sub jobs. I got to know the people I worked with and had the comfort of knowing where I was going each day. The long-term assignments were classified employment, so they didn’t pay as well, but I felt like I was almost better-suited to these tasks than classroom teaching. Perhaps I should have gone into special ed—but now I had a child to love and care for, and the prospect of going back to school for more training wasn’t overly appealing.

After three months, our roommate left, and life began to settle down…except for our upstairs neighbors. They didn’t take kindly to my husband going up and asking them if they could be quieter. The dad and teenage son had been wrestling around on the floor, and it was pretty noisy. This would often happen at night—usually when we were trying to get Kristiana settled into bed. For a few months, they were very unkind to us, and one day when we came home the lady of the house waited for my husband to get out of the car and proceeded to cuss him up one side and down the other. They moved not too long after but made it a point to whoop and holler, slam things around, and vacuum the last night they were there. This was after eleven p.m.

With that stress gone, we could focus on enjoying our little family. I took on a couple daycare kids to earn some summer income and soon learned that I was expecting. We were devastated a couple months later, in August of 1994, when we lost that baby. My emotional recovery took a while, and as the school year drew closer my anxiety loomed larger with it. I knew I didn’t want to keep doing daycare. Byron didn’t really relish the idea of another year monitoring bus behavior for relatively little pay. I also didn’t want to sub anymore in the city, so what was the solution?

My friend from college, Kim, had grown up in Hermiston. After our Master’s graduation, she had gotten a job in her hometown fairly quickly. In communicating with her, I learned there was a great need for substitutes in Hermiston—and there was always the chance that becoming a known quantity there could lead to permanent employment. The drawback was that we’d be much farther from friends and family. But we were young, unfulfilled, and still a bit spontaneous. What did we have to lose?

Byron ventured over one day to scope out an apartment for us. I wished later I had specified “not right next to railroad tracks,” but it was a decent place all the same. And what Kim had said was true. Once we got settled and found childcare, I worked nearly every day. But Byron still couldn’t find work and was getting discouraged. Finally, it seemed there was no alternative but for him to go back to school bus driving in Beaverton; he would “camp out” with friends during the week and come home on the weekends.

After about a month of that rigmarole, an apartment managing job in Hermiston caught our eye. We had no such experience, but Byron did have supervisory experience and customer service skills. He got the job, which came with an apartment. So we moved a little ways across town. I continued subbing but found we could survive with me working less. I enjoyed the extra time with Kristiana.

I was glad Byron had work in town, but the job proved to be more than we had bargained for. Over time it became clear that the property management supervisor was crossing some lines of ethics and legality. And she wanted Byron to participate in some of it. We began to pray, asking God for an escape route. He put the Willamette Valley, where we had started out, strongly on our hearts. One property management ad, in particular, seemed to be “the one.” I just knew that if Byron applied for it, his chances would be good. He got an interview, and from that moment I felt confident that God was saying the job was his.

The new position was at a brand-new manufactured home complex in Albany. I relaxed for a while and got our house in order, trying to make things fun and comfortable for our then three-year-old Kristiana. I subbed in Albany for a few months, but after our daycare provider decided to close her business we never found what we considered a quality situation. Soon I learned I was expecting again, and I felt my teaching days may, in fact, be over.

After Kalina was born, I remember working a few days here and there, but I just didn’t feel like my baby’s needs were being met. I desperately wanted to be there for her, as I had been for Kristiana during her infancy and toddlerhood.

Several months before, we had moved my parents from a poor housing situation in Mapleton, Oregon to the complex Byron was still managing. We felt it would be better for their health, social development, and morale—as they would be close to us and the grandkids. Health was really a primary concern, because my mom seemed to be on the verge of another breakdown. We’d be close to doctors and hopefully be able to get her the help she needed.

When Kalina was three and a half months old, my milk production died decreased significantly due to the stress of my mom having a full-blown psychotic break and having to be committed and hospitalized. I stopped nursing. I also asked Byron if we could move from our upstairs apartment--where we had to go up and down, to and from the laundry room below. It was a small thing, but it was adding to my stress. So he agreed without hesitation.

My mom got stabilized, and in the fall Kristiana started preschool at Good Shepherd Lutheran School in Albany. I often spent time with my parents while she was in school, and after school we’d go to the park and feed the ducks with Grandma and Grandpa on a regular basis. The following year she attended the same school and had the same teacher and assistant for kindergarten. These were good times.

But for Byron, working for the housing agency came with a lot of politics. Decisions he made got overridden, and the fallout (tenants who shouldn’t have been approved causing domestic havoc) sometimes required police intervention. After three and a half years there, he knew he couldn’t work in that realm all his life. It was at that point that some friends in Salem began talking to us about a historic home they wanted to preserve. Perhaps we could live in it, and Byron and our friend (whom he’d gone to high school with) could start a renovations company, specifically to restore such homes. Of course, they’d have to generate income before they could do much on this one, but we could work off some rent costs by fixing things. It seemed like an appealing deal after being cramped in a less-than-800-square-foot home with two kids. Again we asked ourselves, what have we got to lose?

At this point, I was working in Corvallis at a reading clinic, which I absolutely loved. We didn’t want to pull Kristiana from school, so since we moved in December we commuted for a while for work and school—until she finished her kindergarten year.

Since I’d had three interviews in Hermiston but no job to show for them, I was wary of applying for work in Salem. I laid low for a while, then had a low-volume tutoring business for a time. It became clear though that I would need to work outside the home. I believed I wanted to work in a Christian school, even though I knew the pay was not as high. I got a job at a school called Cornerstone Christian, teaching grades one through three.

I struggled and burned the midnight oil. I’d never had my own classroom of one grade, let alone three! The girls missed me, for it seemed that even when I was home I was always doing schoolwork. Honestly, I was trying to wrap my head around how to have three different things going at once in one classroom and be able to help everyone who needed help. It was not a natural way of thinking for me, and the more ideas people tried to give me, the more overwhelmed I became. But this was my first class! I had to make it work. But how?

One day, I had a terribly failed lesson when my principal came to observe—I got so discombobulated that I had to stop in the middle and do story time. After that, my friend Vonnie (a fellow teacher at the school and friend I’d known for many years) met me in the hall. All she had to do was ask how things went, and I burst into tears. I remember saying, “I don’t think I can do this.” I felt I was failing at the one thing I had been told I was born to do. And it felt awful.

After one month in, I resigned—I felt God give me a peace about it and release me. But emotionally, I felt like I must be from the Island of Misfit Teachers. In my heart, I wasn’t sure I’d ever recover.

Not long after that, I began subbing for the Salem-Keizer School District, as well as a couple other outlying districts. Truth be told, I enjoyed working for the “country schools” the most. Salem-Keizer had lots of rules—lots of things subs couldn’t do, particularly in regard to classroom discipline. It was way different than working in Christian school. For one thing, I could always bring God into the equation—and address matters of the heart from a Christ-centered perspective. I missed being able to do that and felt like I was in foreign territory to some degree. I had a couple really bad teaching experiences where the kids were so badly behaved, I told the district I would never sub in those particular schools again. But for the most part, it was acceptable. Not entirely fulfilling, but do-able.

Then I got a job offer. A teacher was retiring mid-year, and I would be teaching at a middle school. Little did I know, this was one of the “rougher” schools in the district—one that housed not only some gang members but a lot of gang wannabes. If my classroom management skills were lacking before, they were about to be put to the ultimate test. Not only that—the students had grown unaccustomed to actually working. I was to be the seventh and eighth grade reading and language arts teacher for the second half of the year…mostly with kids who for the past several months hadn’t been required to do much of anything. And their attitudes said “make me.”

After that experience—which one staff member referred to as “the class from hell,” I felt even more convinced that Christian school would be my niche…if I ever taught again.

We enrolled Kristiana in third grade and Kalina in preschool at Cornerstone in 2000. I was then expecting another baby, whom we’d decided would be our last. I became as involved as a volunteer as I possibly could. I did the Friday Fun Lunch program our second year there--with baby Josiah then in tow, filled in for a teacher who had to be out for a few weeks due to medical reasons, and in 2002 helped spearhead a Young Authors program for our school.

After working for a year at a private school as a reading specialist (through a Salem-Keizer grant), I started another tutoring business and with double the clients I’d had before, but I continued to sub occasionally under our principal at the time, Brad Wallace.

In 2003 I applied for a job at the school and was extremely disappointed, even hurt, when I didn’t get hired. But I still wanted to do something useful. My heart was definitely there, and my girls were thriving. Would I ever teach again? I somehow felt I wasn’t cut out for classroom teaching. I liked working with individual students or small groups of kids. Maybe that was what I was meant for. But the bills continued to come.

Kalina’s fourth grade year, another parent, Paige, and myself had a vision to start a library. Our school’s “library” consisted of some old Christian biographies and a couple rows of Hardy Boys books. We drew up a proposal, got thrift store and donated books, and received some hands-on training from an experienced Christian school librarian. I loved doing library with my friend, running our crazy read-a-thons, and seeing the kids get so excited about reading. We poured our hearts into it, and it was amazing. Especially that first year. But eventually, God had other things in mind. The library was to serve as my launching pad. Sure, I’d had a couple short-term jobs, but at this point I still felt like I’d never truly be a “real teacher.” Maybe I was just a sub.