Sometimes it’s just about making it through the weeks without letting on that you don’t know the answers

In your students’ classroom, there’s Morah: smooth, familiar, and predictable. The superhero.

Then there’s you, the substitute.

Substitute teaching means six weeks of high pressure and high pay. It means a ready-made class and start-from-scratch lesson prep. It means a strong framework and an unnerving unfamiliarity. It means well-established classroom policies that the students know better than you.

As a substitute teacher, you enter the classroom as a guest and have to instantly become its master. You display just the right combination of dignity, I’ve got this — while relying on the students to fill in all the unknowns you never thought to ask Morah before she sailed off into her maternity leave, leaving you stranded in a sea of questions.

And there are so many questions. Sometimes it’s just about making it through the weeks without letting on that you don’t know the answers.

You don’t have the crutch of a long-standing relationship behind you when dealing with a recalcitrant student. You don’t have that intimate knowledge of who can handle a difficult Rashi, who to allow to hide behind their Chumash without ever reading aloud, who to challenge and who to gently encourage.

You barely have a handle on the material you’re preparing, and you hope you’re not repeating, or worse, contradicting, a lesson that Morah gave a few weeks ago. You breathe a sigh of relief when a lesson passes undisturbed, because if you’d mess up, you would know, and the highest praise is when the students take to your lesson as naturally as if you were Morah herself.

And then, just when things are proceeding as smoothly as a frozen lake in midwinter, you schedule a test. And you suddenly notice cracks in the ice, and the steady glide of your skates turns into a swerve to avoid a crested wave that froze in place. You’re disoriented but your students are all watching so you need to pretend you were just doing a figure eight, because hey, I got this.

Still, it’s hard to think fast when you’re so unsure.