Small talk

Art teachers are often the rejects of the teachers' lounge...as in life, many times...but I digress...at school we miss daily drama of constant classroom behavior, rarely dish out homework and thereby suffer no angst over failures on the part of our students to complete, return, or submit their homework, and cycle through a lot more kids in a lot less time; we don't have the benefit (?) of that classroom intimacy found in academics. Consequently, we have little drama to share in the teachers' lounge, at the water cooler, or anywhere else in the work place and probably a lot less interest in hearing it as well. Additionally, I venture to guess most art teachers are far more antisocial than your average educator.
Thus, in substitute teacher land, I really just like to stick to my home base, my "safe zone", the room to which I was directed at the start of the day, and the desk from behind which I monitor monotonous tasks performed by frustrated students all day long.

Unfortunately, one cannot go a whole day without a visit to the restroom.


As soon as I abandon the safety of my sub placement safe zone and go out wandering, hunting a child-free lavatory or trying to locate the "lunchroom" to heat up my highly delicious highly nutritious Campbell's condensed, I am inevitably captured, like the four-legged victim of a deer-spotter's utility light shone from an inappropriately obnoxious utility vehicle, in a moment of smalltalk with a colleague. Said colleague usually initiates our awkward meeting with some benign and unoriginal phrase such as "is everyone eating lunch in their rooms??" while standing before the microwave line awaiting their turn at warm Campbell's and leering over an empty lunch table. Or, "are they giving you too much trouble today??" while passing my quaint and quiet post during planning periods. Or, my personal favorite, flicking their emerald green sub ID and grinning, "who you in for???". Within two words I can tell my converse-er is not a teacher at the school. It's another substitute. The insincerity in their voice is like a lighthouse beacon in the night; imposing, unmistakable. Dawning wide and eager eyes the common substitute, I've learned, throws out one cliché quip after another, evidently seeking some approval, acceptance or other justification. The whole experience is like watching the behavioral instincts of an exotic animal. Here it seems the imposer's target audience is the "in" crowd at school, in substitute-teacher-land this being the real and permanent staff. The actual teachers. Perhaps they think I am...but then my green substitute badge flickers in the overhead fluorescent light...

Their fall-back plan: some underlying drive for substitute bragging rights (sounds like: "...come here often? I sub here every day.") to move oneself, in one's own eyes, up the substitutes' hierarchy. And this is where my conversation heads- ridiculous competition, bad soup, insincerity, evoking faint memories of my high school experience, impending ill-timed introspection ( I hand-wrote this blog on standard lined notebook paper while watching the execution of inane age-appropriate school work at my substitute post) .

As I walked my luke-warm soup back to the safety zone it dawned on me: inevitably, even for the adults in a school, its always a popularity contest.