In this chapter, I will create a narrative of what I learned of subbing, an ethnography of myself, to eviscerate the process of discovery that substitute teaching entails, so that my own ethnographic path can be traveled by others who wish to make further discoveries. Here I want to outline the form of subjectivity which subs are constrained to enter, and thus to outline not only the limitations and opportunities of "the sub as researcher," but also to detail the contours of the "political structure" of the substitute teacher, to show subbing as it exists beside the latent purposes of schooling.

I get up at 6:15 in the morning, and prepare to go to work by brushing my teeth, using the toilet, shaving, and showering, when the phone rings at 7:30am, by which time I am dressed to go to work.

At this time, I usually have an assignment already, either because I called a sub caller (Hill USD) or because a sub-calling machine called me and offered me an assignment, which I accepted by punching the appropriate number on the keypad of my touch-tone telephone (Valley USD). But for this week, the machine for Valley USD is down, and on this day, the sub caller from Hill USD, and the sub caller from East Hill USD, do not have work for me.

At any rate, back to my description of the particular day I wish to illustrate here. I pick up the telephone receiver, and the voice on the other end is the secretary from Valley Unified School District, who offers me a choice between two assignments, both of them to teach 5th grade. I can choose to go either to School A or School B. I choose School A because, last I heard, School B was a "fundamental school," with a dress code of coat and tie for substitute teachers, and I have no ready coat-and-tie outfit to wear. The sub calls me back in five minutes and pressures me to go to School B. I say, "but that's a fundamental school, and I have no coat and tie ready." She says, that's OK, School B is no longer a fundamental school. Dress casually. (I heard later that the notion of "fundamental school" appeared to be tied to some desire for "traditional schooling," and that they once required a dress code for teachers that required women to wear dresses and men to wear ties, except that a teacher sued the District over this policy and managed to get the school to withdraw it.) I have barely enough time to check the e-mail and to put my shoes on and drive off to School B, where I park in the faculty parking lot and walk in the front door of the main building of the school, turning left and opening a glass door that is the front door of the school's main office, walking to the front desk of the office. I hand the time card to the secretary and tell her that I am here to sub a 5th grade class. The secretary tells me to come back to the teacher's lounge, where the teacher's boxes are. She hands me the key to the room (which she obtained while I was waiting at the front desk) and the attendance sheet, and tells me where the rest rooms are, and where the class I will be working in that day is.

I walk to the classroom I will be in charge of, a portable in back of the school as it used to be before the neighborhood's population expanded. There are at least a dozen portables in this part of the school grounds, arranged in two rows with a courtyard between them. The District had to buy a large number of portables to accomodate the extra children, when the neighborhood population went up. I open the front door of the portable with the key , and walk into the portable, where I observe a piano in one corner that has been painted yellow, a large number of desks, a CD player-boom box in another corner, the teacher's desk in one corner, where I head immediately and begin reading the lesson plan that will dictate what I do with this class that day.

The class lines up in front of the classroom in two rows, one for boys and one for girls. I welcome them into the classroom and explain to them that I am "Mr. F.," that they can use my full name "Fassbinder" if they like but that nobody likes to pronounce my name, that I speak both English and Spanish, and that I understand well that they are to be well-behaved through the day I am in charge of them as their teacher-for-the-day...

This is a narrative of how one particular day begins as a substitute teacher, from a particular day of subbing. But the beginning of subbing for me is more than the narrative of a particular day, it has been a narrative of how I found out about subbing, about what one has to do to be a substitute teacher, and it is this narrative I will mainly discuss in this chapter, to elicit a process of knowing that . I will start with a historical narrative of how I found out about substitute teaching, and continue, after I am finished, with a description of the typical daily narrative

I was attracted to substitute teaching as a job that would pay well, with good hours, for someone like myself with academic experience and a bachelor's degree but not a lot of "documentable skills" (such as they counted in the labor market of suburban southern California). I had little clue of what the need for subs or the pay for subs was until I saw an advertisement in a local paper, that the County of Outlands needed substitute teachers and substitute instructional aides. So, after going to an employment fair at East Valley High School, I was put on the list of the County of Outlands, and I went to various special education locations, from April of 1988 to June of 1988. The next year, I signed up with East Valley Joint Union High School District, asked them for english and math assignments, and enrolled at a California State University campus in a program leading to a credential in math and english. I tried to get through student teaching, and found that being a student teacher was far more difficult and less satifying than was being a substitute teacher. I quit student teaching in the middle, quit the program at Cal State, and went to graduate school in a Department of English.

While going to graduate school, I went back into subsitute teaching, for two years (1990-1991, and 1991-1992), with the County of Outlands, a "district" that is composed of individual special education classrooms which are administered directly through the County Superintendent of Schools' Office (and not through any specific district) and also with Backcountry Unified School District. I found the County of Outlands to provide relaxed teaching work, and Backcountry USD had some rather stressful assignments.

The "County" of Outlands "Schools" assignments were "special education" assignments. As I found out later, Public Law 94-142 requires that students who are diagnosed as being unable to function in typical classrooms (and at that time, the typical classrooms in California all had between 28 and 32 students), were put in "special education" classrooms, where there were instructional aides and where the student ratios could be as low as was necessary. Of course, none of the lessons I was to deliver were at grade level. But I generally enjoyed subbing for the County; the adult assistance of the instructional aides was a great security net, that someone was always there to tell me what was the appropriate thing to do at any point in time. And I could tell that being a sub in a special education classroom was much easier than being a regular teacher, for the regular teachers had to fill out "IEP" or individualized education program forms detailing what the students had learned and what they were going to learn, and from what I could tell, the students in these programs hadn't learned very much at all.

The easiest assignment I had when I worked for the County was an eight-day assignment at a high school, where the students in the special education class were extremely shy of new teachers and there were plenty of adult teachers and aides to take care of the few students that had to enroll in that class. The only way I could be helpful in that class was to bring doughnuts to the students and teachers as they arrived. Sometimes I had to change the diapers of students who had not been able to learn toilet-training.

When my coursework for the Ph. D. was finished, I went back to subbing again, this time to understand the schools I was in, and to make money that I wasn't making as a fly-on-the-wall observer at Local Elementary School, a school which hired me to substitute teach one of their upper-grade classes for two-and-a-half weeks, which I discuss below. At any rate, when I went back to subbing, my dissertation subject was reworked, to include as its primary topic substitute teaching at Valley USD, since that is where I had the most consistent work. It took me a long time to get on the list at Valley USD. The requirements that needed to be fulfilled before one could be put on this list were; one needed to have three employment recommendations, one needed to turn in all of one's undergraduate transcripts, as well as having to turn in all of the other documents (TB test, proof of having passed the CBEST (California Basic Educational Skills Test), and an application) and pass an interview. I applied to be on Valley USD's substitute list in September, and there was a persistent confusion in the Personnel office as to whether I had sent them the three recommendations they requested; eventually I had one of my recommenders send me the recommendation personally (the Personnel Office claimed to have no record of the one he sent them directly), which I copied and sent to the Personnel Office. Then there was a confusion in Personnel as to whether I needed to turn in my graduate transcripts. The people in this Office appeared to believe that my graduate record was an undergraduate record, until I pointed out to them (during an off-day when I was not working for Backcountry Unified School District), that I didn't need to turn in these transcripts. The secretary who was handling my case said, then, that "we'll be calling you." Well, they eventually put me on the list two months later, when I walked into the office and demanded an interview. At about the same time, I was put on Hill USD's list too. Backcountry USD was not giving me enough work to live on, in March of 1997 at that time.

As it turned out, Backcountry USD had removed me from the sub list, and they sent me a letter a month or so after my last assignment with them, asking me to meet with the Assistant Superintendent of Personnel in the District Personnel office. At that meeting, I was asked about some incident I knew nothing about, that occured at a time and in a classroom that the Assistant Superintendent would not specify. I denied knowing anything about this vague allegation that was being leveled against me. The Assistant Superintendent said, "We'll do our own investigation of this incident," and I left the room. The next week, I was called by the automated subsitute caller. I could thus presume that I had not been blacklisted by the district, although Backcountry did not use me as a substitute teacher the following year.

My first understanding that there was some political importance to the way school was taught was in substitute teaching with East Valley School District, a lower-grade school district that used, by districtwide mandate, Lee Canter's Assertive Discipline as a classroom discipline policy. I substitute taught with East Valley from September to December of 1988, and quit because, even though I liked substituting lower-grade bilingual classes where I was asked to speak Spanish throughout the classroom day, I disliked being asked to enforce the system of school discipline used in each classroom in the District. Canter's system involves a system of rewards and demerits that are to be issued impartially according to whether the student's behavior hasn't or has followed a set of rules. Canter reminds me of Watsonian behavioralism, or perhaps (more vividly) of Pavlov's experiments where scientists could make dogs salivate upon hearing the sound of a bell. Students may learn to behave well under Canter's system when the regular teacher is there, but when I was running the classroom as a substitute teacher, the children would talk endlessly about whose name belonged on the board and whose name didn't belong on the board, and this irritated me, that I felt that children conditioned under this system could find nothing better to do with their time than discuss whose name was or wasn't on the board. What was generally learned from this three-month experience, was that classroom discipline was going to be a prominent part of my teaching experiences, but that what made substitute teaching disciplinary was also what made it disagreeable. (Canter's system, furthermore, is very popular in Valley USD as well, though it is not district-mandated there.)

In fact, I might guess that my main concern about classroom discipline (and the reason I have reserved the last chapter of this dissertation for a discussion of "classroom management," involving "classroom discipline" but also much more), was that I regretted that its mastery, the task of keeping large numbers of children "in line" within the confines of classrooms, was the main qualifying condition for new teachers, and one of the main qualities whereby a substitute teacher might "control" the classroom, appearing to simulate a teacherly quality of the regular teacher. My own idealism about teaching had led me to believe that somehow I was to magically reunite classroom ritual with the ideals of "learning" which allowed me to learn so much when I myself was faithful to them. My allegiance to "learning" as a raison d'etre of the educational system gave me, I felt, license to devalue classroom discipline, and look for ways of teaching everyone in a classroom without heavily concerning myself with whether their classroom behaviors met certain standards of decorum.

Now, having provided my general personal history of substitute teaching, in order to show what sort of learning process substitute teaching provides (and to elicit something of the long-term knowledges that can be acquired in doing this type of research), I want to go over the daily ritual of substitute teaching, to focus more particularly on the sub's acquisition of knowledge about daily routines.

A typical day of substitute teaching might involve:

1) I get up in the morning, sometimes when a phone call comes in with an assignment. When I was working with districts that used a human being as a sub caller, I often had a choice as to what sort of assignment I was allowed to choose. During the 1990s, however, Backcountry USD and Valley USD automated the sub caller, and replaced the human being with a machine that called my phone number, or at least with a human being that fed instructions to a machine that would call my phone number. With the automated programs these districts used to call me, I was given the choice of one assignment, take it or leave it.

There was another option during the period I worked with Valley USD: get an assignment with Hill USD. In practice this meant persistently calling the sub caller's message machine. If the sub caller had an assignment, she would leave the assignment on my message machine, and I would go directly to the assignment she left, without needing to confirm with her.

For two weeks during 1998, the machine at Valley USD went off-line. Replacing the machine was a human sub caller; yet the human sub caller would often call quite late in the day to offer me an assignment. This changed the dynamics of getting work; if the district that was calling me early was then calling me late, I was more tempted to accept assignments from other districts than Valley. After that two weeks, a new machine was installed at Valley, a machine that I could call before 5pm after work to get assignments for the next day, rather than having to wait until after 5pm to get the machine to call me. This was a convenience for me, for it meant much less time spent at night waiting for the phone to ring.

2) I prepare for the classroom day. Usually this means no more than preparing a lunch and selecting some books from my library to be read by the students during the "quiet reading time" ritual that is commonly scheduled sometime during the school day in most classrooms I have visited. During the assignment at Southern Elementary, it meant having to schedule activities for the upcoming day, and it meant having create a schedule for work, and to correct work done the previous day. (Since only a minority of the students in that class actually did work, it wasn't surprising that my attempts to complete these tasks failed for that assignment.)

3) I check in with the secretary in the front office of the school. This occurred at 8am every morning I subbed at Valley, whose elementary schools are all on the same daily schedule. I give the secretary my time card (except with Hill USD, which didn't use time cards) and the secretary gives me a key to the classroom and (sometimes) directs me to the teacher's box in the teachers' workroom, which contains the attendance sheet.

4) I go to the classroom, armed with the attendance sheet, my key, and my daypack, where I open the door to the classroom and look around, first on the teacher's desk and then on any other tables in the classroom, for the lesson plan. When I found the lesson plan, I would read it. I would read first for things I was required to do right away with the children, looking for the equipment I was to use in doing these things, and then if there was any spare time I would look for the equipment to be used the rest of the day. If there was something I really didn't understand, I would call the front office when it was convenient, and ask them to explain the lesson plan for me, especially if I thought it meant something to the teacher that I conform to her lesson plan.

The rituals of communication in the public school system separate out into types of disciplinary ritual, that can be regarded as "typical" of substituting experience.

1) "Control" demands placed by adults upon my classroom, acting as administrative authorities:

I experienced this a lot in a 5-6 grade assignment I had for eleven days in November and December of 1997, at Local Elementary School; the old teacher, who had been these children's teacher for a year and three months, came in to reprimand the students, the principal (who suspendecame to reprimand them, the janitor reprimanded them, and the teacher in the portable next door came to reprimand them. I was not blamed for their misbehavior, yet I felt I was implicated in the misbehavior of the class as a whole even as my efforts to gain classroom control were applauded. Perhaps I was being implicated in their misbehavior because the school principal wanted an additional justification to cut my leadership of that class short, and bring in an off-track teacher with Valley USD, who was also a regular teacher at that school. At any rate, I was only assigned to teach at that post from mid-November until Christmas at the latest, anyway. So I might infer from my experience that my replacement as a substitute was a testament to the replaceable nature of the substitute teacher as District employee, and not necessarily of any failing of mine at the art of substitute teaching. But there are many other experiences I can remember when outside authority-figures came into my classroom and justified my presence in authoritarian ways for their own specific purposes.

I remember being asked to substitute a 3rd grade classroom for two days, in a school at Backcountry USD in the Fall of 1996, which had lost its regular teacher, and which didn't have me or anyone else as its replacement sub. The principal came into my room after I had asked for help controlling the office, and screamed at my students in a derogatory sort of way. There was, in the districts I subbed, often a general demand placed on students to "behave themselves," that superceded whetever slim autonomy I was granted as the teacher-for-the-time of the classroom I was placed in.

In one sixth-grade classroom in a school at Valley USD, the neighboring teacher came in and sternly lectured my class about the importance of being quiet, and soon after that, the principal came in to lecture my students: "Now Mr. F. doesn't have to go to school any more, but you do..." From my journal:

Thursday, March 18, 1998

At the beginning of the day I walked into the old, small office and handed the secretary my time card. There was something I was being asked to wait for, some papers or something, while the secretary was on the phone. I went to the room to read the lesson plan. There was a standard book lesson plan, something I couldn't read very well. I went back to the office and received a faxed lesson plan. The room I was to teach in was a dimly lit, beige room with books and science equipment in one corner of the room and blackboards adorning the other corner. It was connected by a door inside the building to an octagonal room with computers, that was also connected to three other rooms; I stored my bicycle in the ocatgonal room. We were to start the day with a math assignment, something about converting improper fractions to mixed fractions. Everyone claimed they had already done the math assignment, and so I did some math tricks while we were waiting for the Mad Libs to be ditttoed (with the principal in attendance, I dared the class to come up with a math problem I could not solve in my head), and when they came I taught everyone to do Mad Libs. I had brought a a book of Mad Libs, which are a parlor game, played with a partner, which one needs to know the parts of speech, grammar, to play. It took two Mad Libs before most of the students learned how to play, and at that time the class became very loud, and another teacher, with a thick Jamaican accent, came in to chastise our class, and then the principal came into our class to chastize it, and then the lesson plan recommended: "10:42 -- 11:00 Eng. Adjectives are needed for S.R.A.. Trial test in Spelling lesson 17.

I didn't recognize the spelling lesson on my desk, and at any rate the students wanted to proceed to the work in their folders, which was based on these readers and some comprehension questions they were supposed to answer. Some of them seemed truly to enjoy this work. I had Anna, a student, hand out the folders, and count them when they were retrieved just before lunch.

After lunch, we were supposed to work on country reports, a matter which was hard to police as there were a lot of students wandering around the room and wasting time with talk, people whom I probably should have sent to the office but didn't. They were loud and I had to yell at the misbehaving students to sit in their seats, over their voices, when the teacher with a Jamaican accent came in to yell at my students some more. Then there was another science class, which came from another room, which I had read a science lesson and which I sent back into their rooms early. I then had my class, just back from PE, which was to do a science lesson on light and concave and convex lenses, all of it seatwork involving reading the text and answering the questions at the end of the section. I talked a lot of sloppy stuff about light and seeing Jupiter in binoculars, in an attempt to liven up a lesson. Apparently this was a GATE class, as I learned toward the end of the day while looking through the teacher's notes. The day ended, I copied the lesson plans on the copy machine in the octagonal room, I picked up my time card and left. (End of journal entry.)

In the various SDC (special day class) classes I accepted while at Valley, there was a rigid system of control, usually maintained in my presence by the instructional aide who was there during most of the school day, and intended to keep students on task, even though these students were significantly "below grade level" in their studies.

2) Student behavior labeled as "unwanted" according to (my) adult definitions of behavior; semi-rebellion:

This often expressed itself as endless chatter between students (a topic which I will discuss in more detail below), and could also express itself as fighting between students, "tattling" (especially in grades K-4), often-repeated requests to use the bathroom or the drinking fountain, or refusal to do work. Teachers generally labeled these behaviors as "students pulling one over on the sub," yet what this label made clear was a definition of the teacher role that made the teacher into a judge of wanted and unwanted student behaviors, compliances and resistances. The subject of student resistance is covered best, and very thoroughly, in Peter McLaren's ethnographic study of schooling in an immigrant neighborhood of Toronto titled Schooling as a Ritual Performance, and no synopsis of his book will do it justice. Suffice it to say that I observed that the sub can be drawn into the dialectic of student resistance and teacher authoritarianism described by McLaren, where the students sporadically attempt to set up a private "streetcorner state" within the confines of the classrooms, against the teacher attempts to set up a "student state" for the students through authoritarian bullying.

3) Periods of elective student activity intentionally scheduled by teacher or administrative authorities:

In Valley Unified School District, this mostly involved "centers" as it was expressed in Kindergarten classrooms, or periods of elective activity that were meant to soak up time that teachers found "hard to manage" -- at one school at Backcountry USD, the last half-hour of every Friday was made into outdoor recess supervised by the teachers themselves. Observed rituals of elective student activity differ from recess only in that they must necessarily be supervised by the teachers themselves, rather than (as was often the case, especially at Valley USD and Backcountry USD) by noon duty aides. Recess at Hill USD was largely supervised by the teachers themselves, but in this resepct they acted as noon duty aides, rather than as teachers held responsible for particular groups of twenty to thirty-two students, as they would be in a "classroom situation."

Sometimes elective student activity could be the only "out" for me as a sub -- in the 5th grade class I mentioned above, the class that was in revolt, the only thing I could do with those students, I felt, was to take them out to the playground, let them have a recess supervised by me, and report any serious problems to the principal through those few students willing to run errands for me. Some lower elementary classrooms were very largely run through elective activities -- with these classrooms I found it best to try to find an activity that each student was willing to do, and maintain my own peace of mind by dismissing insignificant conflicts between students (when they would fight over use of a book or pencil) and mediating significant conflicts.

4) Entertainment ritual led by the substitute teacher of his (in my case) own volition:

The literature of substitute teaching, specifically elementary (grades K-6) substitute teaching, commonly mentions the notion of a "bag of tricks," a cluster of activities the substitute can engage in case a lesson plan is not submitted to the substitute teacher, or in case the substitute teacher finds the lesson plan inadequate to the situation he/she finds him/herself in. My experience as a substitute teacher led me to believe that the "authority," the willingness to comply, that elementary students grant to a substitute teacher will often correspond to the entertainment value perceived in the substitute-teacher's proposals for classroom ritual, the liminoid character of such ritual. Such sub-led entertainment rituals might also have educational value, of course, and in that regard I felt obliged as a "professional" to make them learning experiences.

I found that proposing such "entertainment ritual" to be an easier thing to do when I was teaching a lower-grade elementary-school class, a class with only 20 students in it, rather than a class with the 30-32 students that was typical of classes in grades 4-6 in the state of California. Oftentimes the entertainment rituals I led were connected to a common teacher-directed arrangement-of-students-for-ritual called "centers." When I became proficient enough as a substitute teacher to use the logic of "centers," situations where small groups of students (although these "small groups" could constitute half the class, as they did in one class I substitute-taught) would work with more than one piece of educational equipment, I found "centers" a successful vehicle for entertainment ritual. I found that it was at times somewhat easy for me to create "centers" not merely for Kindergartners but for first and second grade students as well; these centers were directed centers, but I could think of "fun things to do" for each of them. Children would like it when I read to them, which (for me) usually meant asking questions to them, about their experience, as it would be related to a book which I was reading to them.

I could set up a creative writing lesson where I would show first and second graders how to make little books with two 8 1/2" by 11" pieces of paper, folded in half and stapled together at the seam, and decorated with words and pictures. This would keep students entertained in that they could entertain each other for at least an hour at a time. Often I would combine this lesson with peer review of the books (having students read each other's books to insure that each page had pictures and words on it), and with sessions where students could volunteer to sit in the teacher's chair and read their books in front of the whole class.

When the lesson plans demanded a "quiet reading time," a time that was often the most joyous time of a particular school day, I would bring out a collection of "Magic School Bus" books, books that were accessories to a very popular PBS animated television series about a class of students that had magical adventures that taught them about various important concepts in science. Students would commonly flock to my pile of books, and I would feel obligated to stand near them to make sure they would not fight over books, that everyone had one book (that no particular student was taking more than one), that the students knew how to share the books.

There were times when I could use the position of substitute teacher to elicit student validation of my role as a "liminoid" servant, as a purveyor of rituals perceived as containing fun and choice. The above constitutes some examples of such rituals.

5) Spontaneous whole-class student actions

Sometimes the students would all agree to get a drink of water at once, and so I was besieged with requests for a drink of water, from an entire class of 20, each of them individually. There were times when a whole class would agree on an activity to be pursued. In one second grade class, a class I was subbing for one day, where the teacher was using Lee Canter's "Assertive Discipline," I allowed the class to have "free time," which most of them chose to use playing with an array of computers. At the same time, I had agreed with a neighboring teacher that we were going to show a film in her room late in the day. When the time came to show the film, each and every one of them told me that he or she did not want to see the film, an indication that they wanted to continue using the computers in the workstation. It was only through repeated coercion that I was able to get all students to crowd into the room where the film was being shown.

At one time, I had a combination Kindergarten and first-grade class, an unusual combination for an elementary school classroom, where the I had to "get through the day" as the only adult supervising a classroom of eight first-graders after the Kindergartners had spent the morning with myself and a tutor who was probably recruited from a local college. The lesson plan asked me to show a film, which the students did not watch, and then I was to ask the first graders to write about the film. When they all said they didn't want to, I asked them what they wanted to do. After encouraging them to read a story (or listen to me read a story), which they didn't want to do either, I let them write on the writing board, which was a white board which they could write on (and erase) with erasable ink markers. Finally one of them suggested that she could take out paints and paint with them, a suggestion which quickly became popular. I responded to this idea by asking them to put newspaper under the paints they used and pictures they painted. The students behaved responsibly with the paints and put them away at the end of the day. I tried to use this experience as an opportunity to teach these students something about responsibility and co-operation.

6) Students helping the substitute teacher perform the "normal" routine

This was often the case when I was substituting a first or second grade class (most often a first grade class), and the lesson plan was vague about how to perform the ritual known to these classes as "calendar." In classrooms that used Lee Canter's "Assertive Discipline" (tm) rituals of classroom management, students would often "help" me by setting up the list of good and badly behaving students. Students would often "fill me in," as well, by telling me rewards the teacher would mete out for good behavior or for completed and turned-in homework. 7) "Anti-public" student and teacher behaviors

This is really two types of behavior: 7a) Teacher behavior discouraging publicity, 7b) Student refusal of publicity -- but in one experience I had as a "long-term substitute teacher," I was implicated in an ongoing process of 7a) at the school where I was teaching, while witnessing an active process of 7b). During the first twenty-two days of the 1997-1998 school year, when I was a "long-term substitute teacher" for Southern Elementary School, I experienced a dynamic to the public behaviors of students and teachers that disdained the public life of the school while encouraging separate private spheres for student life, one for student peer-group behavior, and another for student behavior under the control of the teacher. Now, the notion of the "student state," the state of student life when under the control of teachers within the classrom, and the notion of the "streetcorner state," the state of student life when participating in peer-group talk, shouldn't be news to those who have read Peter McLaren's Schooling as a Ritual Performance, but in my observations of life at Southern, I could observe behaviors where the two states of ritual existence, as they were performed, there, collaborated to produce a "privatized" form of public life.

Teachers at Southern revealed to me some of the ways they had of getting control of their classrooms, a control that appeared to them to be urgently necessary as, as one teacher confided to me, students at that school were generally "wild." Other teachers told me they would publicly humiliate disobedient students, they told me they would hand out homework until the students would be quiet at the end of the day (privatizing the ritual of home life through homework as a response to surplus student publicity, i.e. talk), they commonly, like much of Valley and many other southern California districts, used the "Assertive Discipline" practice of putting the names of rule-breaking students upon the board, a practice which discourages publicity by allowing the entire class, a potential "public sphere" within the school environment, to know the names of those whose behavior is to be discouraged; thus through this practice publicity itself is to be discouraged (as it produces as byproduct, emanating from the students' mouths, the negative form of discourse known as "chismes" or in English "tattlings," student accusations against each other made directly at the teacher, as if possibly intended to incite the teacher toward more punitive publicity).

Perhaps the most tell-tale sign that publicity was publicly discouraged at Southern was in my misguided efforts to create a public sphere within the classroom through the practice of "community circle" (following Gibbs (1995)): most of the students appeared to resist my efforts to get them to talk to the whole group (as fervently as they resisted my efforts to get them to listen to me, efforts which they were more used to hearing from teachers), and they mostly resisted my efforts to get them to speak to the whole group, even revealing to me (as many of them did, on one of my last days teaching that class) that they thought of this whole-class conversation ritual (that I was trying to coerce upon them) as a form of shame. The peer-group conversation that was that class's choice, on the other hand, was divided somewhat strictly upon gender lines, with girls rarely talking to boys and vice versa, and it was often directed toward shaming other students in front of their peer groups. Its claim upon classroom ritual was nearly infinite, disappearing now and then when I tested them or (to a certain extent) during a math assignment. Apparently testing was a ritual that could persuade these students to submit to the rigors of the "student state," and math was the most private of learning experiences within the curriculum I could establish within that classroom.

Thus I concluded that much of the conflict between student peer-group life and teacher demands for classroom control made its mark upon student life, at Southern and perhaps also throughout much of Valley USD, through "privatizing" publicity, publicity that discourages publicity. All I have really come up with, here, is a communicative clue to public life in schools: more research, of course, will be necessary to assess the significance of such a clue. The category or categories described above might allow us to consider the category below:

8) Student talk (as it maneuvered around teacher-talk-to-students)

I observed this even in classrooms I was merely observing, where teachers claimed to be "in command." Communication between students did not seem to come to a complete stop even when a class sat silently in front of a teacher, often shifting to a nonverbal realm to avoid being labeled as "talk." Discussion between individual students thus appeared to me, from the beginning of my exploration of the teaching profession, to be one of the most plentiful discursive resources available to a teacher. Such discussion appeared to me to be generally more plentiful as one moves up the grades in an elementary school context, from Kindergarten through sixth grades, although I would not argue for any direct correspondence between grade level and amount of classroom talk. It would seem, generally, that the schooling process is thusly engaged in a multiplication of discourses,

DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE DISTRICTS

Valley USD was, as the reader may have already understood, a district with many Mexican-origin students who were taught in Spanish in grades K-2, a fact which meant (for me) plenty of work with Valley, as I spoke Spanish. This was perhaps a privilege only for elementary school, and the lower grades at that, as the district policy appeared to "transition" the students to English-speaking classes by the third grade at the earliest. The fourth-grade class I had to teach at Southern Elementary School appeared to exist due to a decision not to transition students, perhaps an unusual decision in the context of Valley USD.

The cultural identity of the students, however, did not mean that such students behaved in a drastically different way than, for instance, the students at Hill USD, who were largely European-Americans whose classes were all conducted in English, with a significant minority of Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Latinos. In fact, the respect given to the cultural identity of Spanish-speakers at Valley USD, through Valley's extensive programs of bilingual and transitional education, appeared to be a matter of creating a climate of overall student conformity; the main argument for bilingual education as above a program of English-language immersion (the main way of integrating students at Hill USD whose parents spoke Spanish, or so it seemed), was that bilingual education allowed Spanish-speaking students to "stay with" their English-speaking peers in literacy and numeracy skills, whereas (it was argued) if they were to be forced through an immersion program in a Spanish-speaking area such as the area of Valley USD, they would "fall behind." (This was President Bill Clinton's main given reason for opposing Proposition 227, a proposition that will basically create a "poison pill" for bilingual education in the state of California, as the reader will learn in the subchapter below.)

POLITICAL OBSERVATIONS I MADE OF THE ENVIRONMENT UNDER STUDY The most important matter of politics that I observed in my year of subbing, mostly with Valley USD, was the matter of bilingual education. For reasons that appear related to the absence of other issues, one of the most "bankable" issues for the political elites in the latter half of the 1990s in the United States is education, and the issue that became most important, as the 1997-1998 nine-month school year drew to a close, was education.

A member of the Assembly of the State of California, Barbara Alby, had proposed bills, AB 1610 and AB 1612, which were passed by the State Assembly and the State Senate and signed by Governor Pete Wilson. These bills required all teachers, including substitutes, to get background checks by the California Department of Justice, who had to clear us teachers before we could work one day in a classroom. This bill passed on September 30, 1997. My credential expired October 31, 1997, and was a "30-day emergency" substitute credential, to be renewed each year. "30 day" in the credential name meant that one couldn't teach with such a credential for more than 30 days in any school year without another credential, which was called a "long-term substitute teacher" credential.

Before AB 1610 and AB 1612, teachers would renew credentials just before they expired, and one was granted a credential waiver until the credential application was renewed. Today, one needs approval of a background check in order to renew a teaching credential in the state of California. The district told me of this about two weeks before my credential expired, and I waited one week before I renewed my credential. The result? I was not called by the district for a week and a half, eight work days, before the District called me to say that my security check went through and that the substitute caller was to put me back on the list of available substitutes, to be called at any time (usually in the evening, for me, this year) between 5 and 9 in the evening, or between 5 and 9 in the morning, Monday through Friday. I thought of it, financially, as the loss of (potentially) more than $800 in wages.

Bilingual education was a political matter for two reasons. The first was the standardized test the students had to take (by virtue of a mandate coming from the state of California); this was the Stanford 9 achievement test, which is displayed at the Web site http://www.startest.org/ . The thing that made the Stanford 9 test a political thing was that the governor, Pete Wilson, had decreed that the test was to be given only in English. Since the meaning and use of this test was not made fully clear to its participants, it wasn't clear what political import the various relative scores, higher and lower, were to have, besides there being some sort of imputation that a school with higher test scores graduated "better-educated" students than a school with lower test scores.

The thing that made the test political despite this vagueness was the decision to test only in English, which meant that taking the test was rendered practically meaningless for those whose lack of language skills rendered them incapable of taking the test. Even so, districts around the State were required to give the test to all students, English ability or no, to all students between 2nd and 12th grades. In response, San Francisco Unified School District, at one point, made a district policy to not give the test to students without the ability to understand the test's directions in English, a policy which has apparently prompted a lawsuit from the State of California. A political conflict arose as a result of Stanford 9: the San Francisco Unified School District sued the State to block Wilson's mandate that limited-English ability students be required to take the Stanford 9 unless otherwise granted a parental waiver. San Francisco USD won its case in court. The other thing that appears to politicize bilingual education in California is the coming resolution of the passage of the Unz Initiative, which appeared on the June 1998 ballot as Proposition 227. Proposition 227 will, if it is successful, replace bilingual education throughout the state of California with "English immersion" education. Proposition 227, calling itself the "English for the Children" initiative, was popular from the beginning of its campaign as an initiative: it had a 63% voter approval rating according to a Harris Poll taken in March 1998, and was said by a Los Angeles Times article ("Bilingual Education Ban Widely Supported" by Cathleen Decker, 4/11/98, page A1) to have had wide support amongst California's voting citizens of all ethnic groups. It was passed in the June 1998 general election by a 22% margin of the voting electorate in California, and appears to have withstood, for the time being, the court challenge made against its passage by MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund). If 227 prevails, bilingual education, such as the teaching-in-Spanish I participated in daily at Valley USD, would be abolished by law in California. Instead, Kindergarten classes (and all other classes with Spanish and all other non-English-speaking students) would all become language-learning immersion classes, where students would learn only English as a Second Language. Such classes would be classified as "English language classrooms" where "the language of instruction used by the teaching personnel is overwhelmingly in the English language." (Proposition 227, article 2. 305.-306.) Thus Proposition 227 represents a discursive restriction upon teachers, a restriction symbolized by the teachers who attended the school board meeting of the Los Angeles Unified School District on July 21, 1998, wearing yellow gags around their mouths as a protest. (from Louis Sahagun's article "Prop. 227's 'Bumpy Ride,' " Los Angeles Times, 7/22/1998, p. B1.)

There is an interesting exception to this new law, listed in the wording of Proposition 227, that parents may apply to their children's schools to allow their children to be placed in a bilingual classroom under certain circumstances. There are three listed circumstances in Proposition 227; the first is for students who already speak English, and the second is for students under ten years of age, a qualification which doesn't apply to the majority of bilingual students. The third is for "children with special needs." It requires that children have been placed in English language classrooms for "a period of not less than thirty days during the school year," and that it is subsequently the informed belief of the school principal and educational staff that the child has such special physical, emotional, psychological, or educational needs that an alternate course of educational study would be better suited to the child's overall educational development. A written description of these special needs must be provided and any such decision is to be made subject to the examination and approval of the local school superintendent, under guidelines established by and subject to the review of the local Board of Education and ultimately the State Board of Education. (from the Web page at http://www.smartnation.org/wwwdocs/unz.htm.)

So, basically, a significant number of bureaucratic cogs must turn before the vast majority of limited English ability students would be able to gain exemptions from Proposition 227, including approval of the State Board of Education, without which no student gains exemption. Guidelines must be designed and met, and signatures must be gathered. Descriptions of "special need" must be accumulated in order to allow exemptions to have legal standing, or a bilingual education program could be successfully sued by any concerned citizen.

Strangely enough, for the flood of discussion that has come out of the mass media concerning Proposition 227, little has been said about what the public schools would look like if the Unz Initiative were to pass. In an article in The Nation magazine of 4/20/88, Gregory Rodriguez tells us that

Administrators at L.A. Unified, the largest school district in California and home to close to a quarter of the state's limited-English children, are predicting chaos if the ballot measure passes. In a preliminary review, district staff have painted a picture of a school district torn asunder, one with test scores dropping even lower than their current unacceptable lows. The lack of a pedagogical plan other than the one year of "sheltered English" makes it unclear how and what educators will teach newly transitioned students, let alone those whose bilingual programs collapse under them. (Rodriguez 18)

The issue at stake in Lau v. Nichols (1974) is one of whether school districts can "discriminate" in refusing to meet the needs of children who have a "language deficiency" in English. The issue at stake, then, with Proposition 227 is in whether or not the law it created "discriminates" against these same students. Lau v. Nichols maintains the implicit premise, however, that speaking another language than English is of no consequence in itself, that bilingual education exists not for language-learning skills in general but to remedy a "language deficiency" in English. This premise, combined with the failure of the No on 227 campaigns to discursively defend bilingual education in public, doubtless contributed to 227's success in gaining public votes. Castaneda v. Picard (648 F. 2d 989 (1981)) and Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1 (576 F. Supp. 1503 (1983)) are two cases that rely for the nature of their judgments on the requirement stated in Lau v. Nichols. Interestingly enough, I found out about these cases by persuing a carrel filled with handouts in the office of an elementary school in the Valley USD. These handouts warned parents, in English, that their children were limited English speakers and that the school had therefore decided to place them in a bilingual classroom, and that they had several options (including placing their children in English-language classrooms) available to them.

Curiously enough, this was the same elementary school where I visited teachers and students organizing a protest against Proposition 227. Castaneda v. Picard argues that school districts cannot group limited-English ability students as deficient in "general ability"; Keyes v. School Dist. No. 1 asks about one bilingual education program whether it was "based on a sound educational theory" and had "adequate resources, personnel, and practices." Implementations of Proposition 227, from district to district, may stand or fall on the status of judicial interpretations of educational theory in determining whether Proposition 227 discriminates against limited-English ability students.

So far, the courts (see Nick Anderson and Louis Sahagun's "Judge Refuses to Stand in Way of Prop. 227," Los Angeles Times, 7/16/98) have yet to explicate these precedents in the current context (from what little I can find in the newspapers), while allowing 227 to stand.

So conceivably Proposition 227, like Proposition 187 before it (a proposition which would have required teachers to inform the INS of the presence of suspected illegal immigrants in their classrooms, if it hadn't been invalidated in the judicial system after it was approved by the voters), may pass in a public vote, only to be later invalidated in a court of law. But, so far, the one court of law that has ruled on MALDEF's challenge to Proposition 227 has let it stand. The Oakland and San Francisco school districts "have pledged an all-out fight to preserve bilingual educatiion" (Sahagun and Anderson p. A13) the future will reveal the outcome of such a "fight."

"Full resistance" and "full compliance," however, would be inadequate as descriptions of the only two District strategies for coping with Proposition 227. A newspaper article by Louis Sahagun and Nick Anderson ("Schools Draw Up Plans to Implement Prop. 227", Los Angeles Times 7/21/98., pp. A1, A13) graphs a variety of different District responses as they have emerged so far. Los Angeles Unified proposes a program of "English immersion with an option for native language support." Fresno USD proposes a program of "English immersion with up to one-third of school day in native language." The authors speculate that "in a state with 1,000 school districts -- with each fiercely guarding its autonomy -- there may well be 1,000 Proposition 227 plans." (Sahagun and Anderson p. A 13)

As a discursive observation about 227, I would be remiss if I did not add that discussion of this political issue had in fact made its way into the classrooms where I taught. I did substitute-teach, for two days, in one classroom where the students were organizing a protest against Proposition 227. But, overall, the politicization of my classroom appeared to be an external thing, imposed upon the status quo of schooling from without. The encouragement of student initiative, though most manifestly displayed in the abovementioned classroom, appeared to have no overall effect upon the system, because it was in latent form. The march being planned was a children's event, a walk around the block. Of course, the ineffectual nature of politics as it is constructed in schools is so not out of any fault of schooling per se, that even in its most political forms it only produces latent politics, but because the concepts of learning and education, as they are commonly understood, bear upon the latent possibilities that students perceive in themselves, as this affects the possibilities the future brings to all of us.

School may have become an academic culture industry, bound up with the production of test scores and student portfolios and students and teachers who are to consume a set list of text books, pencils, dittos, and notebooks during an assigned period of time constituting "the school year." However, the reasons for schooling may be more bound up with the hopes of parents that their children "succeed" in school, and other idealisms about school, than it would with any collectively-agreed-upon statement that school produce some single tangible thing, in the way that the sugar industry produces sugar for instance. So there is a diffusion of purpose in schooling not captured by the culture industry metaphor.

This latent power of students as they learn in school, being not a mere political latency (as I have been discussing) but rather the potential of adult human being, appears to be relatively small amidst the present-day world of political/social drama, with its expensive campaigns (such as the statewide petitioning effort launched by millionaire Ron Unz to get Proposition 227 on the ballot in the first place) and the heteronomous economy of globalization today, where the prosperity of millions rests today on commodity prices. A view from above upon the vast urban/ industrial metropolises of California, from Sacramento to San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego, puts the latent possibilities of education in the perspective of a vast difference between the potential of today's schoolchildren and the disciplinary nature of human social systems around the globe as described by Foucault. What could schoolchildren do that would be genuinely "political" in this context? Two of them, in only one classroom I visited as a substitute, were allowed to organize a schoolwide protest of 227. That was the extent to which I saw Proposition 227 used by the system as an opportunity to learn about political power.

Manifest politics does not appear today to be something students and teachers create for themselves. The politics of education acts within a history of continuing statewide imposition of doctrines of education (such as the Unz Initiative's insistence that all bilingual education should consist of one-year immersion programs, or the politics of the STAR test throughout California). The people, the courts, the political agents have spoken, and the result is more mandates; intellectual capital has once again spoken, and the intellectual labor of teachers and students must once again change its product, as it had to change its product before with Lau v. Nichols and the various other mandates that produced the bilingual education system in the first place. Schools remain places of disciplinary ritual, the power of their students latent (not yet of voting age), dormant (not voicing the discourses of political power) and tranquilized (with no political power over their own processes of education, which remains in the hands of teachers following mandates).

My own writings seem to offer a glimpse of school life in southern California as a world of work, play, and talk, a world that is privatized and set away from the politics that appears to it as an adult mandate. In the next chapters, I will look at adult mandates as they appear to the adults, starting with writings for and about substitute teachers, and continuing with writings about "classroom management," and in each set of writings I will continue to probe for "political" concerns. Chapter 5 -- Chapter 3