In this chapter I will adhere to the model of textual analysis that is described in Norman Fairclough's Media Discourse:

Critical discourse analysis of a communicative event is the analysis of relationships between three dimensions or facets of that event, which I call text, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice...By 'discourse practice' I mean the processes of text production and text consumption. And by 'sociocultural practice' I mean the social and cultural goings-on which the communicative event is a part of. (Fairclough p. 57)

For the most part, the literature I will be analyzing will use imagery to define a stereotype of the substitute teacher, so as to narratively normalize the ritual of substitute teaching. This is perhaps congruent with the relations of textual production and consumption. School personnel, and the substitute teachers themselves, need to produce a model of appropriate (yet achievable) substitute teaching so that schools can appear to harbor efficient classrooms and so that the substitutes themselves can feel as if there are appropriate guidelines for substitute teaching.

These needs, as I described them above, basically mirror what Norman Friedman perceived as "task demands/adaptations," in an ethnography of schools he did "during the 1979-1980 school year in three small to medium-sized California school districts in the eastern section of Los Angeles County" while working as a substitute teacher (Friedman p. 115). (Yes, there is a precedent for my formal project.) The first task demand he saw as "order-maintenance," which meant the proper following of routines and disciplining of students, and the second task demand was supposedly "assignment-execution," meaning the maintenance of the continuity of the educational program. In all of my years of substitute teaching, in the geographical area to which Friedman refers, I never found that much concern with whether substitute teacher were to follow the second task demand (as we might interpret it strictly as regarding the school's or the District's educational mission), even when I was a long-term substitute teacher -- maintaining the continuity of the educational program was supposedly the responsibility of a teacher that had somehow been placed under contract with the district, and was therefore obliged to follow the district's larger vision of curriculum (which often consisted of a school-wide interpretation of state mandates, as I perceived when reading Southern Elementary School's rules for teaching the various subjects of the required curriculum). So also, for the most part, I observe that the main emphasis given in manuals for the sub is on construction of a typical substitute teacher that can perform typical practices of order-maintenance by creating typical routines to engage a typical classroom for the typical day.

The aim of textual production for substitute teachers is thus itself congruent with the typical sociocultural practices of substitute teaching, which require the typical substitute teacher to spend a day rehearsing some bland (or possibly exotic) variation upon "basic skills" abilities, with children who are to be assembled in classrooms under individual teachers for a significant portion of the day.

Besides the published texts of guides that aim to "help the sub," or at least to help create the role of the sub through administrative labor, there are, most crucially, lesson plans that have been left for the substitute teacher. The first part of this chapter will deal with guides; the second part with lesson plans. Although I cannot claim to have copied every lesson plan I was left with in the many days I substitute-taught, I will look at some representative lesson plans in order to discuss the relation of lesson plan to actual classroom ritual.

The stereotypes of subs, to be sure, are also roles (within the dramatic stage of the school, or, anthropologically, within school society as a whole), but their textual content communicates various types of coded imagery. To remind us of this, the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (2nd Ed.) reminds us that a "stereotype" is "a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group." So a stereotype defines the communication of an image beheld by a group, representing a mold of the typical. * THEORETICAL FORMAT FOR THIS LITERARY REVIEW

Each of these texts creates a stereotype of some aspect of the ritual of substitute teaching. Each text exemplifies a specific genre of discourse practices about subbing, with an implied speaker (usually an "expert," but sometimes merely a first-person observer) and an implied audience, and an implied intention-toward-the audience. Substitute teacher texts thus, re Fairclough (1995), imply discourse events of textual consmuption and textual production, and we can read into each text a certain genre of textual consumption event, from an understanding of the text's way of proceeding.

This literature implies events of textual consumption by its construction of writer and reader roles, and by its intended practical use as 1) substitute teacher manual and/or 2) substitute teacher equipment. The consumption events that these genres represent are staged in terms of the constructed roles of the authors (of the texts) as they gives advice to readers whose constructed identities are also coded in the texts.

It is beyond the ambit of this dissertation to do a full "sociology of the text" with respect to substitute teaching. It is worth consideration, however, that I purchased many of the texts in question at an educational supply store, where one can also buy most of the other equipment important to decorating an elementary school classroom. I purchased these research items at a well-decorated store in a mini-mall in southern California, a store which also sold me the paper strips which I used to decorate an empty 1st grade classroom I substitute-taught (for one week at a school in Valley USD) with pictograms illustrating the English-language alphabet. This store also sold me addition flash cards, "Magic School Bus" books in English and Spanish, other children's books in English and Spanish, and games for my classroom.

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* STEREOTYPES of the SUBSTITUTE in texts that ADVISE ADMINISTRATORS

This is literature that allows administrators to focus subs into the administration of the school ritual, and proceeds first by establishing a stereotype to give administrators a "general idea" of the sub so as to better manage his or her position within the school hierarchy.

Getting Better Results from Substitutes, Teacher Aides, and Volunteers by Dr. Bryce Perkins (with a foreword by Harry A. Becker, Ph. D.) Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

This is a 1966 guide to substitutes for administrators. This booklet classifies subs with teacher aides and volunteers as part of a category "paraprofessional and auxiliary personnel." It provides a stereotype of the sub that is gender- and age-typed, cast in quotes, and portrayed as "natural": "'The typical substitute is a married woman who 'at one time taught full time and quit her regular job at marriage or a few years thereafter. She raised one or two children to school age and then realized she had time to go back to work on a part-time basis. Quite naturally, she chose her part-time work in the field she knew best -- teaching,'" quoting from an NEA research bulletin of 1955 (p. 10). This guide offers some interesting advice, including: "invite substitutes along with new staff members to the preschool building indoctrination or orientation session. They will profit from meeting regular members of the faculty, both old and new -- and also from the instructions given the new teachers. If you develop "new teacher clinics" or similar organized meetings, invite the substitute." (p. 25) This advice was supposedly given "since new substitutes need the same information as other teachers new to the system." (p. 23) I have only been invited to such meetings on the occasion when I was appointed at the beginning of the year (1997-1998 in my case) as a long-term substitute teacher. From my experience (having started substitute teaching in April of 1988), day-to-day substitutes are generally excluded from the information about the required teaching duties of year-long teachers that is given to long-term substitutes, who are expected to take on the roles of regular teachers but are in some circumstances still "on an emergency basis." This book assumed a more "connected" relationship between substitute teachers and schools/districts than the relationships I have had.

"Making Effective Use of the Substitute Teacher: An Administrative Opportunity" by Jackson M. Drake. NASSP Bulletin, September 1981, pp. 74-80.

Drake provides a stereotype of the substitute as someone performing a largely thankless task who can drift into three negative stereotypes unless management acts decisively to select, train, evaluate, and support substitutes. These negative stereotypes are: 1) the substitute as babysitter, maintaining quiet and doling out busywork, 2) the subsitute as bare-minimum teacher, instructing without putting out much effort, 3) the substitute as improviser, deviating from standard curriculum and replacing it with "personal curriculum." Interestingly enough, due to the perceived difficulty of imposing classroom discipline upon a class while in the role of substitute teacher (a perception reinforced by my own experience as a substitute teacher and by numerous anecdotal accounts from other teachers), Drake's negative stereotype #3 sometimes can be a favored role for the sub, as many teachers have told me. More specifically, teachers have told me that if the substitute has a lesson plan he or she can successfully present, that it "doesn't present a problem."

The Supply Story. Edited by Sheila Galloway and Marlene Morrison. London: Falmer, 1994.

This is a British text discussing subbing, which it calls "supply teaching," but many of the perspectives offered are concerned with the duties of the sub co-ordinator, and those of other managers responsible for co-ordinating the duties of teachers. It therefore de-emphasizes the role of the sub's experience in telling "the supply story," although one author, Kath Green, defends the value of such experience in a piece titled "Celebrating Experience."

Effective Substitute Teachers: Myth, Mayhem or Magic? by Terrie St. Michel. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage-Corwin, 1995.

The stereotype offered in this book is managerial: the sub is an ineffective teacher who comes in for the day and finds a classroom full of students who are poorly-prepared for a day of learning under the authority of the sub, and is him/herself poorly prepared to teach the children "as a teacher." Thus the substitute is stigmatized with a "deficit" evaluation, as Kath Green would argue in "Celebrating Experience" (The Supply Story, pp. 16-30.) This deficit evaluation is to be remedied with large quantities of "staff development," involving six (!) workshops scheduled throughout various periods of the year that the substitute is to attend, four of which are to be 2 1/2 hours in length, two of 7 hours. Implementing such a plan would appear to be quite an extravagance in preparing what are, by the market rules of the game, disposable day laborers.

* PROCESS STEREOTYPES (of the ritual of "getting through the day") in texts that ADVISE THE SUB

These process stereotypes offer advice on how to instruct children properly as a substitute teacher of a particular day-assignment. They try to identify techniques for allowing the substitute teacher to look like a "meaningful" substitute teacher. The constructed audience for these texts is usually the elementary school substitute teacher, as perhaps "getting through the day" for the secondary teacher has become an already well-constructed stereotype within the institutional context of secondary teaching.

Substitute Teaching: Planning for Success, by Kappa Delta Pi. West Lafayette, IN: Kappa Delta Pi, 1996. This is a guide offering "30 subject related lesson plans with student worksheets written by 'real' teachers." Many of the lesson plans offered in this book appear to be more complex than the usual routines of regular teachers in the schools I observed at Valley Unified School District, involving prior knowledge I am not sure such students have.

A Handbook for Substitute Teachers by Anne Wescott Dodd. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1989.

This attempts to be a comprehensive guide to being a substitute teacher. This book has no pictures, nor Dodd starts by warning the reader of the game of "get the sub," and then proceeds to tell the reader about some standard ways of getting a job as a substitute teacher, of "surviving on the job" (basically recommending ways that the substitute can maintain order in usually-authoritarian classrooms), and recommending intellectual exercises, "sponge activities" as they were once advertised to me when I was in a teacher credential program at California State University at San Bernardino. This would be a good comprehensive guide for a substitute teacher aiming to be "typical," although I would "Management Advice for Substitutes," p. 12, Instructor Magazine, April 1975. This is a one-page anecdotal discussion of substitutes culled from letters to the magazine. One letter, from Martine Wayman of Bothell, Washington, advises: "When a student acts up, quietly put your hand on his or her shoulder. If a child is a consistent problem, calmly ask her to go to a specific area, away from others. Then talk to the child and invite her to help you with something. It works!" Note the taken-for-granted notions of "acting up," and "consistent problem," note also the idea of "it works," meaning that some sort of use of technique to surmount behavior problems of stereotypical students is ostensibly at the essence of working as a substitute.

"Substitute Teachers: Seeking Meaningful Instruction in the Teacher's Absence, by John A. Nidds and James McGerald, The Clearing House, September/October 1994.

An article that repeats an important set of common ideas about the role of substitute teachers. To the question, "What is the most difficult problem substitute teachers face?" the article answers: "All of the responses identified control of student behavior," and to the question "What teaching methodology works for substitute teachers?", the answer "Basically, use of detailed reading and writing assignments, collected for evaluation by the regular teacher, was the practice most recommended for the substitute teacher" was given.

"What makes Effective Secondary Education Teachers?" by Edward D. Ostapczuk. ERIC Document 374075. Provides a summary of a literature review. Offers that substitute teachers aren't as effective as regular teachers, and specifies "classroom management" as the hurdle for subs to overcome. Suggestions: "Be prepared," "Be assertive," "Remember, 'kids are kids'," "Keep students busy," "Try not to raise your voice," "Circulate throughout classroom," "Leave feedback for regular classroom teacher," "Teaching experience depends on how you frame it." Only the last piece of advice can be said to do more than offer advice to a stereotype, and the stereotype is one of the substitute teacher as a poorly-supported teacher who must therefore rely upon a makeshift structure of "classroom control."

"The Plight of the Substitute Teacher," by Kenneth L. Calkins, The Clearing House (62: 228-230), January 1989.

This short first-person narrative from a former substitute captures the "fleeting" feel of being a substitute teacher and getting to observe the changing behaviors of participants at a junior high school. Reads like the textbook version of "how to write a short story." Substitute Survival Kit, Instructional Fair, Inc., Grand Rapids MI, 1989.

This book codes itself as "equipment" from a reading of the front cover, which pictures books, pencils, crayons, and an apple. It advises on page 1 that subs carry a tote bag with books and school equipment, offers a standard class report, and offers a series of dittos for the students. It appears to be geared to the 2nd grade level and offers the advice: "Don't count on the school to have supplies." The book contains some rather sophisticated math and language arts dittos, and it contains large quantities of "teacher's stickers," with pictures of smiling faces and words of teacher encouragement printed in bright colors on them.

Substitute Ingredients by S. Harold Collins and Lorraine Wilde-Oswalt. Eugene OR: Garlic Press, 1974.

This is a book with words written in paragraphs, but it is also a book with many diagrams and pictures. The diagrams and pictures illustrate a series of games that children can play with paper and pencil. This book offers tangrams, mandalas, math games. Some of these games are sophisticated, and some of the games appear to be merely ideas for games, which the sub must develop him/herself. The point of such books appears to be to offer the raw material with which substitute teachers can create educational games. There appears to be a limited acceptance here of the substitute as a liminoid figure, an advertisement for play.

Classroom Management for Substitute Teachers by S. Harold Collins. Eugene OR: Garlic Press, 1982.

This is a textbook claiming to deal with classroom discipline problems specific to substitute teachers. It is interesting in that it combines the jargon of classroom management with numerous inkpen illustrations of animals. The conductor of the training seminar the substitutes were given at Hill USD called these sorts of illustrations "warm fuzzies." This book starts with a list of expectations for teacher training institutions, administrators, regular classroom teachers, and substitute teachers. Tries to spell out in great detail the role of the substitute teacher. It recommends:

Here is a sampling of rules Substitute Teachers might consider:

* Follow directions the first time they are given * Keep hands, feet, objects to yourself * Use acceptable language * Ignore bad behavior of others * Stay at assigned task. * Arrive on time to class. * Move quietly in the classroom. * Raise your hand to talk.

"Ignore bad behavior of others" might be an unwritten rule in many classrooms I have been in, "Arrive on time to class" would be considered a school rule and not a mere classroom rule, and "Move quietly in the classroom" might be judged as deterring too trivial an offense to qualify as a classroom rule. Otherwise these rules might be typical of the lower-grade elementary school classrooms I saw in Valley USD.

Lifesavers for Substitutes by Mary McMillan. Parsippany NJ: Good Apple, 1992.

The subtitles of this book are "A Good Apple Teacher Resource for Grades 2-6" and "A Wealth of Ideas for the Classroom Teacher as Well," and appears to have some easy-to-use activities that require little planning on the part of the teacher. This book is almost entirely composed of masters for copying on a ditto machine, the same ditto machines that dominate the teacher- construction of activities in schools such as Southern Elementary School. Some of these masters appear to be ideologically-coded to suit patriotism or the War on Drugs or environmentalism -- there are maps of the USA to color, there are "drug free paper dolls," there are "save the earth" coloring sheets. The substitutes that are the audience of this book are elementary subs -- advice for secondary subs goes under the name of "sponge activities" that are supposed to take up the amount of time a secondary sub spends with each group of students. McMillan's list of rules (p. iv) to follow to be a good substitute runs as follows: 1) "Come prepared!" 2) "Keep them busy and learning at the same time!" 3) "Be on your toes!" (continuing the quote) "Even the best of students become adventuresome when the teacher is away." Thus McMillan reflects on the liminal or liminoid nature of being a student when the substitute is in charge, comparing it to an event Turner would associate with liminality, an adventure. Lastly, there is 4) "Inform the teacher!" meaning "write a note saying how the day went."

* STUDENT STEREOTYPES in texts that ADVISE THE SUB: These are stereotypes of the students given out as part of advice to the substitute teacher.

Substitute Teacher's Handbook: Activities for Grades K Through Six, by Mary Frances Redwine. Fearon Teacher Aids, Parsippany, New Jersey, 1970.

This is one of the few commercially-available handbooks on subbing without pictures or pages offered for photocopying or stickers. It is interesting to note that this is a 27-year-old textbook and that it is still in print. Redwine claims to be a "Substitute Teacher" in the "Hillsborough County (Florida) Public Schools." In the second paragraph, headlined ADVANTAGES OF SUBSTITUTING, it states: "Substituting is also an ideal job for many older women whose families are grown." It offers stereotypes of each grade, such as "Kindergartners love finger plays and songs," "First graders are notoriously talkative," "Children in the second grade will be very helpful," "You may begin to have some discipline problems in this grade, not chattering or clowning as with younger children, but open hostility toward authority. You should not tolerate any abuse, whatsoever, and should try to nip any discipline problems in the bud," "Fourth graders are sometimes a little self-conscious and unsure of themselves around adults they do not know," "You cannot be permissive with children in the upper grades and get any respect from them," "Sixth graders are somewhat like fifth graders..."

This is both a stereotype of students and a stereotype of the curriculum -- there are small lessons, mini-"lesson plans" one can teach if one needs something other than the advice of the given lesson plan. * TEXTS THAT ADVISE THE REGULAR TEACHER on HOW TO HANDLE SUBSTITUTES

These are texts written for teachers that often offer advice to them about how to leave the room and write the classroom instructions for the substitute. Interestingly enough, very few texts went into any detail about how to cope with substitute teachers; there were only two that I could find, within my search (detailed in the next two chapters) for guides to classroom management.

Elementary Classroom Management, Second Edition by C.M. Charles and Gail W. Senter (New York: Longman, 1983).

This is a book advising regular teachers (in a way that attempts to be comprehensive) on how to manage the behaviors of others in school situations, from students to administrators to paraprofessionals (including substitutes). I will discuss the advice it gives to regular teachers in more detail in the next chapter. There is a chapter of this book that advises teachers about substitutes. This book advises teachers to be fairly comprehensive in providing substitute teachers with:

• Discipline plan that clearly lays out the control techniques used in the class.
• Seating chart, showing where every child is supposed to sit, for checking attendance.
• Names of students with special needs, and detailed instructions concerning medication and so forth.
• Class list of names only, with space for notations to the teacher about behavior problems, homework, and helpfulness.
• Class schedule that gives days and times of various program activities.
• Lesson plans, in detail, for the day or days of absence.
• Duty schedule that highlights the days and times of the teacher's assigned duties for playground, buses, crossing, or lounge cleanup
• Monitor list that shows the names of student helpers and their classroom duties, with the name of the substitute teacher monitor highlighted.
• School map with classroom, playground, office, drinking fountains, restrooms, library, nurse's station, faculty workroom, and faculty lounge marked.
• Name and room number of a teacher who has agreed to help the substitute if needed.(Charles and Senter p. 217)

At any rate, the above list represents clues to a generalized daily classroom script which I try to piece together at the beginning of the day about the instructional ritual I am to construct for any particular class. Some observations as regards my on-the-job understanding of this detail:

• Discipline plans that worked for the teacher may not work for the substitute teacher, because students may choose to ignore or dislike the substitute teacher. At times I have felt justified in ignoring instructions (as written on lesson plans) to "be strict" with classrooms of students, for fear of alienating students. I have heard more than one (regular) teacher tell me in discussions in teacher's lounges in Valley USD (while relating experiences of "subbing") that there is much less one can do to "enforce discipline" as a substitute than one can do as a regular teacher.
• Seating charts may not be valid because teachers may have changed the seating spaces of students without composing a new seating chart, or because students are switching seats without telling the substitute. I usually asked students' names before assuming their identities, just to be safe.
• If students have special needs, especially medicinal needs, schools, teachers, and students were always careful to notify the substitute teacher of these needs.
• Class lists were readily available, and (at Valley) could often be found in the teacher's information box in the teacher's lounge or the front office.
• Class schedules were often posted on a wall.
• Lesson plans are supremely important; I discuss them in a special section of this chapter below.
• Duty schedules were something required of elementary school teachers at Hill USD, usually involving being a playground monitor. Nevertheless, I sometimes missed duty because I did not arrive at the assignment in time to watch children on the playground. One morning, I was busy reading the lesson plan at a school at Hill USD when a teacher entered to remind me that I had duty. I might thus assume of this school that it had some level of communicative teacher support that allowed its teachers to maintain "duty" duties even when substitute teachers were scheduled for particular days.
• "Monitor lists" -- who exactly had what special duties within a class was something I often forgot, amidst my rush to understand how I was to conduct the instructional ritual in a classroom at any particular hour of any day. Usually the students would remind me
• The school map was something that came from the front office in schools at Valley USD.

• The name and room number of a helpful teacher was rarely given to me at Valley USD, unless such a teacher was also "team teaching" with the teacher I replaced for that day. When such a name was offered, however, it turned out to be quite useful when the lesson plan was not workable or when I needed to send students with inappropriate behaviors to another room in order to continue instructional ritual.

Your First Year of Teaching and Beyond, by Ellen L. Kronowitz. (White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996)

This is ostensibly a guide for first-year teachers; it shares many of the same components of guides to classroom management that I will discuss in the next two chapters. It offers a list of things to leave for the sub, just like the book reviewed directly above; in it are small presumptions about instructional ritual. Example: it advises that teachers leave a seating chart for the substitute: "The seating chart will also help the substitute quickly catch those who decide to pull a switcheroo and sit with a friend for the day" (Kronowitz p.121), implicitly assuming that sitting with a friend is not part of a student's role in an instructional ritual. Also, Kronowitz advises teachers to leave information about discipline, cautioning that "if you don't, the chorus of voices will again take over and tell the sub when and how to give points, hold a class meeting, or put marbles in a jar" (p. 122). From my experience, information the teacher leaves the substitute about discipline is most effective in communicating to the sub something of how to respond to this chorus of voices, said chorus which will express itself anyway.

Kronowitz also recognizes a sort of "reality principle" of subbing in that, if there is no explicitly written lesson plan available for the sub, "you will still have your planbook for the sub." The lesson plans I have read are often quite vague, or in error; a math assignment turns out to be something they've done already, or a writing assignment is written in undecipherable handwriting, so I have to call the office to find out what it says (if I perceive the regular teacher demands adherence to the script of the lesson plan); reading a planbook makes this much harder. Often an activity is named with one word in a planbook, which means that one will have to ask the students (who will give the sub an answer that will allow them to skip the parts of the assignment they don't want to do), or a teacher or administrator (who might be too busy to give the sub much of an answer), what the planbook is supposed to mean for the substitute.

* SUBSTITUTE TEACHER'S HANDBOOKS issued by DISTRICTS

Hill Unified School District, 100 pp. +28pp. supplement

There were actually two handbooks offered with the inservice for substitutes which I was required to attend. One handbook was from the corporate agency who hired the former substitute teacher who talked to us for three hours in connection with the handbooks. The handbooks was meant to convey a sense of pride in the schools of the district, and was something I received and was asked to look at from time to time during a three-hour required inservice given to substitute teachers employed by Hill USD before the beginning of the school year. It goes over the routines governing the substitute teacher's day, and then proceeds to introduce the schools of the district, complete with lists of school rules and maps of each school. At the end is a set of suggestions for classroom management and "sponge activities" followed by a series of legal and district policy documents concerning rules and laws governing substitutes. These documents, which outline the legal codes regarding dress and grooming, sexual harassment, drug- and alcohol-free workplaces, and worker's compensation, construct stereotypes of the substitute as well. The handbooks put out by the corporation offered advice for "assertiveness" and "empathy" and on how to read a lesson plan, plus it offered a typology of students for the sake of helping substitute teachers identify "behavior problems" as they appear in students. The discourse of the corporate handbook appears partially borrowed from the discourse of motivational speaking, which was the self-announced "professional background" of the inservice presenter.

Backcountry Unified School District: 4 pp.

Backcountry USD sent me a Handbook for Substitute Teachers at the beginning of the 1996-1997 school year, when I was re-hired. It offers extremely brief advice on how substitute teachers should "conduct themselves." Its "suggestions for classroom discipline" include a series of on-task cues. From its suggestions for "Your Voice": "State your directions clearly in a tone that says you know exactly where you're going." This handbook says relatively little about substituting, being only four pages long (as opposed to Hill's handbook, which ran to fifty pages, with Hill's inservice corporation's handbook running to twenty-eight pages of length). The concern reflected in these pages is that of a substitute teacher who was capable of managing appearances.

Valley Unified School District Manual. 28 pp.

This manual lists the requirements for applying (requirements one must already have met to receive the manual, it would seem!), a set of directions for using the machine that Valley USD used to call its substitutes, a list of obligations of substitutes, payroll information, and a list of responsibilities of schools, teachers, substitutes and students. It spells out the business and instructional rituals that have to occur if substitute teachers are to succeed at working, at being hired to substitute for regular teachers, and at avoiding the displeasure of principals. According to a paragraph in the manual, "The Principal, at any time during the school year, may request that a substitute teacher may no longer be assigned to that school due to unsatisfactory performance. If three schools make such a request, the substitute may be terminated." Valley's manual uses a legalistic discourse of rights and responsibilities.

It is interesting that three official District manuals that wish to discuss the same topic, substitute teachers and their duties, base their content on such widely-differing discursive forms.

Other curiosities: The Substitute's Handbook: A Survivor's Guide by John W. Brenot. Saratoga CA: R & E Publishers, 1985.

This appears to be a small-press issue of a humorous guide to subbing, the humor being generated in this book from the stress of various substituting experiences by the author himself. One interestingly-political paragraph states:

One major question frequently asked of male subs is whether he is gay. Answer that one immediately. Even though you're really adept at delivering biting sarcasm, don't say, "Is there some special reason you want to know?" The rest will probably laugh, but that embarrasses the kid who asked, and you've made at least one enemy. Even tif the question doesn't come up, I've noticed in classes that if early on I make some allusion to my teenage sons or my wife, there's a general relaxing of tension. You can see students slump slightly. They're very insecure about this issue, so it seems better to face it frontally. If I were a devisive (sic) bachelor, I'd be tempted to invent a wife. My wife, who is teaching somewhere else, is doing so and so, is a, has three, believes in, enjoys the game of, who is also a blond, loves to garden, whose favorite color is, plays tennis well, etc. She exists, sort of. (p. 6)

The humor from Brenot's description appears to be derived from his suspicion that the substitute teacher is best advised to adapt to a situation that has already organized itself, rather than "taking command" of the unknown. Brenot illustrates in example after example that the substitute is not entirely the agency in control of the behavior of the classroom, and so the sub reading this text is offered an exaggerated guide to the other agencies in the classroom so he or she can deal with them.

Most of the literature tries to stereotype a "substitute teacher role," which is then provided with advice as to how to perform the role of a substitute teacher, based on guesses and expectations about the sub's participation in the "typical classroom," which is itself a narrative composed of expectations concerning the symbolic value of substitute teachers and their teachings. These stereotypes and assumptions are ostensibly intended to fill the symbolic void created when a stranger steps into the role usually occupied by the regular teacher. Often substitutes are advised to consult administration to give substance to their claims to being authority figures in usually-authoritarian classrooms. This literature also tries to address a perceived symbolic deficit in the creation of the substitute role, to be remedied by the marketing of symbols for the sub's consumption and manipulation (with ludic effect) with classrooms of students. Some literature for substitute teachers proceeds primarily by stereotyping students, as Mary Frances Redwine's The Substitute Teacher's Handbook does, in order to allow substitutes to "read" classroom situations.

In Substitute Survival Kit, the implicit expectation is that subs may not receive the material support necessary to perform a teacher-role: This book's advice is, "don't count on the school to have supplies," and it also suggests that it itself is about situations when "you will need to write lesson plans of your own." Literature such as Terrie St. Michel's book Effective Substitute Teachers advises district-level managers on the problem of how to create effective substitute teachers.

In literature meant to advise substitutes, there is also coded advice on how to develop a "substitute teacher personality." "Classroom Management for Substitute Teachers" is clear that the sub should "teach to maintain a continuity in lesson plans of the regular classroom teacher, teach to provide new experiences to students, teach to reinforce skills appropriate to competency levels," which argues for ways the sub can help the regular teacher, the students, and the administration in their expected roles. The inservice I attended for Hill Unified School District tried to provide its attendees with a comprehensive understanding of how to develop a "substitute teacher personality."

Lifesavers for Substitutes, Substitute Ingredients, and Substitute Survival Kit cater to the minimal preparation time the sub has to work with, to equip the sub with a prefabricated lesson that could possibly be adapted to any of a wide number of classroom situations.

Using the framework set up by Turner for associating the social drama with any particular performed drama (see figs. 1 and 2 below), we can place the lesson plan in between the two dramas, as forming part of the preconception the substitute teacher will have about the day at school. At times, however, it is important to diverge from the lesson plan, especially when the regular teacher has laid out unrealistic or insufficient expectations about what should happen when a substitute teacher is in charge of a classroom. On one assignment, I noted, a regular teacher (who was assigned team-teaching duties with the teacher I was replacing) came into my classroom, apologized for the lack of a detailed lesson plan and taught that morning's lesson herself, leaving me to help her with teaching duties. The regular teacher had only left me a lesson-plan notebook, with the titles of each lesson vaguely scratched in each box in the grid that decorated the particular page of the book that was marked with that day's date. On other assignments, however, lesson plans would come in bare-bones form, with the mere titles of the assignments to be handed out, and I would have to rely upon the students for advice as to how the classroom day normally proceeded, what were the micro-rituals to be performed.

Often, however, lesson plans would contain hints as to what the school day was to be like, hints I could use or discard (although there were certain districts that advised their substitute teachers to follow their lesson plans rather exactly). In the following subchapter, I will focus my commentary largely upon elementary school lesson plans, since at the secondary level the lesson plans would largely contain seatwork assignments lasting the length of a 50-minute period, and did not have the complexity of the elementary school lesson plan. Some of the hints are:

Lists of "good students," students expected to help the teacher with duties, and lists of "problem students," students expected to disrupt the classroom activities. Sometimes a lesson plan will have a list that tries to "notify" the teacher of students whose behaviors need to be "attended to." One lesson plan notified me of this in a confusing way, a fifth-grade lesson plan from East Hill USD, a district with rather well-off children:

Lesson Plans I am out with a bad cold. Kids over all are good. 4 boys (names listed) need to complete behavior analysis before they can participate with class. They need to spend recesses in office. Here is a rough schedule of our day. Feel free to change anything. 8:40-9:40 Give students new RIMES to make words for spelling test: ide, ast, ad, og ush write as many words as possible for each Then can do starters: Computers, writer's workshop, Rhyming matching 9:40-10:25 Read James and the Giant Peach Mrs. Iberg (resource teacher) should come in and read w/ kids 10:25-10:45 Recess (no duty) (etc.)

Discipline arrangements. Often this would be limited to an instruction to "tell the class your expectations for them," and then beyond that I was implicitly expected to have a style for enforcing the rules I expected the students to follow. In all my years of substitute teaching, I never developed a single way of telling students my expectations in a way they would understand and appreciate. For the most part, I would define my expectations to the class only after observing how they behaved as a group, since this way it was easier to observe the communicative habits of each peer group within the class, and thus to get the group to control itself. This strategy of classroom discipline was rendered irrelevant when applied toward the long-term position I was granted at Southern Elementary School at the beginning of the 1997-1998 school year. What constitutes a "successful" discipline arrangement is discussed in another genre of texts, which I will review later.

Typical activities as listed on elementary school lesson plans

* Calendar/morning ritual. This ritual was common in Kindergarten and 1st grade, and was usually divided into several parts, wherein I would have students put the new date on the board, we would read the days of the week, identify today's day-of-the-week, what day yesterday was, what day tomorrow would be. It would include the pledge of allegiance, sometimes to be performed both in Spanish and English, and attendance-taking, which was sometimes done by having students take cards with their names on them and present them to the teacher, me. We would sing songs, often including songs titled "Days of the Week" and "Months of the Year" which were usually to be played on vinyl records that were recorded by two singers named "Greg and Steve" (as was typically observed in classrooms in Valley Unified School District). Often I would read just the word "calendar" on the lesson plan, in which case I would be required to make up a routine, or ask the students myself. Generally if this happened the result would be chaotic; some students would perhaps take advantage of my confusion to start conversations with each other, and then I would have to demand quiet several times before proceeding. These moments of chaos would occur even though I would become rather familiar with calendar as a ritual of K or 1 classrooms, since each teacher would perform it differently.

An example of a description of morning ritual, for a 1st/2nd grade class, Hill Unified School District, from a fairly well-organized class:

Opening:
• Meet students outside at pole (second from end). Walk into class.
• Meet on the rug in a circle. We say "Good Morning" individually around the circle.
• Take attendance by counting students around the circle -- each student says his or her number as you point to them around the circle. If there are 18, everyone is here. If not, ask the students how many students are missing. Then, who are those students? Record them on the attendance sheet.
• Take the lunch count, counting in the same way as you did for attendance. You may double-check this by asking the students how many must be bringing their lunches, doing a count, and making sure the number adds up to the number of students here today. Choose a helper from the cat mug on the counter, give him or her a standing ovation, and send him or her with the attendance. Put the name stick in the other mug. All sit down in the circle. Tell the students what they will be doing today.

Calendar:
• Helper assists with calendar. They know the routine pretty well by now. Analyze the pattern with the class, and ask for predictions for Monday. Please do not validate answers as right or wrong, but put them on the board to check Monday.
• Morning song: This is a good time to refocus the students' attention. The helper chooses a song (please refer to the list in this folder), then you may decide that another might be appropriate.
• Quiet reading time. This was a ritual required each day in almost all elementary-school classrooms of Valley USD, and it was usually one of the best times of the day, even in the worst classrooms, and this was so usually because I brought my collection of books, including the Magic School Bus series. These books were very popular because they were educational and furthermore they were tied in with a popular television series on PBS.
• Centers. I usually enjoyed centers too, and this was usually so because it meant that the regular teacher had put a lot of time teaching the students how to organize themselves in groups. Usually centers activity was enjoyable, and the children would spend plenty of time on it; sometimes it wasn't, and I would be stuck inventing things to do for the children who boycotted centers.
• Daily Oral Language. In the upper grades of elementary school, usually grades 3 through 6, there was an activity where the students were to rewrite incorrectly grammaticized sentences, written upon the board, onto Daily Oral Language journals. This ritual was common to many of the most authoritarian classrooms, and was often orderly although sometimes it wasn't, and students would talk instead of doing Daily Oral Language (and I felt obligated to continually yell instructions rather quickly in order to keep the routine going).
• After lunch cooling-off activities. It was often, though not always the case, that "cooling off" activities were scheduled just after lunch or toward the end of the day. I tend to think of these activities as "re-integrative" activities in the sense in which Van Gennep posited that after a liminal activity, there would be an activity that would re-integrate the performers into the mainstream of social activity. Sometimes there would be a "quiet time" or a "quiet reading time" just after lunch, so as to re-integrate the students from the noise and play of lunch and lunch-recess into the supposed order of classroom academic activity. Sometimes there would be activities such as art and physical education that would involve a certain amount of play, that would be organized at the end of the day so as to re-integrate the students into the relative chaos of the day after school (assuming, in this instance, that the school day is a liminal phase between successive phases of life under the control of one's parents). I remember substituting one 2nd grade class for a span of two days, where the lesson plans called for physical education after lunch, and it was my experience that the students were so hyperactive after lunch, lunch recess, and PE (which often turned out that this class was too disorganized to participate in for more than 10 or 15 minutes and would drift away from the activity I assigned and talk in peer groups) that I showed a movie each day after PE so that I could "cool them down" and thus could assign the work the regular teacher left me to fill the rest of the day, with a minimum of resistance.

Since I have an adequate command of the Spanish language, Valley USD recruited me often to teach in bilingual classrooms. Given the 70% Latino ethnic composition of most of the area of Valley USD, what this meant was that many classes for very young children, including sometimes as many as half of the Kindergarten classes, were conducted largely in Spanish, but also including periods where teachers were ostensibly to speak English and give an assignment in English. Usually the assignment involved some very simple words, that were to be represented by pictograms that were to be cut and pasted onto other pieces of paper, or we were to sing a song or choral read a poem. It seemed to me that students spent a rather small amount of time (relative to the school day, maybe an hour and twenty minutes each day maximum, of a 6 1/2 hour day) on ELD, yet almost all students were capable of speaking, reading and writing in English .I tried to understand that, however, the English abilities of LEP students in the Valley Unified School District were, as I was told, not "up to grade level" even with the group of Spanish-speaking and English-speaking students I was given for 2 1/2 weeks at Local Elementary School. That group of students had been in 5th and 6th grade when I taught them, and thus they had supposedly been learning English for as many as seven years.

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Even though this series of books does not explicitly refer to the substitute teacher, they were rather successful in enlivening the periods of quiet reading that were part of each day's schedule according to the lesson plans I followed. Students would sometimes fight over their favorite Magic School Bus books in my presence. I really do think their popularity is due to the TV tie-in -- "The Magic School Bus" is a popular animated PBS television series about a classroom at "Walker Elementary School" where the students go on field trips to study scientific concepts by being within various science experiments or natural phenomena. Scholastic, the company selling the books, also sold video tapes of the TV series which were commonly available at department stores such as Target, and sometimes I would show those video tapes.

The teacher guiding these field trips (and driving the bus, furthermore) is "Miss Frizzle," played by the voice of Lily Tomlin, who always has a definitive solution for any problems (scientific or practical) that the class encounters in the various adventures she takes them on. Sometimes the class would be shrunk microscopically, or they would go back in time, or they would be transformed into animals or plants, in order to demonstrate some scientific fact. The theme song to the series, played at the beginning of each show, is sung by Little Richard and was well-known by the students I taught. Miss Frizzle's class appears to be modeled upon third or fourth grade, and the books appear to be written at a second, third, or fourth grade level, where at any rate they are most popular. I collected an entire set of the Magic School Bus books, in both English and Spanish. Some students in 2nd grade would read them only in Spanish, students in Kindergarten or 1st grade would often take my books and look quickly at the pictures, with the effect that they wanted another book every two minutes or so. I would often read one of the books to the assembled students (usually in first grade), and ask them questions every other page (or so) about the topics discussed in the book. The Magic School Bus series appeared to me to be a way I could introduce a ludic pattern to the schooling process while maintaining "classroom control."

The various periods of the elementary school classroom day, as named and divided by the lesson plan, provided for more flexibility than the 50- or 55- (and sometimes as much as 60) minute periods of classroom activity in secondary schools. Within this flexibility is the ability to design classroom periods that are more "ludic," allow the children more leeway to play, but nevertheless conform to learning goals that are specified in the instructional guides of the school's institutional hierarchy. Within this space, I was often able to create enjoyable experiences for very young children, although this ability of mine seemed to diminish with grades 3-6. Even if I didn't accomplish anything important in terms of allowing the children I was teaching to participate in actively creating a "politics of culture," I allowed school to be "fun." And, since I was a substitute teacher, I was there for a short period of time, usually from one to seven days, which meant that my appearance was capable of earning an aura of being "special," and I was not given disciplinary and curricular guidelines to follow which might have interfered with my achieving a "liminoid" status.

Chapter 6 -- Chapter 4