Tell me your best/worst substitute teacher story

[literally lauren]

Substitute teachers. Where do they come from? Where do they go?

Joseph41 and I were discussing this the other day, and I feel like no one escapes high school without experiencing some wonderfully bizarre substitute teachers.

My personal favourite was Mr Greenhall, a 107 (approx) year old man who would tell us "stories" during class. These were typically weirdly specific and completely unrealistic morality tales, including:
- the time he was walking alone in a desert dying of starvation and prayed to God for a ham sandwich and a drink of water, then a magpie flew overhead and dropped a glad-wrapped ham sandwich and a bottle of water on him. Moral of the story: be specific when you ask God for something, and also Collingwood is the best AFL team
- the fact that his son became a billionaire by paving driveways. Moral of the story: get into the driveway paving industry... I guess?
- the fact that printer ink is worth more than gold. Moral of the story:

...does anyone else who went to high school in Melbourne's north-west remember this guy, or was he a fever dream??...

Please share your insights and experiences below, because I need cheering up today, and perhaps if we all band together we can one day understand who and what substitute teachers actually are.

my mum is a substitute teacher, pls don't tell her I'm investigating this

[Poet]

Hey Lauren. Need cheering up? I'll try.

I go to a Christian school, and we've had some pretty wacky/cool/fascinating subs. None as awesome as Mr. Greenhall, but we're getting there.

One of our regular subs has been an extra in multiple movies, has been a model, was Peter Brock's girlfriend (there's proof in photos for that one) and loves telling extravagant tales about her world travels in Paris, Italy, and all those other shmancy countries. Typically to do with famous friends. Whenever we had her for art and we didn't want to do work, we would always ask her if she had a new story. Nek minit, she's spent 50 minutes regaling us with stories of her life of glitz and glamour. Amazing.

Worst sub was (is) a lady who writes Christian time-travel romance..? Not sure how that's meant to work.
She's just a mean person. When I was in year 9 she told the class Jesus gives her premonitions about things so she knows when we're going to do the wrong thing. Then she told me I won't have any friends as a weird sort of joke. Turns out she was't joking. She was right about that one. haha i crack myself up... She gives people her books as random gifts; my English teacher couldn't get past the first four pages.

I have a theory that subs are just, like, little bears wearing human costumes, and substitution teaching is their way of learning how to get around in society. Because students know that subs are weird, they don't need to worry about accidentally roaring when they stub their toes.

[literally lauren]

Worst sub was (is) a lady who writes Christian time-travel romance..? Not sure how that's meant to work.
She's just a mean person. When I was in year 9 she told the class Jesus gives her premonitions about things so she knows when we're going to do the wrong thing.

This is everything I hoped for and more. I'm hunting down a copy of this book.

And your bear theory seems too reasonable not to be right... most of the subs I can remember are 80+ years old, so I always assumed they were just too old for a job but too bored to retire. But I have now fully converted to the bear-in-costume hypothesis.

[PhoenixxFire]

I actually haven't had too many substitutes because my school gives most classes private study when teachers are away but there was one particularly memorable Math sub...

So at my school if your parent calls you then you're allowed to answer it or return their call or whatever. Happens all the time, no big deal, you just have to say that you're going to make a call.

So this sub really didn't believe that we were allowed to make calls. A kid in my class had missed a call from his mum so he stood up and said i'm going to go call my mum and the teacher was like no you're not. He looked a bit confused and told her that we're allowed to call our parents and she kept insisting that we weren't allowed to despite the entire class backing it up. And this was a Unit 1 methods class, it wasn't like we were twelvies trying to get out of work. She literally spent a good 15 minutes arguing with us about whether we were allowed to use our phones, eventually another teacher intervened. She hasn't been back to my school since

Also at my old school in year 8 our teacher got into a car accident in early term 3 so we had a semi-permanent sub for the rest of the year. Every single lesson was as if we had one of those subs who doesn't care and doesn't try and teach. We literally just played a LAN flappy golf game on our iPads every lesson with the entire class. (TBH our original teacher wasn't much better...)

As for favourite sub, he was a guy who was sort of around my primary school a lot because he was friends with the principal and he came on camps sometimes and stuff (he was a retired teacher). In grade 2 our teacher was away so we had him for a few weeks and that's probably the time of early primary school that most of my memories are of. I have like 5 memories (that I can easily recall) from the first 4 years of primary school that didn't involve these few weeks. We played a whole lot of games and he gave us whether's originals and it was really awesome for 8 year old me haha

[Joseph41]

One of my favourites is a guy who told us in very great detail about the gifts he was buying for his children.

All of the gifts were types of pencils.

"I'll get a 2B," he said. "And an HB."

"And if they're lucky, maybe even a 4B."

And he did this all very slowly.

Good thread. More stories to come.

[Calebark]

Substitute teachers. Where do they come from? Where do they go?

Ooh, I've got a good one. In high school, my woodwork teacher was sick, so I had a substitute teacher called Mr. Ekoj. His last name was a bit difficult to pronounce, so we just called him 'Joe'. He said his name came from somewhere mysterious, and he'd explain after the lesson. Anyway, we were all working on our term assignments, which was building a piece of furnitute. I was trying to build a baby bed -- like a cot. I had difficulty doing the hinges, so I asked Jo for help. Unfortunately, he was not a woodwork teacher so he was not qualified to help, but being a cool kinda guy, he decided to help. He got underneath the baby bed and tried adjusting the corner hinge. However, as he did, he touched the wrong part, and the corner of the cot fell right into his eye! It was a horrible mess. The school nurse and rushed him off to get medical treatment. We never heard of him again. To this day, I still wonder...

Where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from, cot-on-eye Joe?

[literally lauren]

Calebark, I feel as though you are making a mockery of this very serious thread

[Calebark]

Calebark, I feel as though you are making a mockery of this very serious thread

Me? Not being serious? What an accusation! An absolute travesty! To prove my innocence, I'll send in another story except this one is real

In Year Four, I had a sub called Mr Goodall (if memory serves) for the day, who seemed like a very kind 60ish year old man. He spent then entire day talking about Star Wars. Facts about how the movies were made, and bits of trivia from the Extended Universe. He'd quote it all day and constantly reference the movies. He said that the Force was real, and that he had real Jedi powers. He was still learning the ways of the force, so he could only push/pull small objects and make minor sparks from his fingertips. However, for safety reasons, he wasn't allowed to show us his powers in the confines of the school. He swore on his life that it was all real. I'm still waiting for proof

[literally lauren]

Mr Greenhall

Mr Goodall

[quinn_03]

we had this one maths sub in year 9. he was trying to teach us about elevation and depression
guy: "ok everybody put ur arms out in front of you parallel to the ground. (we did so). now point your arm a little to the ground. that's depression. now point your arm a little up to the ceiling. that's elevation".
so basically he had the entire class standing and doing the nazi salute in front of him, right before a tour (+ principal) came in to the room. needless to say, we never saw him again...

[EEEEEEP]

I once had a substitute teacher, who was a former electric guitarist that retrained to be a teacher.  He taught us in Yr 9 music for a few weeks

He was literally like Jack Black from School of Rock (but  a little less eccentric) and would rock out his guitar skills every now then (If we got good marks)!

Albeit, some of us thought he made easier exams, so he could show off, but nevertheless, it made from pretty fun and memorable lessons =)

[LaraC]

Haha yeah we had a guy who played the guitar all day as well.....well inbetween playing handball with kids in the classrooms....needless to say he got the sack before long  but we had a lot of fun in those short weeks!
Best fun was a sub teacher we had called Mrs Ryans......we would have the desks in a U shape and she used to walk up and down the length of the U and then back to the whiteboard at the front....and throughout the lesson all the kids would gradually move the desks in very slowly until her space to move was quite limited.....then suddenly the last two kids would move theirs around very quickly and babayum.....she was trapped!!  she was so much fun to play jokes on..... one of the best times was when we were playing a 'balance small beanbags on heads' game with her (this was in year 7 mind you - a lliitle too old for beanbag games As could be expected, we weren't being the most cooperative.....and so she would send kids to stand on the side with their hands on their heads (little did she know that was the aim for us!)....until oop.....she had the whole class on the side and no-one left to play beanbags with

[K888]

My lasting memory from primary school is our substitute teacher used pizza flavoured Shapes to teach us maths. Easily my favourite teacher ever.

There was also the one who sat down my year 5/6 class and had a very serious conversation about how we were experiencing changes in our bodies that meant we were getting a bit sweaty at recess and lunch so everyone should wear deodorant.

In high school, we had a teacher who was our sub for science for a term, and she always said "shhh". Constantly. Like, in a double period, we recorded her saying shhh 118 times??? Even if no-one was making noise, if she thought someone had the audacity to even *consider* thinking about making a noise, she'd shoosh us. It was bizarre.

[michaeljacksonftw]

In year 11 the day before a sac, we had a substitute teacher who wasn't qualified to teach the subject she was filling in for

[casbap]

We had a sub for two terms (my english & humanities teacher went on long service leave and then did her back) that hated children. Not only was she condescending and snide, but she didn't want to be there. It didn't help she was racist and sexist too.
We had to go on an excursion to a synagogue and a muslim heritage museum for this religious unit we were doing in hums. Keep in mind this teacher wasn't exactly the most quiet about her opinions. We get off the bus and she starts ranting about Judaism and making all these horrible remarks, right as our guide who happened to also be the Cantor walked behind her. She walked in laughing whilst we, as 14 yr olds, had to apologise for her.