Being a substitute teacher is bad enough, being a permanent one is even worse.

On random Sundays I’m sometimes hired to serve as a substitute for teachers enjoying things like “days off” and/or “medical leave”. I find myself stuck in front of a room full of strangers who are suddenly faced with a strange face they don’t know and a voice they don’t understand.

Simon Rich, a former Saturday Night Live writer once pointed out that part of the reason new casts of the old show often seem terrible compared to the previous cast is that the audience doesn’t recognize their faces. This means they don’t understand how to react to their performances or their characters. However, once the audience gets used to them, the new members become old favorites until a new set of faces moves in. That new set of faces will always suck, until they are old faces.

The same thing happens with substitute teachers.

Part of teaching is the early dance with students as they test limits and you drag them back inside the limits. They are getting used to you and you to them. Eventually everyone knows the rules and, in the case of some classes, they ignore them completely, but in a way that’s predictable and controllable, or they follow them as necessary.

With substitutes, that dance happens in the middle of the term and because the relationship (so to speak) is temporary, no one invests much energy into it. Make the substitutes mad, go ahead, they’ll be gone soon enough. Smart substitutes recognize that, too. This too shall pass, and pretty damned quickly, too.

In my case, I took over not one, but two classes at the end of the year. I came in to substitute for one teacher and then a second left. This meant the two intermediate classes were combined and I got all the students. The second group were especially annoyed as they lost a much better, and much more handsome teacher and had to face a group of new student faces. The first day they were combined I had to force them to partner together as the Japanese group instinct took over.

I had substituted for both classes before, but not enough for them to get used to my face or me to theirs. They were good students, but we never quite finished the dance in the couple weeks we had. And now the music has stopped and it’s on to the next set of faces.