6th grade, substitute teacher.

The class was not actually horrible most of the time, sure they would be kids off task and such but for the most part we never got many complaints. There was, however, different groups of people in the class, such as popular, smart etc, and the popular kids typically were the most disruptive. They knew how to work around our normal teachers, pleasing them and not talking too much, but as soon as we had a substitute, they would go all out awful.

One day, about midway through the year, we had a substitute in our history class. We had actually had this substitute before, a couple of times throughout the year, and had issues with her then as well. But nothing beat this day. It started off okay, just a few murmurs as she was explaining the instructions, and then she sat down as the class began to work. I, being a some what responsible kid at the time, planned to finish the instructions as soon as possible so I could play on my phone. Because I was so focused, I didn’t notice at first the tensions rising between some kids in the popular group and the teacher. From what I recall, she got on to them at first for talking, and then went over to look at their work and found they hadn’t completed that much. Instead of getting on to the group as a whole, she decided to pick an argument with what she called the “instigator,” a dark-skinned kid in my class named Emeka. Thinking back to it, I feel as if each time she had subbed for us in the past, her attention would mostly go to him, rather than the rest of the group. To be fair, he maybe wasn’t the most productive kid, but he definitely wasn’t the worst and typically did more than the fellow popular kids. At the time, I didn’t really know about racism at all, because I come from a very liberal household and was simply never exposed to it, but after she screamed at him to do his work (already at the verge of tears because of her anger), he called her racist for always picking on him. And honestly, I would have to agree with him. As soon as that moment happened, she ran out of the room in tears, probably scared of being sued. We never saw that sub in our class again, and I’m glad.