The Greatest Subbing Story Ever

With my last post fairly serious and political, I thought I’d lighten the mood some with a quick story about probably the greatest subbing ever.

As of now, I have a full year, plus a few months of subbing under my belt. I feel that I have become fairly accomplished as a substitute teacher, being able to read classrooms better and pinpoint personalities that I may need to watch for. I can improvise a lesson with little description fairly easily, and I know what to do to fill time should the issue arise. I'm still improving, of course, but I do think that I'm getting to be a pretty successful teacher. 

That wasn't always the case. 

You may recall a blog I wrote about the Joys and Also Headaches of Subbing. In it, I share some of the best stories I'd collected from my time substituting around Saskatoon. The first story was of my very first day of subbing ever, where I found myself in a kindergarten classroom for an afternoon, and the only plan was for exploration time. To entertain a few children, I decided to show them how to fold an origami bird. 

It went poorly. 

When I tell that story to teacher friends, they immediately cringe at the combination of "kindergarten" and "origami." But how was I supposed to know? I was a brand-new teacher, fresh out of internship! Ok, yes, I could have used common sense, but I decided that trial by fire was a much better way to learn. 

Thankfully, it didn't hurt my report with the school. After that school year ended and the new one booted up, I found myself subbing at that school a lot. I would be in for one teacher or another a couple times every month, and I got got to know a lot of the staff and students. Generally, I taught upper elementary and junior high, but there would be the odd time I'd be in a younger grade for a period during my spare period. That continued into the following year, where I found myself teaching a grade 7 class nearly once a week. I liked bumping into students I'd taught last year, who would then bug me, asking if I remembered teaching them in so-and-so's class (usually I did) or if I remembered their names (usually I didn't). Because I had been almost entirely with the older kids, I kind of forgot that this was the school I had subbed in a kindergarten class two school-years ago. 

Well, during one of the days I was teaching grade 7, I was placed in a grade 2 classroom for a period, so that the regular teacher could get a little extra work done with some students one-on-one. This was nothing new, and I'd been in grade 2 rooms before, so I quickly adjusted and tried my best to get to know the kids in the short time I'd have. I wandered around, supervising their writing worksheets, checking work and asking questions. They were seated in table groups, so I would usually crouch down beside one student and ask how they were doing and answer any questions they had. Of course, few of them had to do with school. 

"How old are you?"

"What's your first name?"

"Are you married?"

"Do you know how to fold an origami bird?"

Wait, what?

I looked down at the small child that had handed me his completed worksheet. I was taken aback by such a specific question. It's like...he knew me. No, that couldn't be it. I'd never taught this class before. Maybe it was just a hobby of his?

"Um, yes, I do...do you?"

"Yup, I do, because you showed me how to fold it two years ago!"

No. 

WAY.

I couldn't believe it. This kid had remembered my train-wreck of a lesson on folding origami, and now was trying to show his grade 2 teacher how to do it every chance he got. 

And I can't even remember kid's names from a week ago. 

I left that day in the best mood I'd been in in a long time. It was amazing to see the impact I had - even as a very inexperienced first year teacher - on a student. And as a sub, no less! I'm sure once I get a classroom of my own, I'll be able to see these kinds of things more often. That's the perks of the job. But I got to experience this as a substitute teacher, which feels like blind luck. And I'm pretty sure that I will never experience something that awesome in the teaching world. 

Let's Talk About Guns

Can I talk about gun stuff?

If that makes you excited, then, well, I’m sorry. This isn’t fun gun stuff, like blowing up stuff and hunting. No, this is about gun control.

I know, I know. It’s basically the opposite of fun. But lately I’ve had some weird, conflicting feelings about it, and I’d like to share them with you.

Why you? Well, I grew up in a place where gun control was looked down upon. Whenever it was brought up in the news, all I ever heard was that it was - more or less - dumb. I’ve long since forgotten why; for me, I eventually just accepted that it was bad, no questions asked. I mean, government control is bad, right? No one wants the government all up in their business. That means higher taxes, more regulation of personal rights, and just more hoops that we have to jump through to get what we want. People have to be trusted to do what’s right. When they don’t choose that, then the government steps in. They are there to regulate the country, not to micromanage our lives for us.

Right?

I know that not everyone agrees with this, but I feel that most of the people I grew up with – friends, family, etc – held this view, and therefore I had this view. I’m not saying I simply accepted the view around me blindly. Sure, the alternate view wasn’t popular, or even talked about that often, and I have found that I am strongly influenced by those close to me, but as I grew older and began to evaluate and test my beliefs away from those who had taught them to me, I found that I still believed much of what I had grown up with. I still would prefer that the government have more of a laissez-faire approach. The government deals with the world stage and national concerns, while the public deals with the stuff that affects daily life.

But maybe not with guns.

This may sound a little ironic. And I get it. I’m conflicted with these views that I hold myself, and I can’t imagine they’d be very popular among my friends and family back home. But just let me explain my reasoning, and then you can point out where I’m wrong (since my readers are primarily friends and family back home).

As you may have guessed, these thoughts are strongly influenced with the Las Vegas shooting, where a gunman opened fire from a hotel window at a concert across the street, killing 58 people, the highest death count in mass shootings in the U.S. Another 546 people were injured (according to Wikipedia). It’s crazy and sad and heartbreaking. And yet, I couldn’t help but simply shake my head when I heard.

“Really, again?” I thought.

It seems like we’re all just waiting for the yearly mass shooting to hit the States. Remember the shooting in a gay nightclub down in Orlando last year? 49 dead, over 50 injured. Or what about the white supremacist who killed 9 people in a Charleston African-American Methodist Church in 2015? The San Bernardino shootings, where 14 were killed (also 2015). The frustrated college student who killed 6 and injured 14 in Isla Vista in 2014. Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, where 20 kids were killed. Also in 2012, when a kid opened fire in a movie theatre screening Batman, killing 12 and injuring 58.

And those are just the ones I remember from the news filtering up from the United States to Canada. That’s 110 deaths in five years. There are countless others (nearly a literal statement) that I flipped through, trying to trigger my memory. Virginia Tech, 2007. Columbine High School, 1999. There’s too many.

For comparative sake, I looked at what the internet had to say about Canada. I know we like to pride ourselves on being “better than Americans”, but are we really? Slavery existed up here, too. And residential schools are a huge black mark on our history. So, surely, we’ve had issues with mass shootings.

Right?

Well, there was a shooting in a Quebec City mosque in January 2017, where 6 died. A year before, 4 people died (including a teacher) in La Loche, Saskatchewan. In 2014, 3 were killed in Moncton, New Brunswick, before the gunman was taken out by the RCMP. 4 died in a Claresholm, Alberta shooting in 2011.

And that’s pretty much it. In the last six years, there’s been a little less than 20 deaths in Canada related to mass shootings. The biggest mass murder in Canada’s modern history was in 1972 in Quebec, where 37 people died, but that was related to arson, not firearms. Gun related, the highest death toll is 15, coming from the Quebec school shooting in 1989. According the list I found, no other massacres hit double digits (unless you start going back to pre-1900).

What if you compare it to the world? Barring terrorist attacks, the United States sits in 6 of the top 10 deadliest mass shootings in world history. Even more upsetting is that, apart from the Norway massacre in 2011 (which was a lone-wolf terrorist action), none of the shootings that happened outside of the USA occurred after 2009. Two of the deadliest world massacres -  and probably the most talked about lately – which occurred in Australia (35 dead in 1996) and Scotland (17 in 1996), were met his very harsh gun laws. Since then, no mass shootings in either country.

So what do we do with this? That’s where I get stuck, and resort back to the old Canada vs USA comparisons. In either country, I don’t think you can buy fully auto weapons. Semi-autos are widely available, but carry higher restrictions (I think) than those that are just single shots. It also depends on the power of the weapons, probably…I feel that I’m in slightly over my head. Can you believe I’ve never bought a weapon? But in Canada, it’s a bit harder to go out and buy a gun than it is the States. You have to go to a dedicated outdoor store or gun shop. In the few times I’ve gone shopping in the States, I’ve found high powered weapons in the weirdest places. Like WalMart. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think you should be able to go to a store, get some apples, maybe a Lego set, and then, why not get a firearm.

Right?

It’s fairly obvious that gun regulation is stricter in Canada than in the United States. And, yes, it hasn’t stopped certain people from getting weapons and committing awful crimes. But there’s got to be something that can be done. Just look at the numbers I pulled, which I found in just a few minutes of googling. The United States is the only country in the world that regularly experiences mass shootings with dozens of people killed. In nearly every other instance, governments have responded to major losses in life with harsh rules. Again, this bars terrorist attacks, because I believe that those incidents, as sad as they are, are truly unpreventable. However, mass shootings resulting from lax gun laws seem to be very preventable.

Yet the United States continues to argue that nothing can be done. No, something can be done; it just sucks to do. Guns are cool. Paperwork and regulations are not. But you know what else isn’t cool? Constantly wondering whether you are going to be a victim in the next mass shooting. Because it’s no longer a “what if” question – it’s when, and how many will die this time. As Canadians, we can sit back comfortably and complain about strict gun laws and argue that we should have concealed weapons so we can protect ourselves if a shooter ever pops up. But chances are, they won’t. This is hardly a Canadian issue. We can still ask “what if”…what if a shooter shows up? What if I whipped out my gun and stopped a massacre? What if I was a hero?

…

What if I couldn’t be sure if the person behind me on the sidewalk had a gun and was also mentally stable? What if criminals had easier access to high-powered almost fully-auto weapons? What if I was just one step away from being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

I don’t want to have to ask those questions. I can’t imagine the fear that some Americans live in, or the sorrow that some experience when they lose a loved one to a crime that was preventable. I don’t have a strong stance on this. But I’m tired of seeing that another Average Joe found his way to a dozen weapons and somehow managed to kill dozens of innocent people. Criminals will always find ways to secure the tools they need for crime, but these crimes aren’t committed by criminals. They’re committed by regular dudes people don’t expect to shoot up a place, and have good records and can legally buy weapons. So maybe a few extra laws would prevent these people from having the firepower to carry out their sick thoughts. Even if that means sucking it up and going through a few extra steps to afford a firearm for shooting clay pigeons.

Right?