I gave up my career voluntarily as our first-born approached middle school, the years which combine exposure to drugs, sex, and bullying with no reliable child care on offer. After failing to get a voiceover career going–I was quite good at reading copy, enunciation, and imitation, but abysmal at self-marketing and self-motivation in the face of endless unpaid auditions with mostly negative outcomes–I turned to teaching so I would have the same hours as my kids. To find out whether I would like it, I started by subbing.

Just like any cantankerous old fool might, I can now assert that back in the day, things were better, that it, the early 2000s were the golden age of subbing. There was a staff who personally vetted and dispatched the subs, primarily by applying matchmaking skills. My best subjects were math and music, and music-enabled subs were rare, so I got a lot of those gigs in the early days. Some of the music teachers left detailed plans, so I taught third-graders to play recorder, introduced seventh graders to guitar, and rehearsed the middle-school chorus, including piano accompaniment the one time both the teacher and the accompanist were out on the same day. Other teachers gave me the option of free-lancing, so I developed a percussion unit based on word phrases, let kids try our didgeridoo (sanitizing in-between), and taught a scat unit, with the help of this track from a Lisa Yves CD I owned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMxz3U50sB8. Kids always cooperate when you let them bang on something, blow on something, or sing nonsense syllables.

This happy situation did not persist. Soon the clever dispatch team was replaced by a computer concerned only with filling slots. Instead of assigning us to a classroom or subject for the day, it moved us pawnlike from class to different class to playground to lunch duty, optimizing our usage. Worse, the assignment could be completely changed on arrival, for any number of reasons, which was psychologically jarring to those of us accustomed to the Old Ways.

Like most technological advances, this was more efficient and more economical, while reducing human agency and the depth of human contact. For the teachers, a sub day thereafter was almost certainly a lost learning day, with students watching a movie, or at most filling out a worksheet. I was one of the subs qualified for long-term assignments and many of us switched to those, but while they were quite fulfilling, they were not at all flexible, and not always available.

As a person with two engineering degrees, a deep reliance on my navigator, and a creepy attachment to my smart speaker, I hardly qualify as anti-tech, yet I do find that tech interactions can make me grumpy, which is one reason I have essentially zero social media presence. While writing these blogs, I keep my mind on my tiny but precious audience, my dear friends and family, all of you actual persons I personally know. Thinking of you is an antidote to the bot-world.