Loyalty is all I ask of you.

A quick note to teachers: (Disclaimer: this goes to no teacher in particular)

If a substitute teacher goes out of their way to help you out, please give them the respect of your loyalty and ask them first when looking for a substitute.

Examples of things a sub might do in attempt to gain your loyalty:
• Answering your 11 p.m. phone call begging for a sub the following day, even after the teacher has confessed their room is a mess and they have no lesson plans.
• Coherently answering your 5 a.m. phone call when you are sick, with no lesson plans, and some kind of special visitor coming to do a project with the class.
• Cancelling a prearranged job at another school the next day to come and sub in your class for consecutive days to make life easier for you and the kids.
• Gracefully dealing with parent volunteers, even when we have no heads-up they will be coming in or idea of what to ask them to do while they are there. (When this happens, it seems they usually hover in the room and watch my every move to report back to the classroom teacher.)
• Creating a half day’s worth of lesson plans out of the three sentences you scribbled on a sticky note when you had to leave for an emergency and called for a sub to come in the middle of the day.
• Spending hours of time after school productively working on all of the after-school projects you left to complete, even though completing all of it will mean staying after our contracted time.
• Going with the flow when finding out you forgot to mention additional commitments they will need to cover including things such as after-school club advising, students who stay inside for recess, bus duty, etc.

Bending over backwards like this makes me feel very frustrated when I find out you asked someone else to sub for you because you happened to run into them or you thought I was already working.

Thank you for your consideration.