Teachers are always the ones students look up to for advice, for guidance about the subjects they teach, and who push people to do their best every class.

However, when these teachers leave for some reason or another, like for maternity leave, they leave helpless students with, most of the time, substitutes that the school hires at the last moment to fill in subjects they don’t even know.

I believe that long-term subs are a bad solution for students in the long run because students won’t be taught by someone who knows the class material.

When teachers leave, most of the time they leave lesson plans for the substitutes to follow. And just like every other day with a substitute, you learn from a teacher who doesn’t usually know what they’re talking about.

Imagine being stuck with that for three months, with nothing but FIT, morning or afternoon tutoring sessions, and other teachers to help you keep your grade from sliding down because a substitute doesn’t know the quadratic formula.

Even worse than that, these same substitutes are in charge of the grades. The same people who don’t understand the content are giving 50’s left and right because they are not doing a good job of helping you understand what you’re failing. It’s a vicious cycle of failing and not understanding that, because of the substitutes, might have students end up in summer school now or Delta.

Students also lose that bond they have built up with the teacher when they leave for certain reasons. I know that bonds with teachers are essential to me liking a class, and if I don’t like a teacher, I don’t like the class.

I’m not saying that the teacher has to be nice or the class has to be ridiculously easy, because the teachers I like the most are those who push me to do my best every class and are there when I need help but at the same time aren’t overbearing.

But, when I develop that bond and it is suddenly gone when they leave for their reasons, I feel heartbroken and upset that I am stuck with some (most of the time) random substitute that can fill in for two to three months, or sometimes longer, until they get the teacher back in the classroom.

While some substitutes do know what they are talking about, I know first hand how some long term substitutes are. I had one in the 7th grade when my Texas history teacher suddenly left midway through the year. I had a substitute who, although did know history, was not very good at explaining things to students and, as a result, my grades quickly declined.

He treated every day like it was a brand new day and he was a substitute for just that day, and he never learned our names and assumed the teacher would someday come back. She never came back, and by the end of the year I had barely made an 80 and I had learned close to nothing from him.

It’s not all the substitutes fault, though. They are thrust into situations they don’t usually know how to handle because they are only replacements. If there was a way for the teachers to teach the subs and then the subs teach the students, long-term subs wouldn’t be that big of an issue among students.

If teachers know that they are going to be absent ahead of time, instead of leaving a lesson plan for a substitute to follow on a piece of paper, leave a video behind so students can still see you and understand what is going on by the one person who is the expert. This is an easy solution, as this allows the teacher to know what the students are exactly going to learn while also allowing the teacher to still do their job in the way students have gotten to know.

Overall, long-term subs aren’t always bad, but they don’t usually know how to teach a class because they are thrust into a new situation and students feel the effects in their grades and their class preferences.

If teachers could somehow still teach their classes, like through a Skype system or some sort of video system, long term subs would only be there to monitor what is going on, and wouldn’t be suddenly pressured to teach subjects they don’t know.