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Well one of my substitute teaching gigs was doing a semester stint as a Spanish teacher in an inner city school.
Having only a speaking knowledge of Spanish - which I learned as a necessity because I managed our family's mushroom farm in my younger days and our crews were immigrant workers from Mexico - I was winging it.
Most of my students were Puerto Rican and the Spanish they spoke was far different from the Mexicanized Spanish I spoke. In any event, the challenge for us all was to learn (me to teach) Spanish from the book - mainly how to write it. I taught all levels from beginning to fourth-year.
It was a basically impossible task, and so I instituted a lot of self-study.
Anyway, the discipline policy was to have students escorted to the office when they were unmanageable. Unmanageable meant things like endangering others, throwing things, starting fights, screaming profanity, etc. The number of unmanageable students increased daily. At some point, the administration cut back the number of students they would accept in the office.
So I began ejecting the worst problem students into the halls. When they asked me where they should go I would say "I don't care".
I never got called back to that school.
The subtext of all this is the job of a substitute is crowd control. It's not really an "educational" situation...
When the administration stops supporting your disciplinary options, you have no options.
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