The baby bird incident is one of many strange and bizarre stories that I have gathered from my subbing days. While the details remain ever-changing, the underlying cause remains the same: The students would rather be doing something else. In an ideal situation every student would be working on his or her own individual learning plan that caters to his or her current interest. However, even the most liberal educational philosopher would have to admit that this must be tempered to some degree; we cannot have students learning how to make explosives, but maybe we can allow them to investigate the science behind an explosion...maybe. Even this incremental omission sets the student down a different path, one whereby the teacher knows and the student does not.
Practically, the students must all learn what the teacher, and by extension the Ministry of Education, provides. This takes the form of generally set lesson plans, classes, and standardized tests. Students can, and do, learn at different rates, and may pass through the material quicker or slower in relation to one another, but each student learns more or less the same thing. It is simply a matter of time management. A ministry in charge of roughly 400,000 students cannot assess all of them if they are all doing something different. I would argue that for a substitute teacher, the acceptance of standardization is ideal, both for the sub, and the students.
The problem is power, not power in the Marxist sense, whereby a few hold power malevolently over many others, but in the sense of a social contract sub-consciously signed by all members. Michel Foucault writes:
"Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century. "Government" did not refer only to political structures or to the management of states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities, of families, of the sick. It did not only cover the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection, but also modes of action, more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities of action of other people. To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others. The relationship proper to power would not therefore be sought on the side of violence or of struggle, nor on that of voluntary linking (all of which can, at best, only be the instruments of power), but rather in the area of the singular mode of action, neither warlike nor juridical, which is government" (221).
In a classroom, both the teacher and the students are linked by power, students are "the other" to a teacher, but a teacher is also "the other" to his or her students. Generally, problems arise when a substitute teacher comes in and has to be brought in to the "conduct of individuals" by the students. Could this ever happen when students are working individually, each his or her own island, apart from the main? If students worked separately, what would the role of the substitute be?
In an ideal situation students would learn concepts based within their own interests. However, as a substitute, a group process is needed to maintain a smooth transition from one teacher to another. Unfortunately, that group is a social contract bound within the curious rules of power. This is both a good and bad thing, the incident with the baby bird happened because I had no social contract with that set of students; I was trying to dominate, not participate. However, as a substitute, I do not have the time to write a contract. I do not, and cannot, govern because I cannot "structure the possible field of action of others" (221).
How, then, can substitution ever result in little more than containment? Does a substitute truly have any power? Why do students listen at all?
Foucault, Michel. (1982). "The Subject and Power." Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd edition. Ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.
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