I’m a substitute teacher for a variety of reasons. It’s a transitional occupation in many ways. My career in marketing and communications is over. No one hires people in their 60s to work in those fields. I feel that’s a shame as my accumulated experience in B2B writing is an asset. I’ve also learned how to use AI in a complementary fashion. But once you get outside that loop of regular hiring in the freelance market, the opportunities dry up.

I took to teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic and have taught in more than 800 classrooms with over 20,000 students. Middle school is a primary focus, but I have also worked with success from Pre-K through high school. I get calls from teachers seeking a ‘good sub’ for their classrooms, and completed several long-term sub assignments in science and art.

The funny thing about this occupation, which I now call it, is teaching in schools where you were once a student yourself. At first, it’s a funny thing to think “I was a student in this classroom.” It evokes both good and bad memories of how you think, feel, behave, and lived during those moments. My sophomore biology classroom is down the hall from where I sit now. Mr. Kaminski was the teacher. He indulged my interest in birds by asking questions about the species I’d seen. Few teachers appreciated that world. I liked Mr. Kaminski.

Sadly, Mr. Kaminski was hugely overweight. He often looked sweaty and uncomfortable in his daily life. Though I was just fifteen years old, I worried about his health. As it turned out, the burden of his physique proved too much to bear. He took his own life.

I also had an Earth Science class down the same hallway, taught by my Kaneland High School cross country coach, Richard Born. I found the grade sheets from that course in some folders that traveled with me through all the places I’ve been and moved in life. That’s sounds crazy in some ways. Who keeps something that obscure and ultimately meaningless in the scope of life? I didn’t keep them on purpose. They just followed me around.

Finding mementos like that makes me think about the past, remembered and forgotten. I remember cold winter days running laps around this campus in the cornfields. I’d typically go out for track the week after basketball ended. I’d be out of running shape and those first track practices tore up the lungs as the March winds ripped fierce and cold across the stripped Illinois farm fields. Half the time I’d be sick with a cold, wiping snot on the sleeves a gray sweatshirt. It was hard work, training for track without a track to train on. The cinder track at our school wouldn’t dry out until well into April.

Our running equipment consisted of crappy little gum rubber track shoes that were barely a half-inch thick, and just a hint of a heel. When I made the Varsity as a sophomore, I earned some suede leather adidas Gazelles with thicker soles, but those got stolen at our first outdoor track meet in Rochelle. It was back to crappy gum rubber shoes for me the rest of the season.

I well recall an incident the day I was giving a speech in English class here at Kaneland. As I slid along the table during the talk, a huge sliver that stuck out of the wood penetrated my thigh. It hurt like heck, but I managed to finish the presentation. The teacher let me go to the nurse’s office, but on the way the track coach and Athletic Director Bruce Peterson saw me limping down the hallway. “What’s going on, Cudworth?” he asked.

Pointing to my thigh, I showed him the chunk of wood sticking out of my pants in two places. “Come with me,” he churled. We entered the nurse’s office and he instructed me to pull down my pants. They got stuck on the wood sliver so he extricated them and took a look at the wood sticking out in two places. A trickle of blood ran down my leg. He grabbed some scissors and somehow found a pair of pliers. With a quick jerk, he ripped the spike of wood out of my leg. I winced but made no sound. “Good boy,” he blurted.

Then he grabbed the merthiolate and poured it over the wounds. That stung like hell. He wiped me up with some cloths and wrapped a bandage around me thigh. “There you go,” he instructed me. “You can go back to class. See you at practice tonight.”

That event is such a symbol for how we work through many kinds of pain in life. It penetrates us one way or another. If we’re lucky, someone comes along to yank it out of us or at least put an emotional or physical bandage over it, and we go on living.

During my sophomore year at Kaneland, we moved in March because my father had lost his job and then blown a bunch of money in a network marketing scheme. We could no longer afford the big house where we lived in Elburn, so we moved to a new town and the Kaneland coaches picked me up each morning for the ten-mile commute to finish out the school year at Kaneland without losing any eligibility. My father somehow managed to arrange all of that.

So while it could feel really weird being in the high school I attended long ago, I don’t torture myself about teaching in my transition to retirement. I work because I’m not rich, and I’m not rich because I’ve had some slivery setbacks in life that have affected me over the years. The kids I taught last year in a long-term Science substitute job at the middle school are here in class with me today. They’ve smiled and greeted me upon entering the room and I’ve smiled back. What could be better than making new connections in this world and giving back to an educational system in which I deeply believe?

In the end, the existential question is “Why is anyone anywhere?” The answer is simple: Because it’s our choice to be here. Or anywhere.

Note: I’ve also used my five years of teaching in public education to write and illustrate a STEAM-based curriculum guide titled In Their Nature. It draws on my lifetime of study in biology, English, and Art. I already have commitments from park districts and schools interested in using it for curriculum support and programming. This illustration is from the children’s story Harey and Scarey.