Mr. Stephen Michael Minard is a substitute teacher at Garfield, a difficult and depressing job that is often unrecognized. He always wears animal print glasses and blazers. He flops his hands around when he talks, and unlike most substitute teachers, people listen to him.

Would you like to sit on the stool so you feel high and powerful?

I’ll just sit on the floor so I feel small and insignificant.

I absolutely love your glasses.

Thank you. They’re from Prague. I lived in Prague for twelve years. I got there just after the revolution and it was very exciting. Then there was no other place in the world I could use the Czech language, so I stayed another year.

What did you do in Prague?

My big accomplishment there was to have two children. And I started my own company to do advertising. I used to work in advertising because I wanted to learn how to be a better teacher. Advertising makes you become a better teacher.

Why?

You have to be good, otherwise you get fired. Public school teachers, they can be not good, but they don’t get fired.

So how does that make them alike?

They’re alike because they both want to change people’s minds.

How does a teacher change people’s minds?

Your journalism teacher wants to change your mind so that you write who, what, where, when, why instead of just, “I don’t know what to write.”

Did you know that your name is only two letters different from the journalism teacher, Stephen Michael Miranda?

Really? At this school? Maybe you should interview him.

Uh, maybe…

What room number is he?

It’s by the boys’ bathroom on this floor.

There’s a boys bathroom on this floor! Well that’s very good news.

What were you like as a kid at Lakeside?

I was a little kid and I couldn’t play on the football team because I was too little. But I played on a special little person’s football team. I also really like skiing. I was going to have a skiing vacation at Crystal Mountain because I liked this girl and she was going to be at Crystal Mountain at the same time. But then I disintegrated my shin going off a jump and couldn’t ski for three months, so that was a real turning point in my romantic life.

Did you always wanted to be a teacher?

I wanted not to be a teacher, but I knew I was supposed to be a teacher so I ran from it for a long time. I wanted to be a filmmaker, but you have to beg for money a lot, and I don’t like to beg. And now I’m a teacher and I beg my students to learn, so you can’t escape.

What do you usually teach?

At Garfield, or in the system?

Both.

I’m certified K-8 special-ed, so I’m really an elementary school teacher. But there is a dearth of substitutes in the Seattle Public School system — for good reason, because the pay is low and the conditions are miserable. All we see, day after day after day, is “Let’s beat up on the sub.” Different places, same story. That’s because learning is really about relationships. You build a relationship and then you agree to share information. But when you’re a newcomer, there’s no relationship.

So does it really get you down, being a substitute and being treated poorly?

Oh yeah. It gets me down, yeah.

How do you deal with that?

One thing, I like to sit in cafes and write. Hemingway said that to be a great writer you have to have a miserable childhood. And I had a great childhood, so this is kind of like my miserable childhood. So now I have something to write about.

Could I read what you’ve written?

Wow, nobody’s ever asked me that before.

Maybe you could read something that you like.

Ok. (He sings doo-doo-doo as he flips through his journal.) These are things to discuss with students. Money. The money you make by coming to school, the method of this class. History. You are shaped by it, so know it. Skill sets. you need a good skill set. The better skills you have, the better life you have. Luck. You are victims of bad luck. There are all kinds of luck. They are: luck luck, home luck, body luck, and school luck. Politics. The question of power: who has it, who keeps it, and how they keep it. Where do you fit in this structure? The brain. How the brain works, how it can grow. Identity. Do you know who you are? Do you think about it? Should you think about it? So those are notes I jot down.

Why do you teach at Garfield?

I like Garfield because it’s like planet earth. There are schools that I’ve been in that are not like planet earth, they are not the racial composition of planet earth. What really gives me joy and hope, is that people here work together. They work together more than they did in my day.

Talk about your pushup contest.

There was a new kid in class, and he’s a physical kid, and one thing I learned in teacher education was that our schools in America are horribly focused towards manipulating words and manipulating numbers. But that’s one of the seven intelligences. Like physical, musical, interpersonal, kinetic intelligence. I challenge them to all kinds of contests. Arm wrestling contests, and they win, pushup contests, and they win, singing contests, they win. I challenged them to a dancing contest, and they wouldn’t do that, but they would win. Also I just wanted him to get rid of some energy.

It was a good choice.

Yeah. I’m standing there as a substitute teacher and I realize I’m outnumbered. And I also realize that most kids can beat me up. And that’s just one of them. So two of them can really beat me up. And twenty of them can leave nothing, not a trace. I have to be upfront about that. So the point is that children usually have more power than adults, and for us to say otherwise is fake. So we should get clear, and then we can see: what purpose do adults really have? What they end up doing is just being a traffic cop, saying you go there, you go there, and everything will work out better. I read this article about a horse trainer, and she said, “I never tell a horse what to do, I ask permission of the horse to do something with the horse.” And that’s what works for me. If someone comes in and tells me to go over there and learn the irregular verbs in Latin, it doesn’t work for me

Very interesting. Thank you for the interview.

You know what, you should have Ms. Stengle take a picture of us three, and then I’ll take a picture of you three. Then I’m going to go to the bathroom on this floor.