I've never subbed for another teacher before. It's not that I haven't had the opportunity. I was just too scared. Why? All of the students would be total strangers to me, which means I don't know the level of their practice or their injuries. If my teaching style is different from the teacher I'm subbing for, I run the risk of surprising or upsetting the regulars (and I know they'll tell on me when their teacher returns). And let me count the ways adult classes are different from my teen classes. Many of these, I realize, are preconceived notions and generalizations.

1. Adults pay for their classes themselves, not their parents. So they have something invested other than time, and probably even more upset if you don't give them what they think they've paid for.
2. Grown-ups are more likely to be averse to change. Teenagers kind of go with the flow.
3. Adults are stiffer, and thus more fragile, than kids.
4. They have way more injuries and health complications. (The possibility that my teenagers will be pregnant or recovering from a surgery is very slim.)
5. Adults have had the opportunity to do a lot more yoga (and some of them probably know more about it than I do). They will know, and judge me, when I mess up.
6. Adult classes are an hour and a half, my teen classes are an hour. (More on this later.)

So for a very long time, when the opportunity to sub came up. I just wasn't interested. But all of that changed a couple of weeks ago when I got an email from another teacher at my studio who needed a sub for her Saturday morning class. Despite my reservations, I thought a Saturday morning class would be a blast so I agreed, thinking "What's the worst that could happen?"

Well, let me tell you.

I wasn't prepared. I didn't have change. (At my studio we act as the cashier as well as the teacher.) I was nervous. My sequence was all wrong—too many Sun Salutes and energizing poses. I said right when I meant left. All of this is par for the course when you sub a class because you don't know what/who to expect. The biggest mistake of all. I looked up at the clock, and thinking I had ten minutes left in class set them up for a restorative pose. When the students settled into the Supported Child's Pose, I realized that the class wasn't supposed to be over for another half an hour. Oops!

I totally PANICKED! Once you get students into a restorative pose, you can't take them out and have them do active poses again. And even though restorative poses are great, it's not really what you want the focus of a class to be at 10:30 in the morning! But I already had them there, so we did two restorative poses for ten minutes each, then had a long Savasana (Final Corpse Pose).

However, the students' reactions to my mistakes were another surprise. (Trust me, I did not hide them well.) They were anything but judgmental and disappointed. All I saw on their faces was empathy, and maybe just a hint of pity. When they gathered up their belongings to leave the studio, they expressed gratitude for the time to rest. Phew! So even though I messed up (big time), I consider my first experience as a sub a success.

Have you ever had a subbing experience go terribly wrong? What makes a great sub stand out from a not-so-great sub?