When I began my ESL teaching career, I was working at a English language school that had a big problem with teacher absences, especially during flu season. At least once or twice a week, an ESL teacher just didn’t show up for one reason or another, and the administration didn’t find out until the last minute. We didn’t really have any substitutes, so the missing ESL teacher’s students were often dumped into another ESL teacher’s class for the day. More often than not, those