The Substitute Survival Kit

Most sub plans can be summed up thusly:

"Tell them to do this work and make sure they don't kill each other."
(a loose interpretation)

In the nice suburban school district I sub in, most teachers have trained their students well enough to have them do self-directed work relatively quietly. The few rebels can be easily cowed by a stern command and the teacher "look of death." Therefore to prevent utter boredom, the substitute must come prepared with her own means of amusement in order to prevent certain death by boredom.

My substitute survival kit usually contains:

• Light reading material
• Cell phone equipted with Tetris
• Illicit login and password (although all subs sign the acceptable use policy, we aren't given logins-- another sign of our "sub"-par (get it? lame, I know) status)
• Super strong coffee
• Lunch
• Knitting (usually a toy for my cat)
• Additionnal work, i.e. applications for jobs or grad school, transcriptions I'm working on

Is there anything I'm forgetting? Look, I know I'm probably not putting a model version of substituting out there, but there's not much "teaching" to it. I get excited whenever I can actually teach something or help a student, but to be honest, it doesn't happen very honest. So let's not pretend subbing is something it's not.