Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  Feeling duly chastised and contrite, we all walked to the cafeteria, where there was a massive molten fondue of noise. I went back and ate a second sandwich in my room, wondering whether this was in fact the worst day of my life. When I picked the class up half an hour later, Jess, a thin, sweet-faced girl with a pastel hairband, said, “At lunch some kids were saying you looked like Santa.”

  “Well, they have a point,” I said. “I have a white beard.”

  “They say you’re going to give us presents,” said Jess. “I was trying to stop them because it’s really rude. I could see them saying it in kindergarten, but not in fifth grade!”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I held my arms out. “NOW, OKAY, GUYS—TOTALLY QUIET! THIS IS SILENT READING.”

  There was a moment of relative silence, broken by Zoe. “Get your butt out of my chair,” she said to Carlton.

  “READuh!” screamed Danielle.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “Merry Christmas,” said Carlton. Zeke snickered.

  “THAT’S SO RUDE, CARLTON!” said Jess.

  And then I lost it. I got genuinely angry. “Just sit in your chairs and READ YOUR BOOKS. For god’s sake! It’s outrageous! I don’t want to hear ONE SOUND from any of you! NOT ONE PEEP!”

  Perhaps because they could hear the true note of anger in my voice, or perhaps only because Mr. Pierce had paid a visit, they all went silent. We had half an hour of blissful, noiseless reading-to-self. Pages turned; the heating system hummed. When it was over, I passed out a math worksheet. The kids saw it and said, “Oh, no!” They clutched at their faces and moaned.

  It was a mystery picture grid, similar to the one I’d passed out the day before in the second-grade class, except that this time the squares in the grid were smaller—there were a hundred of them—and four colors of crayon were involved. Each square held a single-digit multiplication problem—“6 x 7” or “3 x 2”—and if you got the right answer and matched it correctly with the color key and colored in the square, and if you repeated that task a hundred times, you ended up with a crude likeness of a train. Several obedient kids, mostly girls, set to work. Only a few students knew their times tables; instead, they referred to preprinted times-table matrices taped to the top of every desk. “They will try to be noisy,” said the sub plans. “Do not let them.” Hah.

  “This doesn’t look like a train,” said Danielle, disgustedly, when she’d finished. I separated Nash and JoBeth, who were fencing with plastic rulers, and I told Carlton to stand by the bathroom door because he was talking incessantly about poop. The slower kids, sensibly, copied the train shape from the faster kids’ worksheets. Toby, the boy who said he’d eaten a ham sandwich over the weekend, was in despair. Not one block on his page was colored in. He’d written his name at the top. “What’s up?” I said.

  “I suck at everything,” he said sadly.

  “No you don’t,” I said. “Just do what you can do. It’s all right, it’s really okay, don’t worry about it, my man.” I collected all the finished and partly finished and not-even-started mystery trains, and then, inwardly gnashing my teeth, I was compelled to hand out two more diabolical worksheets. One held a multiple-choice test of synonyms—the class did a good job of circling difficult as a replacement for hard, and lengthy as a replacement for long—and one sheet held a grim story about two boys taking a test, filled with twenty antonyms in bold. “They were calm because they were not really prepared but decided to give it their worst try.” “Felix’s pencil mended twice during the test because he was pressing too softly.” “They were very anxious when they were finally able to finish and were able to turn their tests out.” This sheet gave them a lot of trouble. “What’s mended?” they said.

  Toby asked me if he could sit at a table out in the hall, because he could concentrate better there. I said he could—he looked genuinely sad. A few minutes later, an enormous ed tech in a paisley dress ordered Toby back in the room. “They can’t sit at the tables without supervision,” she told me. “They know that.” Toby obeyed, but instead of going to his desk, he climbed into a supply cupboard in the back of the room and tried to close the doors on himself. “YOU CAN’T BE IN THERE!” cried Nicole and Danielle, pulling hard at the doors as Toby’s white fingertips held them firmly shut.

  “Toby, come out of the cupboard!” said the ed tech. “COME OUT OF THE CUPBOARD OR YOU’LL OWE MRS. BROWNING A RECESS.”

  “He’s really unhappy,” I said to the ed tech, in an undertone. “He’s been struggling. He told me he sucks at everything.”

  “Oh, he always says that,” said the ed tech.

  Toby emerged from the cupboard and put his head down on the desk, shielding himself with his arms.

  Jess handed the ed tech the sheet that she’d kept of wrongdoers and, to my horror, the ed tech started to write all their names on the whiteboard.

  I said, “Oh gosh, please don’t write their names up there.”

  “Jess said you wanted me to write the names down,” said the ed tech, annoyed. She erased the names and handed the paper back to Jess.

  Jess, crushed, tore up her list and threw it away. The ed tech stumped off.

  “Thanks for doing it,” I said to Jess.

  I collected the synonym-and-antonym worksheets. The last task of the day was for me to read to the class from Danny, the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl, starting from where Mrs. Browning had left off, at the beginning of chapter two. I read to them about the BFG, the Big Friendly Giant, who catches children’s dreams in glass bottles and makes magic powders out of them. “A dream,” I read, “as it goes drifting through the night air, makes a tiny little buzzing humming sound, a sound so soft and low it is impossible for ordinary people to hear it. But the BFG can hear it easily.” I looked up. The whole class was motionless. Carlton’s head was up; Ian’s head was up; Nash’s head was up; the tattletale girls were all intent on hearing every word I was saying. Everyone was listening. I kept going. I got to the part where the Big Friendly Giant uses a long blowpipe to blow his dream powders into children’s rooms. The sleeping child breathes in the powder, and begins dreaming a marvelous dream. “Then the magic powder really takes over—and suddenly the dream is not a dream any longer but a real happening—and the child is not asleep in bed—he is fully awake and is actually in the place of the dream and is taking part in the whole thing.” I reached the end of the chapter. “Wow,” I said. “Should I read some more?”

  “YES,” said the class. It was the first time they’d spoken in unison since they’d said “I will be the best that I can be” at the beginning of the day. I read the next chapter, which was about kite flying. It was good, but not quite as good as the bit about blowpipes and dreams, and some kids got squirmy, but still, they all listened. Thank you, Roald Dahl—you difficult, arrogant, brilliant genius.

  “You’re an awesome storyteller,” said Nadia.

  The funny thing was, Dahl’s story of the Big Friendly Giant had a residual effect. The class paid more attention to my voice afterward. When I asked them to pick up the paper on the floor and stack the chairs, they did it. I thanked each of them for spending the day with me, and some of them thanked me for being a sub. “Nash,” I said, “you were going totally nuts in the middle of the day, and now you’ve pulled it together.”

  “I’m like that,” Nash said. “I’m wild, and then I calm down.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  The buses were announced, and then the class was gone.

  While I was writing a note to the teacher, on yellow lined paper, the night custodian came in to empty the trash. “How are you?” she asked. “You survived the day?”

  I said I had. “They got a little wild.”

  “Oh, big-time,” she said. Her husband was the day custodian, she explained, and he’d told her all about how wild the kids were. She had to do all the bathrooms by nine o’clock, she sai
d. She used to have an assistant, but then the district had cuts and she lost her assistant. “But you know what? You do the best you can.”

  That’s true. You do the best you can. End of Day Three.

  DAY FOUR. Wednesday, March 19, 2014

  LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, SEVENTH GRADE

  YOUR BRAIN LOOKS INFECTED

  I STARED AT THE RINGING PHONE uncomprehendingly, and then I remembered: I’m on call. Beth asked if I was interested in filling in for a seventh-grade math teacher, Ms. Nolton, at Lasswell Middle School. I was.

  The middle school, hidden behind several fifteen-foot-high snowpiles in the parking lot, seemed new, with higher ceilings and a fancier entranceway than the high school—one of many schools built during Maine’s era of relative prosperity, when Angus King was governor. My classroom, part of Team Orinoco, had cinderblock walls painted a gentle yellow, with a long row of Venetian-blinded windows down one wall. The chairs rested on the desks, which were arranged as a square within a larger square. There were two identical taxonomy-of-learning posters hanging in the room. One was in the back by a wall telephone, and another was affixed to a corkboard, just above an impressive chart of mathematical “benchmarks” for seventh- and eighth-graders, produced by the Northwest Evaluation Association. One benchmark read: “MA.03.AEE.03.02. Understands the solution to an inequality results in an infinite set of answers as plotted on a number line.”

  Inequalities, it turned out, was one of the topics Ms. Nolton wanted us to be thinking about on that day. But first there was homeroom. “Students are expected to be working, reading, or socializing quietly,” said Ms. Nolton’s sub plans. The students, who were giddy from reciprocal teasing, yanked the chairs off the desks and talked about music. The boys had faint mustaches, and their voices had just changed, or hadn’t yet changed; some of the girls looked like they were about twenty-two.

  “I’m allergic to Justin Bieber,” said a flirty, sporty boy, Jason.

  “Justin Bieber’s amazing—no hate,” said Sydney, a flirty, sporty girl with a wrist brace. “He makes elephants take dirt roads.”

  “Elephants love him,” said Sunrise, who was thin and wispy-haired and secretive.

  “My mom thinks he’s weird,” said Jason.

  “I think he’s a freak,” said a loud boy, Evan.

  “He’s a weirdo with legs,” said a super-confident girl, Cayden.

  Georgia, broad-shouldered and theatrical, slammed her iPad pouch down on her backpack. “I don’t like anything,” she said. “Everything makes me mad. Even colors make me mad.”

  After the beep on the PA system we all stood and said the pledge, followed by a moment of silence. “Thank you, you may be seated,” said the secretary on the PA system. “On the lunch menu today we have grilled chicken and broccoli on garlic butter noodles, with a garden strawberry and spinach salad, crisp celery sticks, and chilled grape juice, and milk choices.” The students talked through the rest of the announcements, which were about intramural basketball, drama rehearsal, and a meeting of the yearbook committee. “Here’s my pencil, I found it, yay!” said Sydney.

  Next period was a STAR block. “What is STAR?” I asked William, who was staring at the floor. “Um, STAR is STAR,” he said. A technology enrichment specialist named Mrs. Elton—an ample woman in a gray pantsuit with the voice of a caregiver in a nursing home for people with dementia—introduced herself. She taught STAR class on Wednesdays, she said, which was fine with me: these middle schoolers made me nervous. “Everyone should be reading for the first few minutes,” she announced. The class went quiet; the boys sat on one side of the room and the girls sat on the other. Using purple marker, she wrote a list of science-related apps on the whiteboard: Little Alchemy, goREACT, Germ Blaster, NASA Viz, GeoMaster Plus, EarthViewer, Phases of the Moon, Black Hole, Powder Game Viewer. When she was done she explained that the students could download these on their iPads—except not right now. “We seem to be having Internet issues this morning,” she said. “Has anyone had a chance to try Little Alchemy?” Nobody had. She went down the list, describing “fun apps” while the class stared at their hands or down at the blue-green industrial carpeting. When the Internet came back up, some kids downloaded Germ Blaster and GeoMaster Plus and Black Hole, and soon half the class was laughing and poking at their iPads. “Guys, little noisy,” Ms. Elton warned. She looked at the clock. “Okay, guys, you can start packing up,” she said, and the STAR block was over.

  Next period I was on break, making some superstrong instant coffee for myself in the teachers’ break room, and after that was an “advisory block”—a study hall. The students were supposed to take an online survey about technology, which they did, in extreme silence. Some of them listened to music on earbuds; two girls shared one set of earbuds. These advisory kids were easy—too easy, I thought. I missed the jokes, the bavardage. I got my computer out and read an article in The Huffington Post: “‘Giraffe Woman’ Has 11-Inch-Long Neck.” The giraffe woman had begun her body modification program in middle school, by wrapping bent coat-hangers around her neck. Good lord. I could hear a science teacher next door explaining systems of classification—a restaurant menu, she said, was actually a way of classifying the food in a restaurant: appetizers, entrees, meat, fish, dessert. “I can’t believe you’re so focused,” I said to the students. “Is this always the way it is?”

  “No,” said a boy.

  At 9:55, the bell rang, and it was the beginning of my first actual math class. It was a high-level group, apparently, and they had lots to do: a half-page worksheet on number lines and coordinate planes, a “Scoot Sheet” of one-variable algebra questions, and several sets of problems on a website called IXL. They handled these fairly well. What broke the class’s will, though, was a page downloaded from MathWorksheetsLand.com. At the top of the page was a cartoon of a hard-hatted man bearing down on a jackhammer. Below him were ten gnarly, closely spaced strings of variables that the students were supposed to “evaluate”:

  Evaluate y2+3/4x3−3z3 when x=4, y=2 and z=3

  Evaluate (x + xy)−(−4y−3)x+6 for x=3 and y=2

  Several kids passed out small personal whiteboards, shaped like slates from one-room schoolhouses of yore, and everyone dutifully began crowding arithmetical calculations on them with dry-erase markers. They erased with their fingertips, or with neatly balled-up athletic socks, a bin of which were set aside for the purpose. The problem was that most of the students were shaky on the order of operations, and many had forgotten how to handle exponents. A few couldn’t recall what seven times six was. They ended up with all kinds of strange answers on their whiteboards. Sage’s fingers were blue from dry-erase ink. A plaid-shirted blond boy named Isaac called me over. “I’m having trouble with number four,” he said:

  Evaluate 6d+3d2+3e−e/6d+d−e for d=5 and e=2

  “That’s a hairy bastard,” I said, and we laughed helplessly at its absurdity for a while. Then together we jackhammered through it, variable by variable, making simple errors of arithmetic, correcting them, continuing. There was no answer sheet, so I wasn’t altogether sure that our answers were correct. “Do the best you can,” I said, and slumped in my chair. The bell rang; class over.

  The next class, which was split in two, with lunch in the middle, had less work to do—just the Scoot Sheet, some simpler problems on IXL, and a test on graphing inequalities. I spent ten minutes pawing around in the sub folder and among the piles of papers on the desk, looking for the inequalities test. “There’s something else she wants you to do,” I said, “but I can’t find it. So I think we should just talk. What should we talk about?”

  “How awesome I am,” said a small, plucky boy, Owen.

  “How has seventh grade been going?” I asked.

  “It has been the hardest year of my life,” said Owen.

  I asked them what the biggest adjustment was in going from elementary school to middle school.

 
“Waking up in the morning,” said a smart kid, Thomas, with a voice like a patrician banker’s.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “Why does school start so early?”

  Sunrise said, “It should be illegal for school to start before eleven. And illegal for it to end after eleven oh one.”

  “A sixty-second day,” said Thomas.

  “No, they’d just give you a ton of homework, think of it!” said Jason.

  “If you were the superintendent of schools,” I said, “how would you design the ideal school day?”

  Mackenzie, one of the pretty, dominant girls, said, “I would say you didn’t have to go.”

  “Then you’d miss out on the social aspect,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t meet anyone in person unless you went to some sort of party,” said Dylan.

  “That’s what they make the Internet for, and Facebook,” said Mackenzie.

  Her friend Darryl said, “I met my boyfriend online. He’s thirty, and he’s on Zoosk.” The two of them laughed.

  “That’s kind of sketchy,” I said.

  “Joke,” Darryl said. “I mean just like, we could go online and add random friends.”

  I said, “Let’s say you absolutely had to require people to go to school Monday through Friday. When would you start the day?”

  “Eight o’clock,” Thomas said.

  “Two a.m.,” said Owen.

  “I think twelve, for about an hour,” said Laura. “We all could use forty minutes of schooling.”

  Thomas objected: “That would be twenty minutes of lunch and one class.”

  Darryl said, “I think we should all have recliners, that are really comfortable.”

  “Do you know how much recliners would cost for nine hundred students?” said Thomas.

  Caleb, a realist, said, “I think it should be eight to twelve, four hours.”