Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  She wrote domestic on the board and together she and the class defined it: it was the opposite of foreign. Then isolationism, then diplomacy.

  “I can think of a case in our history when diplomacy failed,” said Preston, a smart kid. “Nicaragua. That was when we started selling weapons to the Nicaraguans to fight their own battle.”

  Ms. Hopkins wrote Nicarauga on the whiteboard and paused. “I’m pretty sure that’s spelled wrong,” she said. She erased it and looked at the worksheet. “Treaty.”

  Bethanne read aloud from her iPad, not bothering to hide it. “An official agreement that is made between two or more countries or groups?”

  “Yes,” said Ms. Hopkins. “So it’s a formal peace agreement between countries or groups. For this class we’re really going to be talking about countries.” She wrote NATO and North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the board. A student got it confused with NAFTA.

  We moved on to affect versus effect. “These terms are confused a lot by students,” Ms. Hopkins said. “This isn’t necessarily like a US history thing, but it is two terms that you need to understand the differences of. Can anybody explain to me the differences between effect and affect?”

  A boy raised his hand. “When you’re saying affect, you’re saying that you’re going to change something. Effect is kind of used more as a noun. Like, ‘The effect of being shot is death.’”

  We turned to conflict. Bethanne said, “Even in our own country, we cannot agree on anything.”

  “Even in our school,” said Marlon. “We can’t agree on a grading system—we change it three times a trimester.”

  The Vietnam War was an example of a conflict, said Preston.

  “The eternal conflict between the sexes,” said Josh, with a flourish.

  “Any war is going to go under conflict,” said Ms. Hopkins, sipping from a cup decorated with a paisley pattern. They turned the worksheet over to see what the next word was. “War,” said Ms. Hopkins.

  “War, a state of armed conflict,” said Josh.

  “I have kind of a long one,” said Ms. Hopkins. “‘Organized, and often prolonged, conflict. It usually includes’—you should be writing this if you don’t have it—‘usually includes extreme violence.’ People dying and shooting each other and all that. Social disruption. Economic disruption.”

  Some of the students wrote extreme violence on their papers. More disembodied words floated through the still air of the classroom—social, political, economic, isolationism—each of them requiring a definition and an example. We got through these, one by one, but we still had militarism, fascism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, and totalitarianism to go. We were swimming in a warm, lifeless salt pond of geopolitical abstraction. Ms. Hopkins’s throat was hurting more now. She told everyone to work on their own, and she sat down and put on some music: Journey singing “Love Will Find You.” Then she played Joan Jett doing “I Love Rock ’n Roll.” The students copied out the dictionary definitions of the disembodied words until the bongers bonged. I felt sorry for this class, and for Ms. Hopkins. I said goodbye and walked around the corner and down a hall to Financial Algebra, taught by Mrs. Erloffer, a short, tough veteran teacher.

  She stood at the whiteboard going through the homework—the students were doing tax problems. For example, if somebody’s taxes were $5,975, how much more tax would she have to pay if her income went from $42,755 to some higher amount? My head lolled and I read the inspirational posters on the wall. Below a photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue, a headline said, “As a Student, He Was No Einstein.” Another poster: “The Best Way to Make Your Dreams Come True Is to Wake Up.” And another: “You Get Out of Life What You Put Into It.”

  She dimmed the lights and showed a soporific PowerPoint. “So we’re going to be constructing income tax graphs using compound equations,” Mrs. Erloffer said. “We’re going to use a flat tax, a proportional tax, and a progressive tax. Examples of flat tax. Is there anything we pay a flat tax on all the time?”

  “Sales tax?” said a girl.

  “Sales tax, that’s right. Proportional is just another word for flat tax. And then we have the progressive tax system—that’s when you pay different taxes based on the dollar amount that you earn. So—all these fancy words. I’m not going to make you know all these words, but if you hear them you’ll remember that we talked about them in class.”

  The PowerPoint included tax problems with inequalities. “So let’s check your understanding,” said Mrs. Erloffer. “Can you write the tax schedule notation, interval notation, and compound inequality notation that would apply to a hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred and seventy-six dollars and ninety-nine cents? Let’s write that amount down.” She wrote the number down and showed how to notate it in several ways. “The tax schedule notation sort of wants it in words. Can you put it in words, now? You can do that. Here’s the tax schedule. So, it’s telling me that it has to be over what?”

  A wispy girl raised her hand. “Over a hundred and thirty one thousand four hundred and fifty, but less than or equal to two hundred thousand three hundred.”

  Mrs. Erloffer nodded, writing the words on the board. “It’s important to know where you fall in a tax bracket. I hope that you guys are all earning a hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars by the time I see you after you graduate. That would be awesome! Wish I earned a hundred and seventy-two thousand.”

  A boy muttered something.

  “Huh?” said Mrs. Erloffer.

  “I was just talking to Gabe,” said the boy.

  The soft rain of dollar figures continued, and I had to catch myself from dozing off at one point. “Simplify the equation and explain the numerical significance of the slope and the y intercept,” said Mrs. Erloffer. Had she seen my sleepy head dip slowly down? I think she had, but she didn’t say anything. As the clock made its final moves, everyone rubbed their eyes and started zipping up their backpacks. “We’re not out of here yet,” said Mrs. Erloffer. She finished graphing an equation, knowing, however, that everyone had zoned out. “So that’s the significance of slope and y intercept, and we’ll continue from here tomorrow.” Six bongs and we rose to leave. I walked around the halls trying to find my way back to Mr. Bowles’s room, getting lost twice. Finally I ran into Artie, from special ed math, and he told me where it was.

  Mr. Bowles greeted me like an old friend. He said he’d just had an interesting talk with a student whose father was a bear-hunting guide. Several weeks before the beginning of bear-hunting season, the bear guides put out barrels filled with molasses, french-fry grease, stale pastries, and old donuts—black bears, it seems, are crazy for donuts. The bears become accustomed to feeding on the free junk food at the bait barrels, and then, on the day that hunting season opens, “hunters”—i.e., drunk, lazy barbarians—shoot at them from hiding places nearby. Each year, more than two thousand bears are killed in Maine at bait barrels. Mr. Bowles and I agreed that baiting bears with old donuts was unsportsmanlike and wrong. Then Mr. Bowles told a story about a time when he was surprised by a bear on a camping trip. “We sort of looked at each other, and then the bear turned around. The heart was really racing there for all twenty seconds of that encounter.”

  Drew, a rangy kid with a faint mustache, walked in and announced that he’d done a bad job of lacing up his boots. He joked with Mrs. Meese about how she was always late, while she ate something out of a plastic tub. “I don’t like my last class,” Drew said. “I don’t like having my most hated class at the end.”

  “What’s your most hated class?” asked Mr. Bowles politely.

  “Bio.”

  “Oh, jeez,” said Mr. Bowles. “You’d rather have that first?”

  “Probably.”

  Mr. Bowles sniffed. “What’s that smell, beef stew?”

  “Barbecue chicken,” said Mrs. Meese, chewing.

  “I was way off,” said Mr.
Bowles.

  “Yeah, I don’t know how you got beef stew out of barbecue chicken,” said Mrs. Meese.

  “Smells kind of like orange chicken,” Drew said.

  “Nope,” said Mrs. Meese, licking her fingers.

  “That’s my favorite Chinese food,” said Drew. “I love it. When my dad was in the hospital, like he came out, we all went. Most of us had crabs’ legs, orange chicken and stuff.”

  They talked about which restaurants were near the hospital—Five Guys, Denny’s, Friendly’s.

  “You never know what to expect in a Chinese restaurant,” said Drew. “We walk in the door, and there was a guy standing there who looked just like Elvis Presley.”

  “Was he singing?” asked Mr. Bowles.

  “No.”

  “Wearing the white jumpsuit?” asked Mrs. Meese.

  “Black suit,” said Drew.

  “Big fur coat?” said Mrs. Meese.

  “No.”

  A few more kids came in. “Drew and I love to hate each other,” Mrs. Meese explained to me. “He likes to pretend he doesn’t like me. But I know deep down he really loves me.”

  “Deep, deep down,” said Drew.

  “So buried that no one will ever find it,” Mrs. Meese said. “But it’s there.”

  Drew ran his hands through his hair. “Last block,” he said, “we talked about how we can afford to be a potato.”

  Mrs. Meese looked puzzled. “You can afford to be a potato? What was your vote on that?”

  Drew said, “I had to vote whether I should stick my pencil in a socket and become a potato, or not stick my pencil in and stay a human non-potato. She’s like, well, you’ve got to have the money to be a potato. And you’re going to have to have someone to take care of you.”

  “What class was this in?” Mrs. Meese asked.

  “Personal economics.”

  Mrs. Meese was still puzzled. “I’m thinking what does money and being a potato have to do with each other, buddy?”

  “I don’t know, she just brought it up. She was like, ‘How are you going to pay for the medical bills and stuff?’” He walked over and sat by the window.

  “Vegetable,” said Mrs. Meese quietly. “Not potato.”

  I asked her how long she’d been an ed tech. “I started subbing in the fall of 2012, I think. And I was hired full time a year ago. When I subbed I was in every day. It got to the point where my phone never rang anymore, I was just pre-booked. They were just literally like, ‘Okay, we just want you in.’”

  I said that the school seemed to be full of good kids.

  “What I found when I started subbing—the teachers are all very friendly, receptive to you being here, nobody has a problem with helping you with anything. And I’ve heard from other subs who have subbed in other places that their school isn’t that way. The teachers in this school love having ed techs to help in the classroom, and I’ve heard in other schools it’s not like that. The teachers actually don’t want the help in the room. Maybe it’s because it’s another set of ears and eyes.”

  “And also,” I said, “the ed techs can be the source of a little murmur of conversation.”

  “They can be,” said Mrs. Meese. “That English class you were in this morning, that is a very big class. The math class, how’d that go?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I didn’t do much.”

  “I’ve done that course seven times,” said Mrs. Meese. “But this is the first time with that teacher, and she’s doing it all different. So I’m walking in kind of knowing what’s going on, but not knowing how she’s going to be doing it.”

  I asked her about math requirements. Everyone had to take Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II, she said. Financial Algebra was a half-credit course, and her kids didn’t really understand it, but they tried. She packed up her lunch things and went over to talk to Drew. “I’m on this side of the room just so I can irritate you,” she said to him. “I love it when I can irritate you, it just makes my day.”

  “I’ll scare you,” said Drew.

  “You’re not going to scare me.”

  “I scared you that one time, I can scare you again.”

  Mrs. Meese laughed.

  “It’ll happen again,” said Drew.

  “One day you’re going to scare the living crap right out of me again,” said Mrs. Meese. “I believe you.”

  Drew told us about an April Fool’s trick one of his teachers did at his old school. “She took this teacher’s keys to the lunchroom, and before they made the Jell-O, she told them, ‘Put the keys in the Jell-O and serve that to her during lunch.’ She got her Jell-O and saw her keys.”

  “I hope they cleaned her keys before they got put in that Jell-O!” said Mrs. Meese. “Yuck.”

  “One teacher was kind of short,” Drew went on. “They put a pie over the door so that it fell right on him when he came in. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen.”

  The bell rang for block 4. I walked out to one of the modular classrooms in the back of the school, near the football field, where there was a community safety class taught by Ms. Accardo, a petite smiley woman with big hair and big moves. She looked like a dance instructor giving a TED talk. As soon as the bell rang, she said, “Well! Got some review stuff for you guys! After, of course, I do attendance!” While she called names, a kid named Ronald unwrapped a sandwich and began eating it. “Just so you know,” she said, “the people listening to the iPads, if that’s what you need to do in order to focus, I’m fine with that, BUT! If you spend time in class trying to find the right song, I do have a problem with that. So just a little FYI, wanted to get that out of the way.”

  She twirled on her feet and held out a finger. “Okay! What four things will clue you in about an emergency existing?”

  “Behavior,” said Ronald, chewing his sandwich.

  “Unusual behaviors!”

  “Smell,” said Cayley.

  “Unusual smells!”

  “Sight,” said Anabelle.

  “Unusual sights!”

  “Sounds,” said Kiefer.

  “Unusual sounds! Those are the four things. Very good. Okay. That will trigger, or should trigger, your rescue radar to go off. And why don’t people get involved in rescue situations?”

  “They don’t know what to do?” said Kiefer.

  “They don’t know what to do!”

  “They don’t want to be responsible?” said Anabelle.

  “They don’t want the responsibility of helping! They don’t want to get involved! And why don’t they want to get involved?”

  “Because they’re afraid they might mess up?” said Andrew.

  “They’re afraid they might make a mistake! And what happens sometimes when people make a mistake and hurt somebody?”

  “Get sued?” said Andrew.

  “They’re afraid they’re going to get sued! What are some other reasons people don’t help?”

  Cayley said that you could be self-conscious.

  Ms. Accardo made a slow, wide-eyed nod, turning to look at everyone in the class. “You’re going to have a big old crowd of people, crowding around, staring at you rescuing somebody! Anything else? Sometimes people are scared of catching a disease. Or they’re all grossed out, because sometimes rescuing people is nasty. It’s gross.”

  Ronald raised his hand. “They think that people already have it under control.”

  “Yeah. ‘Oh, there’s people there! Somebody’s taking care of that.’ Big ole assumption! Okay, so what we’re doing now is we’re taking away a lot of those reasons for people not to get involved.”

  She told us how to obtain consent to help someone who is hurt. “What happens if someone is spewing blood all over the place, and they go, ‘Get away!’?”

  “Call 911?”

  She pointed at the girl, Jennifer, who’d
said this. “Call. You cannot tackle them! And put bandages all over them! Can’t do it. Now, if they go, ‘Go away’—and then pass out? A reasonable person would want assistance if they were unconscious and severely injured. You can help now—even though they said go away before they passed out.”

  But never try to do something that is outside your scope of training, Ms. Accardo warned. To illustrate this, she offered a vivid retelling of the tracheotomy scene in The Heat, which was, she said, “an R-rated flick with a lot of f-bombs.” The guy’s choking, and Sandra Bullock shouts, “I got this! Give me a knife!” She jams it into the guy’s throat, and the blood starts spraying out, and she panics. The guy is practically dying, and she’s horrified. The moral being that you don’t know how to do something just because you saw somebody do it on TV. And always, always, Ms. Accardo said, before you help somebody, tell them what you’re up to. “Your doctor tells you what he or she is doing. They just don’t stick their hand up your shirt, right? With the stethoscope? They tell you what they’re doing! You need to do the same, so you don’t look like some creeper!” After giving us several more pieces of advice, she played a video about how to move a victim, using an assist, a carry, or a drag. We watched how to do a two-person seat carry. If the victim has a head or spinal injury, you must perform a clothes drag. “Support the victim by gathering the clothing behind the head and neck,” said the male narrator, in a soothing voice. “Move the victim by holding on to her clothing, and dragging her.”

  “You don’t HAVE to move the victim,” said Ms. Accardo, after the movie was over—you only had to move the victim if the place where the victim lay prevented proper care. “Example! The person’s on the bed, and you have to give CPR. You’re just going to bounce them! You’ve got to get them on a firm surface to get compressions.” The lunch bell rang and everybody left, leaving their backpacks behind.

  “That was a pleasure,” I said. “I didn’t do anything, but I’m happy to be in your class.”