Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Jason, take Mackenzie’s survey!”

  Thomas was a movie buff, with a picture of Tim Burton on his notebook; his survey was long and complicated. He wanted people to choose their favorite movie from a list, including The Little Mermaid, Wallace and Gromit, and Peterman, which was autocorrect for Peter Pan. If you could meet a movie director, who would you meet? was another of his questions. And Would you rather (a) go to a movie when you can meet the movie director, (b) go to a movie premiere, (c) have a private meeting with the movie director, (d) meet the director but never see his movies, (e) read his books rather than watch his movies, or (f) watch his movies and never meet the director. Thomas had also asked, What would you like to eat when you got to a movie? and How would you want to die inside a movie? and When would you like to die? Most kids wanted to eat candy at the movies, followed by popcorn, but there were write-ins, too: Nutella, hot wings, “a burger,” “everything,” and soda.

  Mackenzie took Thomas’s survey. “When would you like to die?” she read. “Morning, afternoon, evening, or midnight. Hm. Midnight. I’d rather die at midnight.”

  The survey project was a great success—at least for many. I could hear an eager note in kids’ voices as they compared results. Some were already graphing the incoming responses—circle graphs, bar graphs, line graphs—the software helped with that. “I’ve got to take my own survey!” said Thomas excitedly.

  He asked me if I’d seen Blake on Superhero Day. “He was wearing his wrestling singlet, with tights.”

  “He was looking pretty cool,” I said.

  Thomas raised his eyebrows doubtfully.

  Darryl looked up from doing something with a protractor. “I’d be like, Ah, put some clothes on.”

  “He was wearing a cape,” said Thomas. “Well, towel.”

  Mackenzie said, “Everybody, announcement please. If you haven’t taken our survey on Educate, we need you to take it now.”

  There was a group of slumpy loud girls in the back of the class who hadn’t done anything. “They’re probably discussing feminine things,” said Thomas.

  “They need to be separated,” said Darryl.

  “I hate separating people,” I said.

  “They’re women, they can deal with it,” said Thomas.

  I went over. One of the girls, Marcy, was drawing a smoldering portrait of Ian Somerhalder, from The Vampire Diaries.

  “Nice chin,” I said.

  “Ian Somerhalder is the hottest guy I’ve ever known. Me and him are”—she clasped her hands—“married. Married forever.”

  Nearby, Warren was swiping through pictures of pickup trucks, waiting for the results of his survey to come in. “My brother has a mudding truck,” he said.

  I asked him what his survey was about.

  “Best basketball player of all time,” Warren said. “Best NFL player of all time. Best soccer player. Best wide receiver. Favorite food.”

  “What if they don’t know about sports?”

  “They can just pick at random.”

  He’d also asked what everyone’s favorite subject was. So far the results were: math, 22 percent; language arts, 0 percent; gym, 78 percent. Michael Jordan was winning the best-basketball-player question.

  “We’re going to get married,” said Marcy to herself, as she sketched a lock of Ian Somerhalder’s studiously disheveled hair.

  I sat in a random chair and watched it all happen, singing Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” too softly for anyone to hear.

  Ms. Nolton appeared in the doorway. “Off to your lockers!” she said.

  Within thirty seconds everyone was gone.

  —

  NOW IT WAS TIME TO PRETEND to be a science teacher. I found the chapter on biological classification in the Glencoe textbook, Life’s Structure and Function, and read some of it.

  “Can we take the attendance down?” asked Cheyenne and Caitlin. I gave them the signed sheet.

  “OKAY, GUYS,” I said. “HOOP! HIP! HOOP!” They went still. “So taxonomy. What’s that about?”

  “That would be a way to classify animals,” said Jason. “Like if they had like the shape of a beak, we would be able to like choose different taxonomies.”

  I nodded. “There are certain people in this crazy world who really want to know where everything fits. And the main guy is this man”—I pointed to the picture of Linnaeus that was tacked to a bulletin board—“Linnaeus. Did you talk about him?”

  “Not yet,” said Lily.

  “Linnaeus, about three hundred years ago, lived in Sweden—he was really smart, and he was interested in plants. He went around looking at plants. That’s the first thing you have to do as a scientist, is actually look at things. And he would think, What’s different about this plant? What’s similar about that plant? He looked at all the living creatures and came up with a system, a way of dividing up, or classifying, all living things. What do you think he came up with? If you were a scientist, what would be the first category you’d come up with?”

  “Living creatures?” said Sage.

  I nodded. “You’d say everything living, and everything nonliving, that’s good. And then you come down to the living things. Somebody says to you that it’s terribly important, you’re on a new planet, you have to classify all living things. What would you come up with?”

  Long silence.

  “Organisms?” said Jason.

  “There are organisms. And you’re looking at them. Some are big and green. Some of them are moving. They make grunting noises. Some of them fly. Some of them just sit there. How do you divide them up?”

  “By the five or six kingdoms?” said Lily.

  “Yes—but maybe the first thing you would do is say, ‘These are plants, and these are animals.’ That’s the first thing that Linnaeus did, because he was a sensible guy. Very simple. And then microscopes came in. People started looking through microscopes and they realized that some things didn’t look like a plant, and they didn’t look like an animal. They were a blob of something that moved around under a microscope slide. So they thought for a long time. They thought, Hm, probably not a plant, probably not an animal. Probably something else. A protist.” I wrote it on the board. “A protist just means a really little simple thing. There are all these fancy words, but basically they’re just trying to figure out how life is organized.” I looked down at my notes. “So then some years went by, more scientists looked at the stuff, and realized that there were many kinds of these things,” I said, circling the word protist. “Some of them were really rare. They only found them because they went down to the bottom of the sea and found them living near the sulfur spouts at the bottom of the sea. So they came up with some rarer things.” Darn, I’d forgotten their name. Don’t panic. I held up the worksheet. “So you’ve got this worksheet, right? That says ‘Classification Guide to the Kingdoms’? Do you have it?”

  “No,” said Jason.

  “Yes, we have it,” said Lily.

  “Why are they called kingdoms? It’s because it’s like Game of Thrones, isn’t it? Over here is the plant kingdom, and over here is the animal kingdom, and then there are these really bizarre kingdoms—there’s the eubacteria kingdom. They make their own food, they’re one of the oldest forms of life on Earth, they help you digest, they live in your intestine, they’re small, they’re disgusting. We move on. Another kingdom. The protists. The ones they saw when they looked down the tube of a microscope. And there was a controversy because of the kingdom fungi. What’s a fungus? Is it among us?”

  Sage raised her hand. “It’s like something that feeds off dead or living plants and animals.”

  “Right! So if you had a mushroom here, and a weed over here, and they both pop out of the ground and they grow and they die, why would you not call both of those things plants? Or plantae, as they say? The scientists got really subtle, and they said, Wel
l, plants use the sun to make their own food—they have chlorophyll—whereas funguses just live off of rotting stuff.” I started writing on the board again, drawing lines. “They’ve got Animalia, just a Latin way of writing animals. Plants. Protists. And—what was it?”

  “Eubacteria.”

  “Eubacteria! How do you remember that? It’s hard to remember all these words.”

  “We have a silly sentence!” said Sage.

  “No, we don’t!” said Lily fiercely. “Not for those. That’s how we remember the eight levels.”

  “Oh,” said Sage.

  I asked, “Did every group make a new silly sentence?”

  “Yep.”

  “So what is the sentence that you use?”

  “Donkey Kong Pays Charlie Only Five Giant Strawberries,” said Sage.

  “Great,” I said. I looked down at my sheet. “Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Very useful to have that sentence. The domain is this giant umbrella term above everything. So that’s Donkey. And then Kong. Everything we’ve been talking about—plants, animals, fungi, eubacteria—all that is the kingdom level. That’s the Game of Thrones level.” I held up my finger. “There’s one other kingdom, and it’s kind of interesting.”

  Studying the packet, Lily called out, “Archaebacteria!”

  I pointed at her. “Archaebacteria! When you say that something is archaic, what do you mean? Old.”

  “They’re the oldest type,” said Lily.

  “Right. Archaeology is the study of old stuff—old rusting little bits of nothing that you dig up in the ground. Archaeology. So archaebacteria just means ‘old bacteria.’ In the earliest beginning of the world, when hot lava was spouting out everywhere, when the world’s atmospheres were toxic and strange, there were these animals. One lives in hot springs—a bacteria that’s able to live in really hot water, that’s kind of amazing—and one in salty environments, like the Dead Sea. For three hundred years we’ve been talking about the difference between, you know, a corn plant and an oak tree. But here”—I tapped the words archaebacteria and eubacteria—“are the ones scientists are getting excited about now.”

  Then I decided to go AWOL from the worksheet. “Let me ask you one other really tough question. Could anyone go outside right now and know an oak tree when you saw it? Or a maple tree? Do you know the difference between them?”

  “Nope,” said Trinity.

  “Yes, the leaves,” said Luke.

  “The leaves,” I said. “So there’s this huge scientific theory about all the living things on Earth. But usually what we need to know right here in Maine is the difference between a goldfinch, a robin, a hawk. You want to know what a moose looks like. That’s the real world that we’re living in. And this”—I waved the worksheet—“is the scientific world that involves all the species of the Earth. It’s exhausting, actually. But once you realize that the first guy, Linnaeus, started in that simple way with just plants and animals, it makes sense. So fill out the packet and let me know if you have questions.”

  Trinity came up. “Can I go work in the hall?”

  I told her to do the packet and then she could work in the hall.

  Caitlin came up. “Can I work in the hall?”

  “Buzz through this worksheet and then we’ll see.”

  Lily came up. “Just letting you know. Mrs. Painter sent us a daily warmup that we’re supposed to do. She wants it done and emailed back to her. So you may want to have everyone check their email.”

  “That’s a very good point.” I raised my voice. “Mrs. Painter has sent you an email with the daily warmup thing, and she wants it back.”

  I went up to Max. “Did you do the email thing?”

  “I’m blocked,” said Max. “I can’t get email.”

  I told him what the email said. First list the six kingdoms. Then list the classification hierarchy. Then they had to say what a dichotomous key was, and why it was useful. “What does dichotomous mean?” I asked.

  “I have no clue,” said Max.

  A wounded green tennis ball flew through the air. I ordered Devin, who’d thrown it, to put the ball back on the chair leg.

  Caitlin was having trouble with Google Docs.

  “Can I go get something out of my bag?” asked Devin.

  I asked Lily what a dichotomous key was.

  “A dichotomous key,” she said, “is when you’re trying to classify an animal, and it has certain features. It says, ‘Pick A or B.’ Say it was a cat and you picked B. Then it would say, ‘Does this animal have a furry tail?’”

  “Great, thanks,” I said.

  I walked over to Ashley, who was leaning her head on her hand doing nothing. “I can’t concentrate.” She was sniffly.

  “Are you sick?”

  “No, just a cold,” she said.

  I tried to get her going on the Google Doc quizlet, where she had to list the six kingdoms.

  “I wasn’t here for any of this,” Ashley said.

  I showed her where the kingdoms were listed in the packet, one at the top of each page. Caitlin came up holding a page of work. “Can I go out in the hall?” I said she could.

  Everyone was having trouble defining dichotomous key. I couldn’t blame them. “Why is it called a dichotomous key?” I said to the whole class.

  “Because it is!” said Devin.

  “Because scientists want to make a word no one knows?” said Ashley.

  “Exactly,” I said. “The scientists want to make a fancy word, because they want to sound smart.”

  “Yeah, and it’s a pain!” said Ashley.

  “Science is full of that,” I said. “Doctors use fancy words like febrile for when you have a fever. But it’s also because the words help them be more specific. So what is a dichotomous key?”

  “A way to classify?” said Jason.

  “It was just explained by that very smart person over there.” I pointed to Lily. “All it is is a kind of a flowchart. It says, Is it hairy, or is it smooth? Oh, it’s hairy. Go down here.”

  A boy named Carl sneezed, rattling his chair.

  I said, “Does it sneeze convulsively? Yes? Okay, it’s Carl. That’s a dichotomous key. All right? Thank you.”

  A neat, ponytailed girl sitting at one of the side tables, Jillian, seized her head in both hands and moaned in pain. “I’m in the middle of doing the dichotomous key, and I don’t know what to do!” Part of the assignment was that they were supposed to create their own dichotomous key, in order to distinguish between an ostrich, a crab, an elephant, a fish, and a cat. She’d picked the elephant, and she’d written, “Does the organism have a long flimsy nose?”

  Her friend Lindsey, in an Aéropostale shirt, who was making a dichotomous key for a cat, was farther along. Did the animal have ears or not have ears? If not, it was a fish. Was the tail long but skinny? Elephant. Was the tail long but furry? House cat.

  “That’s pretty good work,” I said. “Seriously, that’s pretty good work.”

  “See, that’s what I’m having trouble with,” said Jillian. Finally she came up with, “Does it have a long neck?”

  “Ooh, yes!” I said. “You’re flying now.”

  I went around the room lavishing praise on various half-completed dichotomous keys. “That’s a seriously nice dichotomous key!” I said to Sage. “Do you know what dichotomous means? It just means cut in half. So you either go this way, or you go that way.” I held up two fingers. “Di-chotomous. Cut in half.”

  Devin was poking fruitlessly at his iPad. “It’s blocking my Google Doc,” he said. His screen had a popup message on it: VIRUS SCAN WARNING. I told him to work on paper.

  I asked Ashley how things were going. “Bad,” she said. She’d gotten a D-plus on her BrainPOP quiz. On her iPad was a question about which kingdoms included eukaryotes. She had to look
through the seven-page kingdom packet, I said. Each page held one kingdom.

  “I have to look all through that?” she said.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said.

  “Yeah it is,” said Ashley. “Look at all those words. Too many of them. I don’t know where a eukaryote lives.”

  I started rattling around in the pages of the kingdom packet with her. “Okay, it says here that a eukaryote can be a unicellular organism. So then you go, Whoa, this is not a eukaryote, this is a prokaryote! So what’s a prokaryote?” The packet defined a prokaryote as “a very simple cell.” I felt a rush of exasperation. “You know what?” I said. “Prokaryote is one of those words you were talking about. It’s a very complicated word that means ‘simple.’ Why do they do that to us?”

  “Because they want to make money?” Ashley said.

  “That’s part of it,” I said. I gave up. “So you’ve just got to poke around, look at the packet, and get familiar with it. That’s how it works.”

  I went over to Evan, who again had a hoodie on to hide his hair. “Travis!” I said. “I know you from before. How’s it going?”

  “Lovely,” said Evan. “He’s Travis.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Every human being has a name. It’s just too hard for me. Do you guys have the email from Mrs. Painter?”

  “I might,” said Evan. “She literally spams me with emails.” He found it in his mail program.

  I went back to Jillian, who’d been struggling with her dichotomous key. She recited the taxonomic ranking perfectly: “Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.”

  “Fantastic!” I said.

  She’d finished her dichotomous key, too. “Now all I have to do is the packet.”

  Ashley had gotten a D-plus on her BrainPOP again. I’d carefully helped her find the wrong answer: it wasn’t eubacteria, it was archaebacteria. “I’m sorry, that was my mistake,” I said. This time she was stumped by A vascular plant that seeds with fruits and flowers. Together we flipped through the packet. Halfway down the Plantae page it said angiosperms have tubes, flowers & fruits that produce seeds. “Is it an angiosperm?” I said. She tried it on her iPad, which chirped: correct.