Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “He told me, ‘Do this, do that.’ So I did, and he messed it all up.”

  Mr. Partridge said, “Well, maybe you ought to do your own, huh?”

  “I was doing it,” said Lucas, “but then he did it for me.” He dropped a magnet on the piece of tin with a loud click and went back to Ben’s iPad. Mr. Partridge tore off a small piece of masking tape and stuck it right in the middle of the iPad’s screen. His thumb was enormous. Lucas squinted his eyes for an instant and decided not to fly into a rage.

  “Those are the bane of education right now, Lucas,” Mr. Partridge said, meaning iPads. “You’re going to cut it, not all the way.”

  Lucas began halfheartedly cutting with the tin snips.

  “You don’t want to cut into the point, you want to stop before the point,” said Mr. Partridge.

  “Oh!” said Lucas sarcastically. He stopped cutting. Mr. Partridge demonstrated the right way to cut. Lucas snapped the magnet again.

  “You watching?” said Mr. Partridge.

  “Yeah.”

  Mr. Partridge put the snips down. “You do it, then.” Lucas cut into the metal.

  Mr. Partridge left. Ben returned. “I went down there, and she told me to walk out,” Ben said to Lucas.

  “You walked in, you walked out,” Lucas said. They began talking softly together about iTunes passwords.

  I took another shot at being a dutiful ed tech. “So, Ben, do you know how to do this, so you can show Lucas?”

  “I don’t remember how,” said Ben.

  “I know how to do it,” said Lucas.

  “If you know how to do it, you should just do it,” I said.

  They went back to the iPad.

  Ms. Laronde came over. “Hey, Lucas.”

  “He’s mad at you,” said Kendra to Ms. Laronde.

  “I know he’s mad at me, but Lucas, you can’t stay mad.”

  “I’m not mad!” said Lucas.

  “You can’t be on the iPad,” Ms. Laronde said.

  “Class is almost over,” said Lucas.

  “No, you have twenty minutes left.”

  Lucas feigned amazement. “No!”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” said Lucas.

  “Can you work on it, please?”

  Lucas said nothing. He looked down, waiting. Ms. Laronde stood there for a while and walked away.

  Near me, behind Lucas and Ben, the three young men in baseball hats sat poking at their iPads. I watched them for a while, until I began to get mad. “Did you guys already do the stuff with the thing?” They looked up and focused on me. “You breezed through it and you’re done?”

  “We put our work somewhere and we can’t find it,” said one.

  “So you spent the whole period doing nothing?”

  “Yep.”

  I said, “All these machines around, Jesus!”

  “We’re not allowed to do anything else on them.”

  “Seems like a waste,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  They returned to their screens.

  Lucas asked Jamie if he knew somebody’s password. Jamie, innocent, said, “I don’t know her password.”

  Using common passwords, Lucas began trying to hack into an iTunes account. I watched them for a while, got up from the stool, and stood over them.

  “So, guys,” I said, “this whole time you’ve spent trying to scam the fricking iTunes, instead of learning something.”

  Lucas laughed, pleased that I sounded angry.

  I pointed at the iPad. “This is a fucking screen,” I said. “It’s nothing. It’s just nothing.”

  They were delighted with my swear. “It’s fucking important!” said Ben.

  I picked up the half-cut sugar scoop. “This is actually something real.” I set it down.

  “We do it because—ah—” said Ben.

  “Tell him,” said Lucas.

  Ben didn’t want to say. It had to do with a girl, I think.

  I said, “Well, it’s your choice.”

  Three people were hammering madly on their hooks.

  I went back to my stool. Mr. Partridge dropped by. “How are they doing?”

  “They just gave up.”

  He nodded. “They’re done.”

  Mr. Partridge moved over to Jamie. “So how much did this cost?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Jamie. Then he remembered. “Sixty cents!”

  “Okay. You got money? I do have to charge something for the materials. We’ll add it up at the end.”

  I slid my stool back to Lucas and Ben. “How well do you get along with Mr. Bowles?” I asked.

  “Pretty good,” said Ben.

  I sat. Lucas said, “The first iPad I had got stolen. At the McDonald’s parking lot. Then it got stolen again.”

  “Was it really stolen?” I said.

  “Yeah, it was. I had food on top of my iPad. They didn’t take the food, they took the iPad.”

  “My passionate door is open,” said Ben.

  I said, “Passionate door? What the hell? This is what I don’t get. This room is actually real.”

  Lucas held up the iPad. “This is real. I’m holding it.”

  “I know it’s real, but seriously. You can learn to make a freaking box.”

  “I don’t want to make a freaking box,” said Ben.

  “But you did it. And Lucas didn’t do it. And the guy came by and he saw you were looking at the screen and he thought, Screw it, I’ll go and help somebody else. And then you lose your chance. I can’t believe it.”

  “Two weeks ago, he did this,” said Ben, nodding at Lucas. “And his got messed up, and when we came back, it was gone.”

  “It was stolen at McDonald’s?”

  “No, that was his iPad.”

  Lucas said, “Listen, he got his box done, and someone crushed it with a boot.”

  “But he did it again,” I said. “He came back. I saw you did that template, I saw you did a good job with that. Now I’m supposed to help you, and I don’t know what the next step is. But Mr. Partridge came by and was ready to show you, and you were blowing him off.”

  “I don’t think we were blowing him off,” said Ben.

  “I don’t mean blowing him off that way, I mean you just shrugged him off. It actually hurts his feelings if you do that.”

  “No it doesn’t,” said Lucas.

  “Of course it does! Any teacher wants to teach. This guy wants to teach you stuff. He has skills, and he wants to teach you something. I watched the whole thing happen! I don’t want to bore you, but it’s like—” I shook my head. “So what do you guys want to do? In the end, do you want to do something with small engines?”

  “I want to go in the military,” said Lucas.

  “Me, too,” said Ben.

  “All right,” I said. “There you go.”

  Lucas said, “I’ll paint my face black and put a towel over my head and go around with an AK-47 and go, Whoo-hoo!” He went into a Southern falsetto. “I’ll shoot you, boy!”

  Ben said, “My friend was in high school, he took a chair, he threw it out the window, and hit a car with the chair.”

  “You know what my dad did, dude, when he was here?” Lucas said. “You know those janitor hats? So he greased one of those and filled it up with water. Took a dookie in it and put it on the principal’s truck.”

  “Wait,” said Ben, “did he go here?”

  “Yeah, here. The principal at the time says, ‘That fucking kid!’”

  “Last year my friends and I hated the principal so bad we put lobsters in his car,” Ben said.

  To Lucas I said, in a near whisper, “Your dad took a shit in a hat, and put it on the principal’s car?”

  Happy laughter. “Yeah!”


  “ALL RIGHT, CHILDREN,” said Mr. Partridge. “PACK UP. PAPERWORK UP FRONT.”

  Lucas and Ben bolted toward the door to wait for the bell. Jamie had been listening. “Those guys are toxic,” I said to him. “You should stay away from them. You did really good work, by the way. This is a good class, it’s real.”

  “My dad used to work at Bath, making ships,” Jamie said.

  “He made destroyers?”

  “Yeah, and he used to shoot the guns,” said Jamie. “He was in the army, too. He used to work for a company that makes jets.”

  I asked Jamie what he wanted to do.

  “I like building stuff. I want to build machines. I love art, too.”

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

  Mr. Partridge sat down at his desk as his students trickled out of the room.

  “I watched it happen,” I said to him. “They’re just transfixed by a stupid little rectangle.”

  “They’re in another world,” said Mr. Partridge. “They come in, they’re late, they sit there, or they wander out. I grade every day. So far I got two, two, two, two, two. Five for the ones that worked. Jamie is about the best worker in here.”

  “He just told me his father worked at Bath Iron Works,” I said.

  “Good for him. I did five years there. It’s a good experience. If you’ve got an in, that helps nowadays. I just happened to walk by in Portland at the unemployment office. Bath Iron Works was hiring. Nobody in there but the guy hiring. I got in. This was in ’seventy-three. When I started, there was three thousand people. When I left, there was five thousand people.”

  “It’s great what you’re doing here,” I said. “And some of it will have an effect. A delayed effect.”

  “They’ll never forget what they do here,” Mr. Partridge said. “More so than the English or the math. I try to do shop math. I tell them to go on their iPad, look up metalworking. I ask them, What job would be your dream job in the metal area? I refuse to pass a kid who would mature better in a fifth year. I’m faced now with a couple kids. They want to graduate, but they’re not passing. They want us to pass them to get the numbers up.”

  But sometimes, I said, a kid has to be tossed out into the world to realize what he really wants to do. “I wish I’d had a class like this,” I said. Which was true.

  “I started in high school,” Mr. Partridge said. “I’m a welder by trade. I cut my first arc in high school, which I can get these kids to do. We’re in a dilemma now in education. These are the programs that get cut.”

  We shook hands. Outside, as the buses idled, waiting to fan out over the countryside, it was beginning to rain. I drove home worrying about Sebastian’s sleeplessness. And thinking what a hypocrite I was to make an angry speech to Lucas because he wasn’t following the paper template and doing his sugar scoop. The only shop class I ever had to take was in eighth grade. It was taught by a trim, taciturn man, Mr. Harris, who told us to make keyhole chairs. No other kind of chair was acceptable; we had to follow his plans exactly. I used the jigsaw to cut the hole in the back of the chair—that was interesting—and I screwed in two of the legs, making pilot holes for the screws, and then I stopped. I looked around the room at eighteen children making the same thing. The chair, made of white pine, was one the cutesiest, ugliest things I’d ever seen—cutesy and so low to the ground that no grownup could sit on it comfortably. It was not a chair, it was an embarrassment, a pedagogical means to an end, and I despised it. I didn’t tell Mr. Harris that I despised the assignment, I just didn’t finish gluing it, or sanding it, and I didn’t stain it with the dark oak stain that never looks good on pine, and I didn’t polyurethane it. Mr. Harris gave me an F on my keyhole chair. Then, for the second half of the semester, he taught us drafting: how to write numbers and letters in blocky blueprint style, and how to use a T square and a triangle to make a three-quarter measured drawing of a rounded metal piece with two holes in it. That I liked doing—so I did it, and I got an A. One day a kid I was trying to befriend suddenly punched me in the chest, perhaps because I was good at drafting and he wasn’t. The punch hurt a lot because that winter my nipples had oddly swollen adolescent nodules behind them. My eyes filled with tears but I didn’t cry. Later Mr. Harris let each of us design our own piece of furniture. I made a Parsons table with a swiveling disk inset in the top, meant to hold our little black-and-white TV, but the TV couldn’t swivel, because it was slightly too big for the disk. I passed the course.

  To Lucas, the sugar scoop and the wrought-iron hook were like my keyhole chair—absurd make-work exercises with no value to him. Sugar came in a yellow cardboard box with a pour spout, after all. And what was he going to do with a wrought-iron hook except use it as a weapon? He clearly wasn’t a pencil-on-paper kid, either—so he was probably going to fail the course, even with Mr. Bowles’s daily help, and perhaps he would be forced to take a fifth year of high school. Was a fifth year going to help Lucas mature? He wanted to be a soldier and shoot people. He wanted never to go to juvie again. He didn’t need more high school, he needed less high school. He certainly didn’t need me fussing at him about how he was blowing off metal tech. On the other hand, maybe it did him some good to know that he was hurting Mr. Partridge’s feelings.

  Sebastian, though, Sebastian. Why was his doctor giving him those pills? Sleep is a beautiful thing.

  And that was it for Day Twelve.

  DAY THIRTEEN. Monday, May 5, 2014

  LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, SIXTH-GRADE SOCIAL STUDIES

  THERE’S NOTHING EXCITING OR FUN HAPPENING TODAY

  I TOOK SOME TIME OFF to write, and then I was back at it, driving to Lasswell Middle School on a Monday morning in May to take the place of Mrs. Lebartus, a sixth-grade social studies teacher on Team Rhine.

  “Everything you need is right on the desk,” said Mrs. Ricker, the language arts teacher next door. “They’re a good group, but they do take advantage. The hairy eyeball is always good.” She told me that I should be sure to eat in the teachers’ break room and not in the classroom, because there were two kids with allergies. And she whispered a last bit of information: Rebecca, in a baseball hat and camo pants, looked like a boy but was in fact a girl.

  A small boy, Jonas, sat down. I asked him what kind of things he liked to do.

  “I just stay home a lot,” he said, in a flat voice. “I like to play video games, because there’s nothing to do. But normally up at camp I ride my bike.”

  I said hello to two more students.

  “Did you like to ride?” Jonas asked.

  I loved it, I said, I took my bike on trips through the mountains. “It’s a feeling of freedom.”

  “Yeah,” said Jonas.

  I skimmed a chapter of the Prentice Hall World Explorer textbook while the children hauled chairs off the desks. “I need the broken chair,” said Lexie. “My friend’s going to sit here and she hates it when I give it to her.”

  Sunlight poured in on new-seeming tables. Maps and defined terms and learning targets were all over the walls. I said, “This is kind of a nice classroom. You’ve got carpet.”

  Lexie said, “We just had to have our carpet re-renovated, because we have peanut allergies, and right after we got the carpeting perfectly all done, like the next day, someone puked on it. It was awful.”

  Two girls came in, Ida and Amelia. Ida said she rode her horse over the weekend. “I fell off and almost broke my back,” she said. “That’s why I’m not sitting down.”

  “I almost broke my tailbone,” said Amelia. “Somebody dared me to go on a swing and jump off the swing and over my bike. I did it, and I landed on the bike. And then yesterday I fell down the stairs.”

  “She’s a disaster just waiting to happen,” said Ida.

  “I’ve broken like five bones,” said Amelia. “I drink milk every single day.”

  Lexie said, “My dog got her tongue stuck on the doorstep.
She had an operation when she was young, and now her tongue sticks out all the time, like this.” She lolled her tongue out with a hangdoggy expression. “She was walking through the door and she got it stuck, frozen, and she couldn’t rip it off. She’s fine now.”

  “You’re tall,” said Ida.

  There were three bongs. Everyone went quiet, thinking it was time for the pledge. “What happened?” I said.

  Silas made a funnel with his hands. “Your attention, please,” he said. “Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance!”

  Roxanne took it up. “Then he says, ‘Please stand for a moment of silence. For lunch today, we have yadda yadda yadda.’”

  “Could you put your name up on the board?” asked Carl.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  “Why do they call it social studies if there’s no social studying?” asked Ida.

  The principal came on. “Please say with me.” We pledged our allegiance and briefly momented our silence. Lunch was tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich.

  “How tall are you?” asked Carl.

  I sent off the attendance sheet.

  Bong, bong, bong. Homeroom left, except the ones who stayed, and first block arrived. Rafe and Dennis were deep in a discussion about The Hobbit. “Okay, everybody, hello! Welcome to a class with a green carpet. How are you doing today? My name is Mr. Baker, I’m the substitute.” I held up the textbook. “And we’re going to be reading from this book, that matches the carpet. Who’s good at passing out books?” Ten hands shot up. Books were distributed. When it got loud I said, “WOW!” And then I talked in a soft voice. “I like quiet. I love quiet. Everybody loves quiet, because you can think. We’re going to have a guest attendance-taker who’s going to be calling out names from the corner. Call them out!”

  Lexie called out the names, nineteen of them.

  When she came to Marisa, she said, “She’s not from here, she’s from Norway.”

  I flipped around in the textbook, looking for the right page. “Have you been reading from this book before?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “Ugh!”