Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  The ed techs, Mrs. Malone and Mrs. Hayes, turned and lumbered over to the swingset. “I asked you to stop,” Mrs. Malone said. “I’m going to put you on the wall if you don’t.” The girls stopped, but they continued to cross-hold each other’s swing chains. “Now you can let go,” said Mrs. Malone. They didn’t want to let go of the chains, so they didn’t. They loosened their grip but, for all of three seconds, they didn’t quite let go. That ticked off Mrs. Malone. “Yeah, I think you should go on the wall,” she said. “Five minutes. Five minutes!” Valerie got off the swings. Victoria, who was more stubborn, didn’t. Mrs. Malone began counting. “One.”

  “But we didn’t do anything,” said Victoria.

  “Go to the wall, five minutes,” said Mrs. Malone.

  Victoria said, “We weren’t even going!”

  “You were holding on again, that’s why I asked you to stop.”

  “You said to stop going sideways, and we did!” Victoria began weeping.

  “I said let go!” Mrs. Malone tried to pry Victoria’s hand from the swing’s chain.

  “No you didn’t!” said Victoria, holding on. “NO YOU DIDN’T. You said stop going sideways!”

  “I’m giving you a choice,” said Mrs. Malone. “Five minutes on the wall. Not a lot. But if you keep sitting here, then it’s going to end up being a lot.”

  Mrs. Hayes said, “Just go to the wall instead of arguing.”

  “I don’t want to go on the wall!” said Victoria, weeping bitterly, kneeling on the grass.

  Why, amid the playground’s screaming and shouting and roughhousing, were these ed techs punishing the two people who were calmly and happily and nonviolently making an oval shape in the air at an otherwise empty swingset?

  I walked over to them. “I think I’m partly to blame for all this,” I said—because I’d said that the girls’ swinging was poetry in motion.

  “They should still follow the rule,” said Mrs. Malone.

  “But then they got busted by you guys,” I said. “I just wanted to add that to the mix.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Hayes. I watched them lead Valerie and Victoria toward the cinderblock wall of the back of the school—Valerie crestfallen and silent, Victoria still defiant. “I didn’t do anything!” she kept saying, through her tears. “You said to stop swinging!” Mrs. Malone and Mrs. Hayes waited, arms crossed, while both girls sat down with their backs against the wall.

  Mrs. Malone returned to where I was standing. “I just want to explain something,” she said, “because it looks like we’re being unfair and really mean. But sometimes the kids just keep back-talking and back-talking. That’s what it’s for, more than anything else. I’ve been told that they’re not supposed to be swinging sideways. We had some kids get too rough. They fall off, and there are injuries and stuff.”

  “Really the riskiest thing is the play structure,” I said. “I’ve been sort of hanging around there. So you’re a teacher here?”

  “I’m an ed tech, yes,” said Mrs. Malone. “This is my second year here. I was a teacher for thirty-seven years, and I retired from that and came back as an ed tech.”

  “I see,” I said. “That must be an interesting new experience.”

  “It is,” she said. She strode off toward the play structure. I walked to the wall, where the two girls looked up at me with desolate faces. “I’m sorry all that happened,” I said. Victoria wiped her cheeks. She was wearing a white barrette with a flower molded into it. “Thanks for being a good sport, I appreciate it,” I said. I didn’t want to make a speech criticizing the ed techs, so I just rolled my eyes and shook my head.

  “Is five minutes over?” asked Valerie.

  “Just about, but don’t take my word for it,” I said, “because she’s the boss.”

  Back at the play structure, Mrs. Malone was helping another girl who was crying. “She said a bee went up her sleeve,” Mrs. Malone said. “Do you have any good ideas about that?”

  “Is it up there?” I asked.

  The girl was sobbing and panic-stricken. “Yes,” she said.

  “You can feel it crawling?” said Mrs. Malone.

  “No, but I know it’s in there!”

  “Let’s just roll up your sleeve, okay?” I said. “You mind if I roll up your sleeve?”

  I started to roll her sleeve up and the girl shuddered. “I think it stang me already,” she said.

  “You’d really know,” I said. I asked her where she thought it had stung her. She pointed to her shoulder.

  “I can’t really roll your sleeve up much higher,” I said, “so the best thing to do would be to go in the girls’ room, take off your shirt, and make sure it didn’t sting you. Shake out your shirt a little bit.”

  “I don’t want to do that!” she said.

  “I think probably it looked like it was going to go in there and then didn’t,” I said.

  “Let’s go check,” said Mrs. Malone. As she walked the girl into the building, she remembered Valerie and Victoria sitting against the wall. “You can get off now,” she called. They got up and straightened their dresses.

  I went back to the wiggly bridge part of the play structure, where things were crazy. A boy chased a bee saying, “Bite me, too! Bite me!” Several girls were shrieking in full primal terror mode. However, nobody was injured, and nobody was trying to injure anyone, so I angled back around to the bigger swingset. Nearby, in the shade, three girls had set up a pretend tea table on a flat rock, with rock plates. It was almost time to get ready to line up.

  Mrs. Malone reappeared. She said, “I don’t think it’s up there, either—the bee. I left her with the nurse, because the nurse had to take her shirt off. I think she’s okay, but I didn’t want to take the risk.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  While the lines were forming, I heard Mrs. Malone giving a full account of the side-to-side-swinging incident to Victoria’s teacher. “I think she should lose fifteen minutes of recess,” Mrs. Malone said.

  “Absolutely,” said the teacher.

  I went back to Ms. Collins’s class. “I don’t think I have you till two-fifteen,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Must be the noonday sun.”

  We looked at the schedule that the secretary had printed out.

  “Oh, I thought that she had changed it,” Ms. Collins said. “One-fifteen to two-fifteen. Okay, I’m wrong. You’re right.”

  “Mr. Baker! Whoo-hooo!” said Jared.

  I sat down. Ms. Collins said, “We have a lot of work to get done from one-fifteen until two-fifteen, until you go to computer lab. They’re working on research projects. I keep extending the deadline. I’m not extending the deadline any further than this Friday. This is the last week we are spending on this, because I have a lot of other things I need to teach you in the next five weeks of school. This means every single one of you is going to be focused on your outlines, your rough drafts. Maybe you are revising. Some of the common mistakes—when I look at people’s work—is people are forgetting to capitalize their states, or capitalize their capitals, and knowing that you need to put commas in between your city and your state when you’re writing. Make sure you are revising for capitals at the beginning of your sentences, and punctuation marks. I’m not going to be in here, Mr. Baker’s going to be in here with you.”

  “I’m happy to swap times, though,” I said, “if you’d prefer.”

  “Nope, this is perfect,” said Ms. Collins. “They should be able to work independently. Some of them are done with their final copy and they’re working on taking that information and putting it into either an iMovie or a Keynote. But every single one of them should be working really hard during this time. I’m going to be pulling kids for some different reading assessments.”

  “So I should bop around and see how things are going?” I said.

  “Ye
s, but just let me know anyone who’s not using their time wisely. Thank you very much. BOYS AND GIRLS. Felix, I’m going to take you first for the assessment.”

  The class was more or less quiet, so I started doing the rounds. They were writing about their favorite regions of the United States. “Do you have to type that?” I whispered to Mitchell.

  He nodded.

  “Good luck, man.”

  I pulled a chair up next to Marcus, who had less than a line written and was not interested in doing anything. I asked him what region he’d picked to write about.

  “Southwest,” Marcus said.

  “Southwest, that’s fascinating! Do you like country music? No. What do you like? You don’t like substitute teachers sitting down next to you asking you questions. What do you like about the Southwest?”

  “Not really anything,” said Marcus.

  “It’s just that it was your assignment?”

  He nodded.

  “Texas is down there, Florida’s down there—no, Florida’s not down there.”

  “Oklahoma,” Marcus said.

  “Oklahoma. There’s a song about that.”

  Irene, nearby, sang a snatch of “Oklahoma.”

  I said to Marcus, “You’ve got to find something you like about the Southwest. Otherwise the world is just going to fall apart.”

  Elijah stood up. “Can we turn the lights off?”

  Good idea. “You know what’s in the Southwest?” I said. “The most amazing cactuses. They’re fifteen, eighteen, twenty feet high, huge spines. Saguaro cactuses. Good luck.”

  I stood up and whispered, “It’s so much calmer when it’s dark, isn’t it?” The class was almost as quiet as during silent reading.

  Joanna said, “Do you think I should go to the nurse?” She showed me her arm.

  “It’s a bruise. It’s probably not broken. So I would say wait. If it really hurts overnight, then worry about it. But not now. I think it’s okay.”

  Hope was holding a towel over her eye. She’d gotten something in it during recess. “They used eight drops in my eye and they couldn’t get it out, so they used a Q-tip.”

  “I’m sorry, that sounds like a nightmare,” I whispered.

  “Can I go someplace quiet?” Lindsay whispered.

  I looked shocked. “You don’t think this is quiet? Find a corner.”

  Back to Marcus’s Southwest.

  “What was the cactus?” he asked.

  My computer wasn’t logging into the network, so I drew him a saguaro cactus. Finally my Internet came on. “Check it out,” I said, pointing to a page of Google images of saguaro cactuses. “They are enormous, they live for hundreds of years.” I typed “southwest facts” into Google and got an Encylopædia Britannica article. “Do you like dry sand and lizards?” I asked.

  “I like lizards,” Marcus said.

  “Well, there’s definitely lizards down there,” I said. “And spicy food, too.”

  I leaned toward Connie, who wasn’t doing anything, and asked her how the typing was going.

  “Good,” she said.

  A girl whispered, “Alex! Alex!”

  Marcus handwrote, I like how they have lizards.

  “Brilliant,” I said. “You are in business.”

  He said, “What do you call those cactuses?”

  I showed him how to spell saguaro.

  He found a picture of a tiny bird that lived in the saguaro cactus. What kind was it? he asked.

  “That is a funky bird,” I said.

  “Funky bird?” said Marcus.

  “Don’t write that down,” I said. “It’s a Gila woodpecker.” I pointed to the name on the screen, in an article titled “The Saguaro Cactus and Its Greedy Guests,” posted on Kuriositas, an educational blog. Marcus began writing Gila woodpecker, copying it letter by letter off my screen.

  Jasper was doing something energetic and idle, making silence-shattering clicks of chair leg against neighboring chair leg. I pointed to his blank paper. “Let’s see this thing take shape, man!” I whisper-shouted.

  “I just started my outline,” Jasper whispered back.

  “Well, you’ve got to get flying,” I said. “You’ve got to really kick it up a notch!”

  Back to Marcus, who’d found a different bird—a hummingbird, dipping its beak into a saguaro bloom. He wrote hummingbird. Farther down there was a photograph of an owl, and one of bats pollinating a cactus by night.

  “I like it,” said Marcus.

  “Kind of like a horror movie,” I said. “They’re long-nosed bats.”

  “Long-nosed what?”

  “They’re called long-nosed bats.”

  Marcus tried to write nose. “N-O-W? For nose?”

  “Can I go to the bathroom?” asked Crystal. Of course.

  I told Marcus how to spell nose. He studied a picture of a nest of paper wasps on the side of a saguaro.

  “You think you’ve got enough?” I asked. “You almost do.”

  “Wait, what’s that?” said Marcus, cursoring over to something on the screen.

  “That’s a red-tailed hawk,” I whispered.

  “Red-tailed hog?”

  “Red-tailed hawk. It’s a famous Southwestern bird. H-A-W-K.”

  Besides what he’d just written, he also had, Oklahoma’s capital is Oklahoma City. And he had a title: “Saddle Up.” Marcus’s basic problem was that he couldn’t read. What he was supposed to do was type what he’d handwritten into a Pages document.

  “Good title,” I said. “You made some good progress.”

  I sat down next to a Lindsay, who was almost finished. She was also working on the Southwest. I told her that Marcus and I had just found out about some birds that live in the saguaro cactus.

  “And owls,” Lindsay said. “Yeah, I know. I know almost everything about animals.”

  “Hey, she’s not the only animal geek over here,” said Grant.

  “Can I go to the bathroom?” asked Elijah. I nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

  Another ed tech came into the room, Ms. Janecki. She seemed nice.

  “Can I go get a drink?” said Mitchell.

  Dustin showed me his Keynote. He had three pictures of the Northwest, with fancy spiraling transitions. “Oh my gawd,” I whispered. “You’re having fun with that. Now, where’s your text?”

  “I’m doing that right now,” Dustin said.

  “That’s the most important part. The transitions are great, though.”

  Connie was working on the Midwest. She was at a loss for something more to say.

  They make cheese in the Midwest, I suggested. “Tons of cheese. More cheese than we could ever eat.”

  “Ugh, I ate a lot of cheese yesterday and I felt so sick,” said Connie. “I could hardly stand up in Miss Sandoval’s class.”

  “Guys, too much talking over here,” said Ms. Janecki.

  The noise gradually rose as we approached the end of the hour. Grant and Elijah explained that I was supposed to pick two quiet kids to pack up the computers, but I could not pick anyone who’d asked to be picked. I picked Grant and Elijah because they’d done a good job of explaining, and hadn’t asked. There were problems with saving typed documents to the server. “Can I share something before I go?” Ada asked me.

  I said, “By ‘share’ you mean tell people about it? It’s kind of chaotic right now. I don’t think anybody’s going to listen.”

  Ms. Janecki waved goodbye. “Have fun,” she said.

  Chairs were stacked. Random tuneless songs were sung. Connie used hand sanitizer. Alex punched somebody in the knuckle. Wrap it up, I said. Pack it up. Pack it all up. Everything packed up. Thank you so much. You’re packed up. Pack it up! You’re packed up. You’re packed up. Are you packed up? There you go! Everyone who’s packed up go on this side
of the room. Are you packed up? Pack your stuff up.

  Then there was an uproar because Jasper and Jared discovered two bees in the window. Bees! Bees! Are you serious? Bees! The bees were on the outside of the window, but Jasper wickedly claimed that they were on the inside and screamed. Maybe kids were more frightened of bees now because of the killer wasp scene in The Hunger Games.

  “Will you not go insane?” I said to Jasper and Irene. Sit down. Sit down right here. Sit down. Sit down, sit down, if you’re all packed up, sit down.

  “I need to do my job,” said Irene. “I stack chairs.”

  “Go do it, then.”

  She sat on top of a stack of four chairs.

  “Will you get down off the chairs, my dear?”

  “I’m protecting them,” said Irene.

  I asked Grant what should happen now.

  “We go in a circle and you can read to us from a book,” Grant said. “But it’s not usually this loud.” I riffled through the bookcase and found a book called Facing West, about the Oregon Trail.

  I said, “ALL RIGHT, ABSOLUTELY EVERYBODY, RIGHT NOW!”

  Mitchell told me that everyone should line up to get ready for computer lab. I said, Okay, line up, line up.

  Elijah said, “No, we don’t line up yet. We still have ten more minutes.”

  We reached an apogee of noise and madness.

  Grant said, “People think that because there’s a sub, that they won’t tell the teacher that people are yelling.”

  I got mad. “OKAY, SIT DOWN RIGHT NOW,” I said. “Sit down. Right now. Sit. Everybody sit right down. Down. Down. Sit down. Sit down right now. Right here.” I snapped my finger at Jasper and pointed at the floor. “Sit down there. Sit on the rug, right now.”

  Finally the din diminished. “I love this,” I said. “This is so quiet. Is everybody happy?”