Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  I heard four mysterious beeps on the PA system and I found where the clock was on the wall. It’s hard to explain why I was so nervous: it was partly that little children are mysterious beings, and partly because I genuinely believed in first grade. Everyone has to master the trick of decoding letters on a page—life is very hard in this country if you can’t read—and I was the teacher, accountable for whatever they learned or didn’t learn that day. I skimmed down Mrs. Ferrato’s plans. There was something about the “Daily Five,” and at ten o’clock I was supposed to “shake the purple egg.” I wrote “Mr. Baker” on the board. Ready.

  “Come on in, I’m the substitute,” I said to the first arrivals, who stopped dead at the door.

  “Uh-oh, it’s a sub!” said a boy named Jake.

  “How tall is he?” asked a girl in a blue ruffled blouse, hanging up her backpack. Her name was Emily.

  “Can you touch the roof?” said Sarah.

  Sarah tried to help Jake touch the ceiling by lifting him around the waist.

  “Are you guys getting married?” asked a third girl, Leyla, slitting her eyes.

  “No, of course not,” said Jake. “I’m not going to get married.”

  “You said you would,” said Leyla.

  “I never, ever got married in my life,” Jake said. “And I never will.”

  Several children handed in lunch money and checks for a field trip. I asked Emily what the Daily Five was.

  “You do what you signed up to,” Emily explained. “And when you shake the egg we come to the rug and we go to second round. We don’t have to go to third round, but if you want you can.”

  Ah. I asked how many kids were in the class. Seventeen, said Jake. A young, pleasant-seeming ed tech named Ms. Boissiere came in to sit with Danny, a mildly disabled child who liked to throw his head back and smile.

  The morning work was written in red marker on an easel. The first thing the kids had to do was to find the errors in

  do you sea that butterfly

  Then they were supposed to use every in a sentence, find the “base word” in careful, and do some subtraction: “Draw tally marks to show the number that is 20 less than 39.” Emily brought up her paper and I checked it and put a star at the top, although I didn’t fully understand what she’d done with tally marks. “Nice job, you’re fast,” I whispered. The sub plans said, “When you put a star on their paper they can sign up for Daily 5 and quietly read a book by themselves on the rug.” Emily sat on the rug and opened her book, Frozen.

  I helped Lee find the base word in careful. “When you take care of someone, you’re careful, right?” I whispered. Another boy, Simon, had written an every sentence: POTSAND BLSFLW EVERYWR. He read, “Pots and bowls flew everywhere!” He had trouble with the butterfly sentence. I reminded him about capitals at the beginning of sentences, and question marks at the end of questions, and I asked him how many ways there were to spell sea. “There’s S-E-E,” said Lee, “and I don’t know the other way,” he said. I wrote more stars at the top of more pages. Suddenly I remembered learning how to make a five-pointed star in second grade.

  Almost everyone had trouble with tally marks. Ms. Boissiere explained the tally technique to Destiny, referring to a number grid. She said, “You have thirty-nine, and with ten less, where would you go, Destiny? Up or down. Up, right. That would be ten less. So we’d go up one more time, to nineteen. So you now need to show tally marks for that number.”

  Joe also didn’t understand how to find the base word in careful.

  Beep. A PA lady said, “Please bring students to the gym for CARE time.” CARE stood for “Creating A Respectful Environment.”

  We lined up.

  “You’re taller than our other teacher,” said Simon.

  “Hey, that’s just the way it is,” I said.

  The whole school gathered in the gym—some students sitting on the floor, some standing. We teachers stood near our classes. The staff here was friendlier, less crabby, than at Buckland and Lasswell. One of the teachers was an alert-looking bearded man; all the rest were women. After a minute of mind-blowing noise, a teacher raised her hand and said, “Shhh,” and the gym went still immediately. A second-grader in a light blue dress, with a bow in her hair, stood at the microphone and read: “Good morning, today is May 9, 2014. Please place your right hand over your heart for the pledge.” The whole gym intoned the pledge in unison. “Please say the school rules,” the little girl said. The gym chanted, “BE RESPECTFUL TO OTHERS, KEEP HANDS AND FEET TO YOURSELVES, LISTEN TO ALL DIRECTIONS, RESPECT ALL EQUIPMENT AND MATERIALS.” There was one birthday that day, she said, Becca Hightower. Applause and cheering.

  Becca took a bow and asked the CARE assembly to dance the turtle dance, so we moved our arms like flippers for fifteen seconds. Then the head of the parent-teacher committee, Mrs. Royer, came to the microphone, with applause. It was the last day of Teacher Appreciation Week, Mrs. Royer said. “Are we ready for the rest of the raffles?” Huge applause. She reached in a bucket and drew a name. A teacher won a twenty-five-dollar gift card from Applebee’s. Gigantic applause. Another teacher won a ten-dollar Applebee’s certificate. Yay! Another ten-dollar gift card. Woo! Two round-trip tickets on the Downeaster went to Ms. Carlough. Yee! Mrs. Newman won the beach basket, holding a striped towel, and sand shovel and pail, and sunglasses and sunscreen. Another teacher won another beach basket. Less clapping now for the winners. Mrs. Yates won a movie basket, with boxes and candy and bags of popcorn. Mr. Stowe, the sole male teacher, was going to win a spa basket, but that didn’t seem quite right, so he won a movie basket instead. Woo-hoooo! Cheering. Mrs. Thornhill won the coffee basket. Mrs. Gaddis won the baking basket. There were a lot of prizes. What if Mrs. Ferrato won something? I wondered. I whisper-asked Emily to accept the prize for Mrs. Ferrato—just in time, too: Mrs. Ferrato won a garden basket. Then the parent-teacher raffle master said, “Thank you, and have a good day!”

  The girl in the light blue dress said, “Have a fantastic Friday!”

  We trouped back to our classroom, where there was time for ten more minutes of explaining tally marks and base words, over and over, and sounding out every and butterfly. “A lot of times, if you look at just the first three letters, you can get going and figure it out,” I said. I asked Simon what thirty-nine minus twenty was. “Three?” he said. We looked at the number grid. Dwight had written delicate as the base word for careful. “You did something extra-special,” I said. “But if you just put care I think you’ll be in better shape.”

  “Darren got a paper cut,” said Lee.

  Darren held up his wounded finger. “That’s a bad one,” I said. I suggested that he hold his pencil in a different way so that the cut was out of the way.

  All this was done in whispers. I looked up at the class and was flooded with gratefulness. “Guys, I really like how quiet you are,” I said.

  Anne-Marie came up to explain, shyly, that if people were doing good and sitting quietly they got to move up on the Clip-Up Chart. “If we do bad we move down,” she said.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. I took attendance, and then Emily reminded me that I had to make a lunch count. I read from the lunch menu on the calendar. “Lunch today is Monster University Mike’s Popcorn Chicken, Sully’s Savory Rice, Boo’s Hot Broccoli and Squished—GUYS, HEY! IN THE CORNER? SERIOUSLY. Boo’s Hot Broccoli and Squishy Steamed Corn, Mrs. Squibble’s Oatmeal Roll and Chillin’ Sliced Peaches, and of course, your favorite—milk.”

  Emily quietly but firmly told me the right way to do lunch count. “You stand up and you say, ‘We’re going to do lunch count,’” she said, “and then you say, ‘Stand up if you’re having . . .’”

  I said, “Stand up if—MY DEAR FRIENDS. I really like it when there’s no clash of voices. Thank you. Stand up if you are having popcorn chicken. Whoa, my gosh.” Eleven popcorn chickens. One person wanted SunButter and
jelly.

  “Do you know about clipping up and down?” asked Sarah.

  “I do, but I don’t like to be mean right off the bat,” I said.

  Jake sat reading Curious George. I told him he was doing a great job.

  “Mr. Baker? Jake can move up because you said he was doing a good job.”

  “On our clip chart,” said Jake.

  “When we get up to pink, we have a jewel,” said Sarah.

  “And three tickets,” said Emily. “And if we get on purple we get two tickets.”

  “My mind is reeling,” I said.

  “Yellow is take away a ticket,” said Jake.

  “And orange is take away two tickets and recess.”

  “And red is when you call people.”

  “Not just people,” said Jake. “Your parents.”

  “I see,” I said. “That’s helpful.”

  It was past time for morning meeting. Emily, who was a real stickler, told me that whoever didn’t finish morning work had to do it at snack time.

  “And if you don’t finish it at snack time, you have to do it at recess,” said Jake.

  Simon took it upon himself to start ordering people to put books away.

  I told him to sit down. “Then everyone will follow your lead.”

  “Have the students sit in a circle,” said the plans. I was supposed to give one student a high five, and he or she was supposed to high-five the next student, and then the next, around the circle. This took a while. “Only one person talks at a time,” said the plans. They were supposed to do something with the calendar, note the weather and the days left in school, and go over the day’s schedule. I went off plan to ask the class if anybody had seen an interesting TV show or a beautiful flower, or had something else of note to report.

  Emily raised her hand. “My brother’s birthday was yesterday. He got a pogo stick, a basketball that glows in the dark, and Willy Wonka, the movie, and he got a video game. And his cake was this big.”

  Deena said, “My sister has a basketball that glows in the dark, too.”

  Simon and Randall were wilding out, so I separated them. To Randall, who seemed especially jumpy, I said, “I’ve got my eye on you, man.”

  Leyla said, “I watched Chestnut. It’s about this dog that keeps growing. And there was two girls. One of them really wanted a puppy. There were two robbers from New York. They put the dog on the road. Then a truck was coming and the kid ran on the road, and then he grabbed the dog and went on the other side very quick, and then went back with the dog. And then Mother Agnes, she really doesn’t like dogs, and they kept it a secret. And then one morning the two girls got adopted, and they—”

  “That’s good,” I said, cutting her short as gently as I could. “I think what you want to do when you tell the highlight of a movie—that was a great summary—is you want to pick the most memorable moment, which was the moment when they save the dog.”

  A hand went up from Deena in the front. “Can me and Anne-Marie do the calendar?”

  I said they could after one more kid said what happened last night.

  “I watched Beethoven, which is about a dog,” said Krista.

  A secretary came on the intercom. “I need a lunch count.” Eleven popcorn chicken, I yelled. Ms. Boissiere added that Danny was having chicken burger.

  “Discuss the schedule,” said the sub plans. Fine. “We’re going to learn about nouns, verbs, and adjectives,” I said. “We’re going to shake the purple egg. We’re going to have a snack. We’re going to write, we’re going to have lunch, we’re going to go to the music classroom, we’re going to read aloud, we’re going to do some specials, then math, then pack and stack. There’s so much to do today, it’s almost overwhelming.”

  Randall was sniffing Simon’s sweatshirt. It was time to dole out a worksheet called “Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Oh My!” But Randall couldn’t get down to business. He rolled around, hummed, sprawled, blathered. I couldn’t blame him. For all but one or two of these kids, it was too early to be studying the taxonomy of words, it seemed to me. They knew how to talk; they needed to know how to read and write. The parts of speech could come later. You can ride a bicycle without knowing what a sprocket or a brake clamp or a wing nut is. You can stand on tiptoe without knowing about the metatarsal arch. Pure brute decoding—reading and writing, memorizing all the unsoundoutable perversities of English spelling—that’s what first- and second-graders needed, more than anything.

  “I got a bug bite,” said Anne-Marie, showing me her elbow.

  I took a shot at putting grammar in context. I told the class, “Already, without anybody teaching you—even before you had a teacher—your brain soaked up literally thousands of words.”

  “Blee! Blop!” said Randall. Sit in the corner, I said.

  I tried again. “In your mind are all these words, floating around. And what teachers are trying to do is say, Okay, let’s take a look at this cloud of words and see what properties it has. What’s the difference between this kind of word and that kind of word? And they came up with fancy terms, like noun, verb, and adjective.” I handed out the worksheet, which said, Write one noun, verb, or adjective, which can be associated with each place listed below. Example: the mall. People, shop, exciting. The first place they had to think about was “your school.”

  “What’s a noun that has to do with school?” I asked.

  School?

  Pencil?

  “Pencil is perfect. Okay, a verb. Something you do at school.”

  Sarah’s hand went up. “Learn?”

  “Excellent. You guys really got the gist of it, good. And finally, this is the hardest one, what’s an adjective?”

  After some struggle, Leyla thought of red. Good—bricks are red.

  The next place the worksheet wanted them to think about was the playground. They came up with swing for the noun, play for the verb, and then came the adjective. “Is the playground sleepy?” I asked. “Is the playground hot? Sometimes the playground is cold and icy. All winter long. Any suggestions?”

  Fun?

  “Fun is an adjective—or it can be an adjective.”

  While the class labored to print nouns, verbs, and adjectives, I got Randall to put his name at the top of the page. “Okay, beautiful,” I said. I pointed to the instructions—find words that have to do with school. First, a noun. “A noun is some thing, like a desk, or a rug, or something that’s in your school,” I said to him. “That’s called a noun. See that word right there? Noun. Tell me some thing in school.”

  Randall thought. “I do know something around school,” he said. “Lots of caterpillars can be around school.”

  “Good, caterpillars, excellent.” I wrote CATERPILLAR out so he could copy it.

  “There’s a book called The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” he said.

  As Randall wrote caterpillar, I helped Calvin think of a noun that went with playground. Slide, he said. Then I turned back to Randall. “Now something that happens at school,” I said. “People talk, they run, they learn, they eat. Those are called verbs. Verbs are things that happen.”

  “Something I do at school is I think,” said Randall.

  “Yes, think! You got it. Randall, that was good.” I explained what an adjective was. A color, or hot or cold, or bright or dark.

  “Dark?”

  “School can be dark,” I said. “Especially when it’s stormy out.”

  “One time I got so scared in a thunderstorm that I hid under one of these tables,” Randall said. I showed him how to write dark, the very same word I’d had such a difficult time with about fifty years ago. Passing on the legacy.

  Krista came up with her word list: TV, look, awesome. Bat, hit, fun.

  Calvin said, “Joe is copying my paper.”

  “I’m not looking at his paper,” said Joe. “I just have a no
un and a verb, and now I need a adjective.”

  “Okay, keep your eyeballs on the page,” I said. “What are some adjectives? A playground can be hot, it can be cold, it can be muddy, it can be crazy.”

  On and on we gamely grammared. Noun, verb, and adjective for the beach, for the doctor’s office, for a baseball game. This was all lost time, it seemed to me, and for some kids it spread confusion and jitteriness, which on a normal day would then have led to their being “clipped down” and deprived of recess. Adjective—what an unlovely word for something juicy and squeezable and wild and elusive and fungible and adamantine and icy-blue. There were nouns and verbs and adjectives in play many thousands of years before anyone took the time to sort and name these abstractions. An eon of language precedes linguistics. You can write a three-decker novel or a whole history of Transylvania without knowing or caring in the least what the parts of speech are—and in first grade, unless you’re an unusual little person who takes an Aristotelian pleasure in verbal classification, it’s an unnecessary encumbrance and a distraction.

  “So what happens at a baseball game?” I asked Randall. “Do they walk, do they run, do they sing?”

  “Run!”

  “And that’s a verb.” Randall wrote run.

  Pencil, learn, red. Slide, play, fun. Bed, eat, fun. Water, play, fun. Sarah came up with nervous as a verb having to do with the doctor’s office. I wished I didn’t have to tell her that nervous was an adjective, and that she had to erase it and replace it with something like worry. Lee said that game was an adjective for the doctor’s office. “Because when I go they give me a game,” he said. Lee and Sarah were both making associative word herds, which was in fact a more interesting activity than this parsing exercise. I felt the minutes sifting by, wasted.

  The finished worksheets went into the Done Box, and then I shook the purple egg, which lay on the whiteboard tray and made a sound like a maraca. Everyone began reading aloud to a partner. Joe got sad because he didn’t have a reading buddy. I said I’d be his reading buddy. “Up went the elephant,” Joe read to me, guessing. I pointed to the picture of a giraffe in a tree and said, “It has a very long neck.” I made the sound of the first letter: “Juh.”