Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “I compared mine to a school,” said Fletcher.

  “Mine was the mall,” said Vanessa.

  “I like that,” I said. “So what’s the nucleus of a mall?”

  “I don’t remember,” said Vanessa.

  “I said mine was the principal,” said Fletcher.

  “Because the principal’s office holds the genetic information?” I said.

  “He controls the building,” said Vanessa.

  “And then what are the bathrooms?”

  “Nothing,” said Fletcher.

  I sat in a chair on the side of the room for a while, waiting to find out how I could be useful. The class, I was happy to notice, was loud and shouty.

  “Getting a little noisy in here,” said Mrs. Christian.

  I asked Matthew what he generally bought to eat when he went to the movies.

  “I usually get candy and soda,” he said.

  “So at a movie theater, what is the ribosome?”

  He pointed to the projector in his drawing. “That,” he said. He’d written, In a movie, you press play. A ribosome acts just like a projector.

  “Fascinating,” I said. “How did you figure that out?”

  “Mrs. Craig helped me.” Mrs. Craig was the ed tech for whom I was substituting.

  “Did you do any Golgi bodies?”

  Matthew pointed to the ticket counter, which in his drawing corresponded to the Golgi apparatus.

  “Holy crap,” I said.

  “I like my arrow,” Matthew said. He’d drawn a fancy green arrow.

  I was boggled by too many partial analogies. “It kind of scrambles your brain a little bit,” I said.

  “Sexual reproduction!” said Zoe loudly.

  Back to Gabrielle. She had drawn a barn and some farmers. The farmers were the Golgi bodies in her comparison.

  She pointed to vacuole. “I can’t find that one,” she said.

  I flipped around in a textbook. “I think the vacuoles are more important in plant cells,” I said. “You’ve got an animal cell. Maybe you can move on.”

  She needed to know what corresponded with mitochondria. I showed her a page of the textbook, which said that the mitochondria acted like a digestive system, breaking down nutrients. “So on the farm, what breaks things down? The soil, the insects in the soil? No, let’s see. The tractor?”

  “Animals?” said Gabrielle.

  “The animals chew the grass and digest it,” I said. “That’s a good one. No comparison is exact.”

  “What is that one?” she asked, pointing to the words endoplasmic reticulum.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” I said, flipping around in the textbook. “It’s a series of folding membranes in which materials can be processed and moved around inside the cell. What moves things around in a barn? A wheelbarrow?”

  “A grain tub?” said Gabrielle.

  “A grain tub. Do you know about farms?”

  She nodded. She lived on a farm. We kept going. Ribosomes make stuff, I said.

  “The cows?” she said.

  “Cows make milk,” I said, nodding. Cytoplasm was the next term she needed to analogize. I said, “It’s a gloopy substance that’s all around the cell. What’s all around you on the farm? People breathe it, and animals breathe it, and plants breathe it.”

  “Oxygen?”

  “Yes, air. Air’s like cytoplasm, isn’t it? What do you have to do now?”

  “I have to put it into a Keynote,” Gabrielle said.

  “Oh, wow.” I felt despair. The kids were supposed to half learn the definitions of the microscopic components of a cell, then half compare these definitions inexactly to another complex system that existed on a human scale, and then put their garbled comparisons into Keynote slides. And yet some of them were having fun with it. Some actual learning was happening.

  “GUYS, START CLEANING UP, PLEASE,” said Mrs. Christian.

  As the classes changed over, Waylon, my overmedicated friend, showed up. “Hey, how are you?” I said.

  “Not so good,” said Waylon. “I’m having the same problems I had last time.”

  I asked him if he was still not sleeping.

  “Last night I had a Benadryl,” he said, “so I had a pretty good night’s sleep.”

  Had he talked to his parents about cutting back on the Paxil?

  “Yeah,” he said. “They put me on Benadryl.”

  “They don’t want to cut back on the dose?”

  “We did.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “Is it easier to concentrate?”

  He nodded.

  “It’s great to see you,” I said. “I’m sorry it’s still a problem, but I hope it goes better. Catch you on the flipflop.”

  “All right, bye.”

  I hotfooted it out to the car to get my day’s schedule, which I’d left there by mistake when I ate a sandwich, and on my way back I saw Shane, my old nemesis from science class, on his knees on the grass, planting some flowers near the school entrance while a teacher looked on, her arms folded.

  “We’re putting in a memorial garden for Nelson,” said the teacher. “Nelson was one of my students last year.”

  “That was really a sad thing,” I said.

  —

  IN MR. FIELDS’S MATH CLASS, a new set of students were doing division problems taken from the arithmetic bag, and now there was another ed tech in the room as well, a young man named Mr. J. The kids had more energy than the last group, and Lynda, Katy, and Adam were interrupting each other.

  “If you want to go to lunch on time,” Mr. Fields said, “I suggest you be quiet now. If you want to be talking now, they’ll go to lunch, you’ll still be sitting here. Who’s screwing who? Come on, get real, will you?”

  After another round of division Mr. Fields brought the horn out and gave it to me. “When Mr. Baker blows the horn, we’ll have to stop what we’re doing and go around again.”

  He pulled out his bag of candy wrappers. “The candies have been removed to protect the innocent from the effects of calories.” Again the students counted how many Twix wrappers, how many Snickers wrappers, how many etc. There were thirteen wrappers in all. “What we’re talking about now is a thing called probability. What do you remember about probability?”

  “It’s everything added up,” said Adam.

  Mr. Fields asked Katy what she remembered about probability.

  “It sounds like probably.”

  “And what does probably mean, in your world?” asked Mr. Fields.

  “Yes, no, maybe,” said Katy.

  Adam said that probability was that maybe a car was going to break down.

  “It’s the chance that something’s going to happen,” Mr. Fields said. He wrote a capital P on the board, followed by a blank set of parentheses. “Last week, Adam, when we were doing area and perimeter, what did the capital P mean at that time?”

  “Perimeter,” said Adam.

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Mr. Fields?” said Lynda. “You should write ‘Pb.’”

  “I’m not going to write ‘Pb,’” Mr. Fields said, “because it’s always written P parentheses, and that would confuse you.” He pointed at me. “What do you say there, Mr. Baker?”

  I booped the horn once and the ed tech, Mr. J., called out division problems. Thirty divided by five. Ten divided by five. Twenty-five divided by five. Three divided by six. The class got most of them right.

  Then Lynda was asked to close her eyes and decide which candy wrapper she wanted to pull from the bag. “Twix,” she said.

  “So you’ve got two chances out of thirteen,” said Mr. Fields. “The probability, out of that thirteen, in one pick, is two out of the thirteen. Mr. Baker, can I ask you to come over here and be the official eye-watcher on Lynda, and make sure she is
not peeking?”

  “I trust her,” I said.

  Lynda reached in, eyes closed, and pulled out a Twix wrapper.

  “Dang it!” said Mr. Fields.

  “You must know the feel of a Twix wrapper, texturally,” said Mr. J.

  “I hate it when I have to pay off a debt,” said Mr. Fields. He arranged a display of mints for her to pick from. “Just so you know, I haven’t washed my hands in a week or two.” Lynda took a mint. “Give the winner a hand.”

  “Boo,” said Adam.

  Adam reached in, hoping for an M&M wrapper, of which there were two. “Mr. Baker’s got his eyes on your eyes,” said Mr. Fields. “Adam knows he’s a cheat.”

  Adam tried to sneak a peek.

  “No, no, no, no,” said Mr. Fields.

  “Just look toward me,” I said.

  Adam pulled out an M&M wrapper. “I got it!” he said.

  “He also only had two chances out of thirteen,” said Mr. Fields.

  After several more reachings in, it was time for lunch, and he passed out more mints. “When you come back, we’re going to play a little game that has to do with flipping dimes.”

  The class was filled with the sound of chewing. “What you guys don’t need is sugar,” said Mr. J.

  “I NEED SUGAR,” said Adam.

  To get out the door, each student had to do more division. “You have to get at least two of these right,” said Mr. Fields. “Ten divided by five!”

  “Ten divided by five is . . . five,” said Adam.

  Mr. Fields shook his head. “Twenty-five divided by five?”

  “Five!”

  “That’s rolling!”

  “I don’t understand why they didn’t teach them the times tables,” said Mr. J. to me, in an undertone, while the class called out wrong answers at the door. “They completely took the rigorous memorization out of it. They do this lattice stuff, have you seen that? It’s insane. It’s the most classic case of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He left.

  “Forty divided by five is?” said Mr. Fields to Lynda.

  “Nine.”

  “Try that again.”

  “Eight.”

  “Thank you very much. Thirty divided by six?”

  “Two.”

  “Try this one. You’ve got to get it right to get out of the door. Twelve divided by six.”

  She didn’t know.

  “How about this one? Forty-five divided by five?”

  “Nine!”

  “There you go,” said Mr. Fields. “You’re out the door, bye-bye.”

  When everyone was gone, I said, “You really make it fun.”

  “Next class I won’t be that good,” Mr. Fields said. “I’ll be tired.”

  I told him I’d just been talking to Mr. J. about the times tables. “He was saying that kids didn’t learn their times tables in elementary school. Which does seem to be true. But I’ve been substituting in the elementary schools, and they’re much better at it now. They can really spit it out.”

  “Good,” Mr. Fields said. “Otherwise they get up here and, come on, it takes them five seconds to maybe pull it out?” He gathered up his candy wrappers. “And my next class will be even slower.” He seemed wiped out.

  In the teachers’ lounge, two teachers were comparing notes. “So he gets up and throws his essay in the trash,” said one of them. I ate an apple and, when it was time, went to the cafeteria to do lunch duty. Another substitute, an old-timer, had a pocket full of lemon drops. That was his secret to getting kids to volunteer as table-washers, he said: “I bribe them with candy.”

  One more class to go: seventh-grade biology with Mrs. Painter in Team Orinoco. “Yesterday you finished diagramming mitosis and meiosis, and comparing and contrasting the two,” Mrs. Painter said to the class. She sounded flat-voiced and tired. “That should be done by now. If it’s not done, you need to do it at home, or before you start your capacity matrix. Today, as a whole class, we’re going to watch a video on how plants reproduce. We’re going to talk about the video. Afterward, I’m going to give you your last capacity matrix. It has every assignment on it that you’ll have to do from now until the last week of school.”

  Howard, a little jumpy kid, raised his hand. “Do we work through the last week of school?”

  “If we’re not done,” said Mrs. Painter.

  “What if everything’s done, then what?” asked Whitney.

  “We’ll deal with that when we get there—if we get there,” said Mrs. Painter. She reviewed asexual and sexual reproduction. “How many parent cells are in mitosis?”

  One!

  “How many parent cells are in meiosis?”

  Two!

  She called us to the front of the room and turned on the YouTube movie. “Today’s topic is the exciting process of plant reproduction in angiosperms,” said an animated amoeboid female-voiced blob named Pinky. “A fruit develops from the ovary of a plant, which doesn’t exactly sound appetizing. Pumpkins, green beans, tomatoes, squash—these all developed from the ovary of a flowering plant.”

  Mrs. Painter stopped the video. “Who knew plants had ovaries? Raise your hand.”

  “What are ovaries?” said Whitney.

  “Female baby-making parts,” said Maureen.

  “Oh, I know all about that,” said Whitney.

  The video resumed—and Pinky began bombing us with vocabulary. We heard about stamens, filaments, anthers, and pollen, which was the sperm of the plant. Then the female parts: the pistil, the stigma, the style, and the ovary. Next came the sepals and physical pollination, effected by a bee. More words from Pinky followed at a brisk trot: Pollen grains held two kinds of cells, a tube cell and a generative cell. The tube cell grew down into the tube nucleus, and the generative cell traveled down the tube cell into the ovary, where it divided into two sperm cells, both of which sought out a component of the ovary called an ovule. Each ovule had an egg cell and two polar nuclei. One sperm cell fertilized the egg cell, while the other sperm cell joined up with the two polar nuclei to form a triploid cell that would develop into the endosperm, in a process called double fertilization. Pinky’s cheery voice made me sleepy, and by the time we got to the two polar nuclei my head started to droop. I think Mrs. Painter saw me dozing off, and I felt bad about that.

  “Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” said Mrs. Painter. I straightened up in my chair. “Before you work on your Keynote, I’m going to give you a sticky note and have you write one thing you learned about plant reproduction, and one question that you have. Based on what you guys put down, I’m going to make a mini-lesson for tomorrow, so we can get the missing parts. Back to your seats.”

  Paloma and Bobby, from Mr. Fields’s class, sat at a table near me by the windows. I waved at them. “What’s up back here?” I said.

  “NOW YOU ARE TRANSITIONING BACK TO YOUR TABLES,” said Mrs. Painter. “THIS IS A REDIRECT I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO BE MAKING.”

  She passed out sticky notes. Paloma said something softly to me I didn’t hear.

  “I’m what?”

  “You’re the quietest teacher I’ve ever known,” Paloma said.

  “Oh, no, I’m very talkative,” I whispered, “it’s just that when I’m an ed tech I don’t like to disrupt the class. When I’m actually a teacher up there I flail around and talk loudly.”

  “What do you teach?” asked Bobby.

  “Anything they want me to,” I said.

  “You’re like a go-to?” Bobby said.

  “I’m a sub, so science, English, whatever.”

  “That’s what my mom was,” Paloma said. “Now she’s studying to be a nurse.”

  “How’s it going for her?” I asked.

  “Pretty good. She’s in the middle of classes.”

  Bobby said, “My mom was thinking of going back
to college. Then she found out that the people in the program who’d graduated couldn’t get a job anywhere. So she’s not.”

  I said, “A lot of people are starting to think that it costs too much to go to college. There’s a lot you can do without it.”

  “I wanted to go to college to be a psychologist,” said Bobby. “Then I thought about that, and now I want to be a firefighter. I’m fourteen, and I can start now.”

  “At fourteen you can be a firefighter?” I said.

  “Well, you can be a junior firefighter. Not a Grade A real firefighter, but they train you to be a firefighter.”

  “I’M READY WHEN YOU ARE,” said Mrs. Painter. “HOLD ON TO YOUR STICKY NOTES. I’m going to collect them after we go over our matrix. On your capacity matrix, you need to put your name on it, and date started, which would be today. So six four twenty-fourteen. This is what you’re going to be working on from now to the last day of school. All of the assignments that you have for the rest of the year are right on this paper, front side, back side.”

  I studied the capacity matrix, which was a sideways chart filled with boxes. Down the left side were learning targets and “Baby Steps,” and a box that said Knows key terms. To the right were levels of achievement—Emerging, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Advanced—and lists of activities: BrainPOPs, quizzes, and projects, including an interesting-sounding “Build a Beast Project.” On the far right were boxes where Mrs. Painter could sign to show that each learning target and Baby Step had been successfully completed. To score a 4, the highest possible score, a student had to demonstrate a higher order of thinking from Marzano’s Taxonomy—Robert Marzano being the Colorado-based educational consultant who was the source of the neo-Aristotelian learning poster that was up in almost every classroom.

  “Since you guys are losing your iPads next week,” Mrs. Painter went on, “I am going to give you the time today to finish your BrainPOPs and the vocab. I’m going to save the mini-lesson that we were going to do today until Monday. WHAT ARE OUR LAST TWO LEARNING TARGETS? Someone raise your hand and read one of them. Maddy. Whitney, find your paper and point to them. Learning target one and learning target two. Understands how variations in the behavior and traits of an offspring may permit some of them to survive a changing environment.”