“No idea,” said Lance.
“The janitor!” said Brianne.
“Very good,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “So we do it to be kind to the people who have to clean up your messes.”
Samuel and Misty stacked the chairs. The bell for first wave bonged. “Bye!”
“Bye, guys, have a good day,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “I’ll make sure she knows that sheet was hard for you! I’m sure she already knows.”
“Hope to see you again,” I said to her. I walked to the office, saying hey to a few students I recognized. Paulette, the secretary, took my name tag. “Thank you very much,” she said.
There was a crowd of students boarding their buses when I pushed out the side exit—fifteen idling yellow buses, packed with human flesh, ready to take people home. The windows were already getting fogged on the inside.
My car was very quiet when I got in. “All right, there we have it,” I said aloud. “There we freaking have it.”
That was Day Six.
DAY SEVEN. Wednesday, March 26, 2014
LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, ED TECH
WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?
BETH HAD ANOTHER ED TECH ASSIGNMENT at the high school for me on Wednesday. My first class was US History, twenty-two tenth-graders under the practiced tutelage of Mr. Hawkes, who also coached hockey and had a powerful handshake. Mr. Hawkes knew how to take command of a class—he stood with his legs far apart as he took attendance, wearing a blue sports jacket and a black polka-dot tie, and he spoke with a remarkably loud voice. Half of the history students were missing, though—they were off interviewing for coveted spots at the regional technical school in Sanford, where those who got in could take half-day courses in the building trades, in landscaping and horticulture, in web design, videography, car repair, nursing, early-childhood education, and in other potentially remunerative fields. Mr. Hawkes referred the class to an online textbook; they could take a look at it if they wanted to. “Not that we use the book a lot,” he said. “I’m not a big book guy.” The assignment was to work on a chart about the antebellum era, but because so many kids were absent, he turned off one set of ceiling lights and put on a History Channel video called America: The Story of Us. Inspiring orchestral music came on. “We are pioneers and trailblazers,” said the narrator. “We fight for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles will become a nation.” The music surged. “America—land of invention. Hot dogs, jazz, the elevator, skyscrapers. This is the story of the greatest innovation of all—the modern, vertical city.” I found a seat near the windows and relaxed; there was no one-on-one coaching I could do with a movie playing.
America: The Story of Us was heavy on the music and edited like a hard-hitting segment of Dateline, but it was good; most kids watched it, or at least half watched it. It began with the campaign to uncrate and assemble the Statue of Liberty, and went on to tell the story of the Bessemer process of steelmaking and Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie risks everything to build a huge plant in Pittsburgh, larger than eighty football fields. “Inside: five tons of molten metal, three thousand degrees, hot enough to vaporize a man in seconds,” said the narrator. Carnegie becomes fabulously wealthy. Cut to the Gilded Age. “It’s an era of obscene opulence. New York is a playground for super-rich industrialists and financiers. Wildly extravagant, they smoke cigars rolled in hundred-dollar bills, their wives’ hats studded with diamonds.” Dramatic reenactments take us high up on a skyscraper during construction. “They’re up here eight hours a day. Meals when they can. No bathroom breaks.” Really? The roughnecks are Mohawk Indians and European immigrants. “Two roughnecks out of five die or are disabled on the job.” We learn about Elisha Otis’s elevator, and the density of new urban populations, and, in the shadows of the steel-frame buildings, slums and crime. “Gangsters, murderers, thieves, and fear are on the streets.” Policeman Burns, the crime buster, gets tough, using the third degree. Jacob Riis takes photographs of poor families. Horse manure is a problem. “Wagons are blocked by three-foot-high piles of human and animal waste.” George Waring builds sewers. Edison’s bulb lights the cities, using power plants, conquering the night. “As electricity comes to the city, more and more people come with it. By 1900—”
Mr. Hawkes stopped the movie there, not wanting to get too far into the twentieth century yet, and he described what they’d be doing for the rest of the week. “Now you’ve got about ten minutes, so you can continue to pretend to find something to do,” he said. Students sat quietly, staring at their iPads, listening to music. A teacher came by to borrow some Wite-Out. Six bongs.
Ms. Accardo’s community health class, out back in the modulars, was next—but Ms. Accardo was absent. In her place was Mrs. Carlisle, the sub who had taught blessings in disguise on Monday. She was wearing jeans and leather boots with fur trim, and she had her bifocals on so that she could study the sub plans. “The first thing you are doing today,” she said, “is you’re going to need your iPads and you’re going to go on Edmodo and find the stress management folder. You’re going to read about the physical effects of stress on the body. You need to take notes on that. So get all your giggles out now.” Several kids had forgotten the group code for Edmodo and asked Mrs. Carlisle for it. She didn’t have it: subs weren’t allowed to tap into the school’s digital resources. “They trust me with you guys, but not with a piece of machinery—just lives.”
Cayley, putting away her hairbrush, tried to remember the Edmodo group login code. “It’s GLU3 something something something,” she said.
“Can you two look on with people?” said Mrs. Carlisle. “Because we’re going to be moving on.”
“I don’t understand what we’re supposed to do,” said Kim, in layers of pastel.
Reading over Kim’s shoulder, Mrs. Carlisle said, “When you have a tension headache, what happens to your body due to stress?”
“You get a headache,” said Kim.
“Yes . . . but.” Mrs. Carlisle waited.
“You start crying?”
“How do you know you have a tension headache?” said Mrs. Carlisle.
“Your head hurts?” said Kim.
“But where does it usually hurt?”
“Your head?”
“The back of your head,” said Mrs. Carlisle.
“Really?”
“Yep.” Mrs. Carlisle rubbed her head. “It starts back here. It’s good that you don’t know this. Adults know this because they live it.”
“Does that happen to Ms. Finn?” said Cayley. “Is that why she always walks like this?” She hunched her shoulders and held her head at a weird angle. Eric, in a gray T-shirt, laughed.
“I don’t know, honey,” said Mrs. Carlisle.
“Some days she has that buff walk,” Cayley said.
“Like a man?” said Eric.
“Yeah.”
Mrs. Carlisle handed out a packet on how to manage stress.
Jeremy tapped his feet several times and turned to the girl next him, Steph, one of the pretty girls. “You smell like mangoes,” he said.
“Really?” said Steph.
“I like mangoes,” Jeremy said.
The class began writing about tension headaches and migraines, and Mrs. Carlisle told Kim how tense she gets when she goes to the dentist. “I had a fourth-grader dislocate my jaw, and I had to have my jaw wired shut,” she said. “It wasn’t good. I’ve not seen any kids here like the kids I used to work with.”
After she’d collected the papers, Mrs. Carlisle had everyone relax. “Stretch out your legs. If you fall asleep, I am not responsible for what happens to you while you’re sleeping. Your eyes have to be closed. Listen—you have to listen!”
She turned on the stress-reduction tape—an actual cassette tape in a tape player. We heard some glissy new-age chords, over which hovered a woman’s infinitely soothing voice. She told us to close our eyes, to breathe in thro
ugh our noses and breathe out through our mouths, to clench and unclench our toes. “Your body is feeling heavy and warm and soothed,” the angel-voiced woman said, “as if you just came . . . from a warm bath. There’s a sensation that you’re sinking . . . sinking . . . you’re sinking into the chair or surface below . . . you’re feeling relaxed and secure as you sink deeper into the warmth . . . so soothed . . . so comforted.” Lambent swells of ambient deep-chill music filled the classroom. Some of the kids were slumped on their desks, some had their heads thrown back with eyes closed. Cayley was studying her fingers. “You feel good about yourself . . . about your body . . . about the world around you. This feels so nice . . . there’s nothing to be concerned about.” The kind extraterrestrial angel goddess took us hypnotically back in time. “Remember the days . . . when you were a child in the back seat of a car . . . coming home from a long, active day of fun . . . you were satisfied . . . worn out . . . kind of tired . . . you’re in the back seat . . . possibly leaned up against a sibling or a favorite blanket . . . you hear the cars going by and the quiet music of the radio . . . you hear Mom and Dad in the front seat talking softly . . . as you allow yourself to drift into a peaceful contented sleep.” She took us to the seaside, where the warm waves teased the sand. We heard the gulls crying. “Your hair dances with the wind,” she said. “Enjoy this moment . . . your body is feeling so soothed and so relaxed . . . let your thoughts drift.” The music swelled again, metamorphosing into a sort of trancelike chorale prelude of compulsory relaxation, and then it died away. There was silence. Mrs. Carlisle turned off the tape machine with an old-school click.
Eric sucked some drool into his mouth with a slurping sound.
Cayley said, “Is it over? That was not twenty-five minutes long.”
“Are we supposed to pass these papers in?” said Kim.
Jeremy took a peek at his phone.
“Let’s take a minute to wake up,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “To process the tape. What did you think?”
Silence.
“Did any of you feel any of what she was talking about? Yes, no, maybe so?”
Silence.
“I think everyone just took a nap,” said Tasha, rubbing her eyes.
“No,” Mrs. Carlisle said. “I was watching.”
“I enjoyed it,” said Jeremy, loudly, with a smirk.
Steph turned and said, disgustedly, “You didn’t do it!”
Mrs. Carlisle said gently to the boy: “I want to know what kept you from doing this exercise.”
“I was just too cool for it,” Jeremy said.
“How about a serious answer?”
“Honestly, it just didn’t grab my mind.”
Mrs. Carlisle described the homework. “You guys have in front of you a stress-anger goal packet.” Everyone was supposed to set a stress-reduction goal and itemize a series of steps that would be necessary to reach it. “You need to pick a date for when you’re going to start your plan,” she said. “And before you get all stressed out about your plan to be stress free, think about some of the things you’re doing now. For some of you it might be sports or music or your best friend. So don’t let making a plan to manage your stress stress you out.”
Jeremy was drumming his feet on the floor. It was almost time to leave. The bell bonged. “Bye,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “Have a good day!”
Students shuffled out, bumping backpacks. When they were gone I told Mrs. Carlisle that I admired how she was able to go with the flow and make things work. “Thank you, I appreciate that,” she said. Feeling oddly peaceful and content with my lot, I went off to an eleventh-grade history class with Ms. Day, where I was supposed to shadow Sebastian.
Ms. Day was a cordial young woman with a wry smile and thick hair cut short. “Today we’re going to touch on Germany,” she said, “and then we’re going to move in on the rise of Hitler, and how Germany was able to accomplish all the things that it did. And how that happened is really correlated to a lot of things going on in the world today. History repeats itself a lot.” She shivered. “I’m going to put my jacket back on, because it’s freezing.”
Ms. Day played a YouTube video of a recent TV news story about Lasswell High School. An art class at the school was learning to draw faces by making portraits of destitute orphan children in Haiti. The idea was that the Haitian orphans would then draw portraits of the Maine kids. “In the face of sorrow,” said the newswoman, “a small message of hope, and a sketch of a brighter future.”
Ms. Day said, “So that was a cool way to start class. Good things going on.” She began showing slides. “Okay, fascism. What do you guys have about fascism? Ron, what have you got?”
“Led by a dictator having complete power,” said Ron.
“Good, led by a dictator having complete power,” said Ms. Day. “Anyone else have anything different? Here’s something else. I’m going to show you a definition. Yours does not need to say the exact same thing—you don’t need it to be word for word. It just needs to have the same message. So: fascism. This system is led by a dictator—good job, Ron—having complete power, suppressing all opposition, and controlling all industry and commerce. In our system today, who would be a group of people that oppose the president a lot?”
“Hippies!” said Sebastian.
“No. Well, not really.”
“Middle Easterners,” said Chad, eating a Jolly Rancher.
“In our own country,” said Ms. Day. “Obama’s a Democrat, so what party opposes him? Republicans, right?”
“Yes!” Side conversations were in progress around the class.
“We can get through this if you guys let me talk,” said Ms. Day. “We have Democrats and Republicans who are known sometimes to have opposing ideas. That are keeping each other in check, so that one party doesn’t grow too big and one doesn’t grow too small. They can kind of battle it out and find some common ground, ideally. A Republican can stand up there and say, I disagree with what our president’s doing, and here are my reasons.” She turned to Scott, who had his iPhone out. “Put it away, or it’s going in the trash. You can’t do that in a fascist society. In a fascist society, there is no opposition. There is one party, there is one ruler, and you all love them, and you do not say anything bad about them, and if you do, you’re going to some sort of camp, or you’re being killed, or you’re disappearing in the middle of the night. Siberia, right? The Russians did that a lot. Siberian exile.”
“Serbia?” said Chad.
“Siberia. It’s like a tundra. Okay? No opposition. There’s no lively debate. It is this way and that is the way it is.” She described the free-market system, and compared it to the economy under a dictatorship. “If I want to go start a business tomorrow, I can.” In a dictatorship all business is government-run, she said. “Two countries that had this type of government were Italy, with Mussolini, and Germany, with Hitler.”
“I didn’t know Mussolini was from Italy,” said Sebastian, who was paying attention. “I thought he was Russian.”
“No, Mussolini is Italy,” said Ms. Day. “You should look up Italy. The way Mussolini takes over Italy is pretty crazy. He took his men—he was a big war hero—walked up to the capital, and took it over. He said, I run this country now. We’re not really going to have time to go into it, but if you want to do some independent research, how Mussolini took over is pretty impressive and cool.”
“He just walked right up?” said Sebastian.
“Yes, literally walked right up.”
Fascism was extreme nationalism, often racism, Ms. Day said. “So under nationalism you should also have Germany and Italy. Make sure those countries are under that category as well. How could nationalism lead to racism? Give me an example.”
“Slavery?” said Sebastian.
“Slavery, right. The United States was pretty proud of itself, but we had slaves.”
Maria, with waist-l
ength black hair, raised her hand. “Hitler,” she said.
“Hitler. Germans are superior, but only the Aryan German is superior. Just because all these Jews are part of Germany doesn’t mean they’re German. They don’t have the mark of the blond-hair-blue-eye, and they are the cause of all evil. That’s how it gets spun, or turns into racism. Yeah, they live here, but they don’t look like us, they don’t have the same ideals as us. The United States with African-Americans is also a good example of that, too.”
“Two questions,” said Sebastian.
“Two answers,” said Ms. Day.
“Back when Adolf Hitler was running everything, who was the country that came and defeated him?”
“It was another world war, so it was us, Britain, and France, again.”
“And Adolf Hitler didn’t have blond hair or blue eyes,” said Sebastian.
“True,” said Ms. Day. “Also what really ends up to be the defeat of Hitler, and we’ll talk about this later, is he tries to invade Russia. He attacked Russia in the middle of the winter. So that starts to deteriorate the army, and it starts to fall apart. But until then, they are a steamroller. Germans aren’t used to the Russian winter. It’s like you’ve got someone from Texas coming up to Maine for the winter. If it’s a mild winter we’re like, Oh, this is awesome. T-shirts at like what, forty? Summer’s going to kill us this year. Can you imagine it being eighty degrees? It was forty degrees a few days ago, and we were like, Wow, we should open the window, and I’m like, That’s sad, it is eight degrees above freezing and I find it warm. I remember we went down to Florida for softball when I was here—it was my sophomore year. It’s April there, and we’re playing softball, it was like seventy-five, seventy-eight degrees, and we were all like, It’s wicked hot, we’re going to go back to the hotel and swim in the pool! And somebody was like, You realize the pools aren’t heated here, right?”
Maria said, “It’s not really refreshing swimming in a warm pool.”
“No, it’s gross. So—fascism usually has a strong military, use of violence, and terror—”