Substitute

  “There’s a lot of testing going on today, so the Internet is slow,” I said.

  BrainPOPs, Portaportal. Quizlet. Wi-Fi. BrainPOP. Packet. I told Darryl her voice was too loud.

  “I know,” said Darryl. “I’m just born to be loud. Kyle has a squeaky voice. I used to be like that.”

  “I want to see incredible progress,” I said. “Just burn rubber.”

  “It’s so hard on a half day,” said Darryl. “Can I do cartwheels?”

  “No.”

  Owen, sitting next to Regan, shouted, “Every one that he gets wrong, I get right!”

  “Is everyone having fun, though?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Owen.

  “You know what I’m doing tonight that’s fun?” said Regan. “I’m going to a concert. And then on July eighth, I’m going to see Yes.”

  “I’m never going to get this done!” said Cayden, bouncing the palm of her hand on the top of her head.

  Laughter from Owen about the BrainPOP: “He got the same ones wrong again!”

  “I just spelled them wrong,” said Regan, pacing around in circles. “I misspelled vertebrate. I used chart instead of key. So I got it right. I’m not doing it again. It’s disgusting. I’m not doing it again!” He threw his iPad case in the trash.

  “You know what,” said Cayden. “I’m just going to do it in Connecticut. I have a long car ride, I’m just going to do it then.”

  “It is technically due today,” I said.

  “But we don’t have class Monday.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. “What should we do right now?”

  “Can we make one of those bombs out of baking soda?” said Jade.

  “No, I don’t think we should make bombs.” Luke handed me back the question book, How Come? Planet Earth. “I’m going to ask some questions,” I said. And if the question seems interesting to you, then say, ‘I want to hear more about that question.’ All right?”

  “Sure!”

  I read, “How do cows digest their food?”

  “They gnaw it and they burn it in their stomachs,” said Jade.

  “Achaebacteria in their stomachs!” said Luke.

  I said, “How do cats purr? There’s another question. Why do they purr?”

  “Sometimes they’re stressed,” said Darryl.

  “Here’s another good one,” I said. “How come so many animals have tails and we don’t?”

  “To keep their balance,” said Jade.

  “That’s good, like squirrels, when they’re running up a tree. What are some other reasons?”

  “When they’re running fast, it helps them turn,” said Dabney.

  “Good. So here’s what the super-scientific dude who wrote this, Kathy Wollard, says. The fact is tails come from the sea. Scientists believe that life started in the ocean. Don’t talk. Be quiet. Long before there were land animals, there were primitive fish. Fish evolved with tails because tails allowed them to move easily through the water. Can everyone sit down? SIT DOWN.”

  “Kyle, sit,” said Mackenzie.

  I kept reading. “Over time, tails specialized to do different things in different animals. Meanwhile, creatures like us that had no use for tails evolved tailless. But you’ve got a tailbone, right? Once I had a sledding accident, I came off a hill and I came down, and my tailbone hurt so badly I don’t even want to talk about it.”

  “I did that,” said Jade.

  “Oh my god!” said Darryl. “I hate it when the bone right there breaks in two. That happened to me.”

  “Ouch. But before we’re born, each human embryo— Guys, dang. Dang.”

  “I like this, this is interesting, guys,” said Chase.

  “No it’s not,” said Sunrise.

  I laughed. “Thank you. Before we’re born—this is the crucial thing! Before we’re born, each human embryo repeats some of our evolutionary history. Tiny embryos start out with gill slits like fishes—”

  Owen was talking.

  “We’re LEARNING in here,” said Darryl.

  “Words are actually flying out of my mouth and going into people’s ears,” I said.

  Caleb said, “If you guys be quiet, I’ll give you a Jolly Rancher, okay?”

  “Okay, I’ll be quiet,” said Owen.

  “And by their fourth week of development, human embryos have little tails. So when you’re a tiny infant in your mother’s womb, you actually have a tail. Isn’t that bizarre?”

  “Not infant, fetus,” said Luke.

  “Jason had a tail,” said Jade.

  I said, “That’s enough about tails, I think. Let’s learn another fact, shall we?”

  “No-ho-ho-ho!” said Sunrise, putting her head in her arms and pretending to weep.

  “Maybe that’s enough for now,” I said. “Do you think that’s enough? I could do Why do animals become extinct?” No interest. I flipped through the book some more. “Why do fingers get wrinkled after soaking in water for a long time?”

  “It’s like a prune!” said Owen.

  “It’s to increase their grip,” said Jade.

  “I don’t believe that,” I said.

  “I read that somewhere,” Jade said. “I don’t remember where, but I read it.”

  A Jolly Rancher fell on the floor. Kyle made a lunge for it and put it in his mouth.

  “That’s messed up,” said Caleb.

  “I picked up a lollipop off the ground,” Owen said.

  “Ew!”

  “You don’t eat lollipops you find on the ground,” Jade said.

  “It was wrapped in plastic,” said Owen.

  “Okay, here’s the answer to wrinkly fingers,” I said. “On hands and feet, skin is quite thick,” I read. “Submerge your hands, and the protein of the epidermis will slowly soak up six to ten times its own weight in water. My gosh. As the epidermis swells and swells, it pulls away from the dermis and folds into ridges and furrows.”

  “For gripping!” Jade insisted.

  I said, “Not—well, okay, for gripping.”

  Meanwhile, rummaging in the bookcase, Darryl had discovered a different book of weird facts. “This is cool, can I read this?” she said. I told her to turn toward the class and circulate, and wave her arms around to get their attention.

  “Circulate!” said Jade.

  “I already read all those books,” said Kyle.

  Darryl read: “Slugs have three thousand teeth and four noses.”

  “Huh!” Sunrise said, with faux amazement.

  “Writers once used bread crumbs instead of erasers to correct pencil mistakes,” Darryl read.

  “Wow!” said Sunrise.

  “A camel doesn’t sweat until its body temperature reaches a hundred and six Fahrenheit.”

  “Wow!”

  “That was awesome,” said Chase. It wasn’t clear if he was mocking or not.

  Jade, tapping a page she’d found in another book, whispered to me: “Improved grip.”

  Darryl read, “A baseball will travel farther in hot weather than in cold weather. Why is that?”

  “Because heat rises,” said Owen. “And the bat’s softer.”

  “Oh,” said Darryl.

  “Is it because the molecules are farther apart in the air?” I said.

  “It doesn’t have as much stuff to push against,” said Luke.

  “The largest dinosaurs were vegetarian,” Darryl read.

  “See that,” I said, “if you eat vegetables, you’re going to become huge.”

  “Panda droppings—or crap—can be made into paper,” Darryl read.

  “Crap, or scat,” Owen said loudly.

  “It would take a jumbo jet about a hundred and twenty billion years to fly across the Milky Way Galaxy,” Darryl read.

  “I love Milky Ways,” said
the lollipop kid, Owen.

  Jade stood and read from her book. “Chewing gum burns about eleven calories an hour,” she read.

  Jade and Darryl started tag-teaming.

  Darryl: “Kids blink about five million times a year! Do it, Jade, throw it back at me!”

  Jade: “Sea turtles weigh about as much as a water buffalo.”

  Darryl: “If about thirty-three million people held hands, they could make a circle around the equator.”

  Jade: “There are more plastic flamingoes than real ones in the US.”

  Darryl: “Bakers in Turkey made an eight-thousand-eight-hundred-ninety-one-foot-long cake. That’s the length of about one hundred fourteen tennis courts.”

  “Whoa!” said Kyle.

  Jade: “Spiders have clear blood.”

  I said, “Spiders have clear blood, people. Know that!”

  “Then how come when you smush them, it’s like ull?” said Jade.

  “They have clear blood, but their digestive system is a mess,” I said.

  “Ew.”

  Darryl: “Abracadabra used to be written in a triangle shape to keep away evil spirits.”

  Jade: “The average adult’s skin weighs about eleven pounds.”

  “So if you want to lose weight, take off all your skin,” said Owen.

  Dabney raised his hand. “It’s a proven fact that when you wake up in the morning, you’re three inches taller than you are at night,” he said.

  “Three inches?” I said. “No!” Suddenly the whole class began talking at once.

  Jade said, “Did you know that hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a fear of long words?”

  The PA lady asked James Moran to please stop at the office before lunch.

  “This was fun,” said Luke.

  Sunrise, who hadn’t wanted to hear any facts, came up to me and said breathlessly, “Did you know that dolphins were evolved from wolves? I watched a documentary. If you look at a dolphin they have little like feet bones on both sides, but the feet have gone away.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “That’s a great fact! Nice going.”

  Jade and Chase were looking up a picture of a zedonk, a cross between a female donkey and a male zebra.

  “Abracadabra,” sang Owen. Several joined in with “I want to reach out and grab ya.”

  “What’s that song?” said Mackenzie.

  “Everybody knows that song,” said Owen. “You have no sense of culture.”

  I looked at the clock. “It’s time for lunch.”

  “Lunch!”

  “LUNCH!”

  “You don’t have to scream lunch,” I said. “Just go to lunch.”

  The early-release day should have ended right there. In fact, all school days should be early-release days, I thought, eating a peanut butter cracker. Nobody learns a thing after lunch—the cafeteria is an endurance roaring contest. Keep teachers’ salaries the same—no, increase them—but cut their hours in half. That should bring in some new blood. And fire the worst of the ed techs and enrichment specialists—the ones who are paid bullies.

  The kids came back, squealing and grunting. They were as sick of the Archaebacteria kingdom as I was. So what if the organisms could live in hot springs? About half the girls successfully measured the beaks of Darwin’s finches, some of them working out in the hall; two of the boys did. Jade and Darryl became kooky and flirtatious, following several boys around, grabbing their shirts. There was a disagreement over a Jolly Rancher; Kyle lifted an unoccupied chair in the air and threatened someone with it. That was when I got genuinely angry. “PUT THE CHAIR DOWN AND SIT IN IT,” I said.

  “Can I go get my iPad?” Kyle asked.

  “NO. Sit.”

  Later one of Kyle’s friends brought him his iPad and he played some game on it defiantly. I ignored him. What did it matter? I left a fatuous note for Mrs. Painter and drove home.

  Loud bad funny brilliant sullen blithe anxious children. If I were a real teacher, I would go completely nuts. I love them.

  End of Day Eleven.

  DAY TWELVE. Tuesday, April 15, 2014

  LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, ED TECH

  I DON’T JUDGE

  BACK IN THE OFFICE of Lasswell High School at seven-thirty in the morning, getting my day’s schedule and ID badge. “There you go,” said Paulette. “You’re in room eighteen.”

  “Mr. Bowles?” I said.

  “Yep, and your plans are on his desk in a three-ring binder.”

  Mrs. Meese, the genial ed tech, was already sitting at her desk. “Good morning,” she said. “You are our illustrious leader today.”

  “That is a scary thought,” I said.

  “I’m sorry but that’s how it goes around here,” she said. She really was an incredibly nice person.

  Ms. Gorton, another ed tech—with a kind-but-tough face and a yellow bandanna and a whiskey voice—showed me the schedule page in Mr. Bowles’s binder, and I said hello to Drew, my dyslexic friend from genetics class, who was sitting in the corner with his feet up on the heating unit, listening to music and staring at nothing. He waved a hand in languid greeting, but he was not happy. Mrs. Batelle, a sharp-featured, bustling older gal, was responsible for him; she was riffling through his stack of overdue assignments. “There’s one more short-answer part of the test,” she said. “And then another part.”

  “Whatever,” Drew said.

  “We can work on that another time. You have your iPad?”

  “Yep.”

  “Stupendous. Thank you, sir.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Drew.

  “You’re a good trooper. You want a Reese’s?”

  “No.”

  “All right. I’ll owe you one, if you want.”

  She left, and then Drew shouldered his backpack and left.

  Ms. Gorton shook her head. “Battle zones,” she said. “The teacher and Drew. They don’t see eye to eye.”

  I said how much I liked Drew.

  “Yeah, me, too. It’s a little like being in between divorced parents. It’s hard.”

  She took off for her classes. Mrs. Meese and I were the only people left in the room. I read Mr. Bowles’s binder and wrote out my schedule.

  “Do you have any questions about what you’re doing?” Mrs. Meese asked.

  I asked where Mr. Masille’s Intro to Tech class was.

  “You’ve got to go to room forty-four, blocks one and five,” she said.

  The high school PA lady came on—noticeably less singsongy in her delivery than the middle school PA lady. She said, “To the guidance office! Sisely Giles, Becca Hamilton, Leslie Ingalls, Angelica O’Donnell, Linus Hopper, Susanne Lampe, Randy Holloway, Lexie Locke, Greta Altham, Francisca Archambault! To the guidance office!”

  I walked to the tech room, passing a goth couple crammed into a kissing corner, staring into each other’s eyes and squeezing each other’s bottoms before their day of classes. The tech room had high ceilings and battered gray stools and several ancient-looking metalworking machines from which sprouted pipes and ducts and electrical conduits. There was a beautiful old Bridgeport drill press against a side wall. Mr. Macpherson, who was substituting for Mr. Masille, said hello. He was a handsome man in a blue button-down shirt and a black tie. He looked a little like James Caan in Misery. I sat on a stool near a large chipped C-clamp.

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. The students said the pledge almost inaudibly, some not at all—maybe tech class was felt to be just outside of compulsory flag-pledge range. Mr. Macpherson barked out each student’s first name—about fifteen of them—and said, “All right, I think you’re all fully aware what you need to do today. Each one of you needs to draw two sketches of a possible maglev vehicle. The game plan is that once those are done, then we’re going to group you. We’ll have six groups of two and one gro
up of three, where you can combine your ideas, and come up with one. Uno! Ein! One! Maglev truck, vehicle. Sound like a plan? All right, let’s do it.”

  He brought out a box of model maglev vehicles from previous trimesters and set them on a table. There was a hum from the drop forge in back that covered up the murmur of students’ voices. “Don’t forget, whatever you design mathematically has to fit inside this track with minimal friction,” he said.

  I checked in on the two boys I was supposed to be keeping an eye on and went over to Mr. Macpherson’s desk. “Let me know if I can make myself useful,” I said.

  “Here’s what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re going to give them four magnets, have them cut the cardboard, and as I said to them yesterday, they can go anywhere they want to with this.” He showed me a maglev car with a toy locomotive glued on top that he’d built himself. “I have a model train collection,” he said. He demonstrated how the car was supposed to slide down the incline, levitating on the magnets glued to its underside. The locomotive slid to a stop halfway down. “The tolerance, and the balance, has to be precise, and I’m thinking that there’s a very slight drop in the ramp,” he said—maybe a sixteenth of an inch. “This one clearly starts, and then it stops. The car has to be perfect.” He placed a freight car at the top of the run. “This one goes good,” he said. We watched it go down smoothly. I asked him why he thought maglev hadn’t caught on more. “It’s the expense factor,” said Mr. Macpherson. “It’s a matter of maybe forty, fifty years. They’ll get it eventually. They’ll have to get it, when petrol as we know it is gone.”

  Mr. Macpherson had been a sub at Lasswell for several years, he said. “I’m a retired college professor. So being involved in education is a piece of cake. A lot of people look at substitute teaching, they come in, they do it for two days, and they say nuh-uh.”

  He took one of the worksheets and held it up for the class. “Guys, now once you have your practice design, there’s a sheet here, and I want you to put your first initial and last name. Print it, so it’s legible. Let’s get that done.”

  Everyone printed their name at the top of their worksheet.

  Mr. Macpherson pointed at a slacker dude, Martin, wearing headphones. “Take that headpiece off,” he said. “Once you’ve put your name on here, and you’ve got your designs, I want you to come to my ‘office.’” He pointed down at his desk, which was in the middle of the room, covered with clutter. “I want to peruse them quickly before you move on. Come and see me right here. There’s no fee to enter my office. But there is an exit fee.” He smiled. “Is there anything in the world that you can think of, where you can get in free, but you have to pay to get out?”