When the mudding videos got too loud, I told the trucker boys to turn them down—and they did. They were, in a way, polite. Every so often I would prod a student to work on math. “Math is like my worst subject,” one of them said. “It’s just stupid. I don’t understand it. I hate it. It’s a total waste.”
But one kid, Colin, with a wavy shock of hair, sat silently the whole time, earbuds in, listening to music, crouched over, doing homework, erasing and rewriting answers.
When I stood up, several people said, “You’re tall! How tall are you?”
The morning went by slowly. My head felt stuffed with cotton balls and I had trouble sitting up and looking authoritative. There was no coffee machine, so I sipped a Coke to stay alert. I sighed loudly at one point, and Clyde gave me a sympathetic look. “I hear you,” he said. “I feel your pain.”
The clock was an hour off because of daylight savings, which had just happened. “You’re lucky you weren’t here yesterday,” said Clyde. “Everybody was grumpy. People were standing in the hallway yelling—it was bad.”
Suddenly the bonger bonged for lunch. By the time I got out to the car I realized I didn’t have time to drive somewhere and buy a sandwich, so I ate three Blue Diamond almonds I found in my car and drank the rest of my Coke.
Back at my desk, I studied the sub plans for what was supposed to happen after lunch. A girl, Charlee, had written a paper, and I was supposed to help her finish her bibliography, which needed to have at least three sources in it. She was sitting, staring into space, listening to music, looking goth but neat. And bored.
“So, you’re working on a paper,” I said.
Charlee nodded.
“What about the bibliography?”
She sighed.
“What are you writing about?”
“Oh, we had to write about an animal.”
“An animal! That’s pretty gripping, pretty interesting.”
“Isn’t it?” she said sarcastically.
“Of course, it depends on the animal,” I said. “What did you choose?”
“The wolverine.”
“I thought that was a shoe,” I said.
“It could be a brand of shoe, but it’s a damn wolverine,” Charlee said. “I’ll show you.” She tipped her iPad toward me.
“Oh, it’s a small, friendly, furry creature,” I said.
“It’s like me,” said Charlee. “Small but hostile.”
Artie called out, “Girl, get your ass to work!”
She began talking to her friend about what they were doing after school: they both had orientation and training at a Hannaford supermarket, where they’d just gotten jobs.
I was also supposed to encourage a certain boy, Logan, to finish a “health assessment” on suicide. “He only has one section left!” said the sub plans.
I went over to him. “So you’re working on something about suicide?”
“Yeah.” Logan was a serious kid, in a gray, zipped-up hoodie, with short hair and black eyebrows.
“And you’ve got one section left?”
“Yeah, I’m not going to do that, that’s for extra credit.” He showed me what he’d done. He’d been given a transcript of an actual call to a suicide prevention unit in which a despairing man talked ramblingly about how he had no reason to live, and about how much he wanted to die. Logan had, as asked, highlighted the “warning phrases” of suicidality with a yellow highlighter.
“That’s quite an assignment,” I said.
Logan said, “Yeah, I know.”
“Well, you’re almost there, you’re on the home stretch, finish it up if you can.”
He began playing a video game on the iPad, in which two hoppy animated creatures leapt up and down on a mountain range. Then his iPad froze. “My iPad froze!” he said indignantly.
And so the day ticked by. Nobody wreaked havoc or did anything too horrible. On the other hand, only a few students did anything that Lasswell High School would define as actual work. At a guess, I’d say that 1 percent of total class time—no, less than that—was taken up with algebra, geometry, health, history, language arts, or any other subject that the school was supposedly in the business of teaching. And yet, so what? I liked the kids and felt that given their forced idleness and the futility of their academic days, they were doing an impressive job of staying sane and keeping their senses of humor.
The means they had available to pass time productively had improved dramatically because of the iPad. In the old days, they would have made spitballs, or poked their neighbors—now they could watch mudding videos, which actually interested them, or take pictures of each other, or play chirpy video games. The iPad had improved their lives.
Nobody expected most of them to do academic work, it seemed, because long ago they’d been labeled as kids with “special needs”—even though in fact they were, judging by their vocabulary, their temperament, and their fluent way with irony, normal American high schoolers. They weren’t masterminds, but that wasn’t why they were in this room—they were here because they quietly refused to do work that they hated.
At the very end of the day, just before the bell rang, everybody gathered by the door. I began putting the computers away. (There were, in addition to the ubiquitous iPads, carts full of old Apple laptops.) Lydia, a girl with braces, in a pink sweatshirt, came in, very keyed-up and wild. She began throwing a pen around. I said, “Hey, hey, hey.”
“Stop it, or the substitute won’t come back,” said her friend Shelby.
“I’ll be back,” I said. “I enjoyed it.”
“See, he enjoyed it,” said Lydia.
I felt like a figure of fun, but not so like a figure of fun that I didn’t want to do it again. I hadn’t helped anybody learn anything, I’d just allowed them to be themselves; I was there for a day to ensure that room 18 didn’t descend into utter chaos. My role was to function as straight man, to give these kids the pleasure of avoiding meaningless schoolwork. And that was maybe a useful role.
The final six bells bonged and everybody surged out and the room was empty again. I wrote a note to Mrs. Prideaux saying that the kids had been good-natured and funny, and that I was grateful to have had a chance to fill in. As I was driving home, I remembered something Clyde, the snowplower, had said. “You’ve got your good kids and you’ve got your bad kids. And sometimes your bad kids can be your good kids.”
And that was the end of Day One.
DAY TWO. Monday, March 17, 2014
LASSWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, SECOND GRADE
MYSTERY PICTURE
THE PHONE PLINKED AT 5:40 A.M. on Monday, St. Patrick’s Day. Lasswell Elementary School needed someone to teach second grade, said Beth, the sub caller. “I’ll do it, thanks,” I said.
On the way there I bought two glazed donuts and two medium Turbo cups of coffee—one cup for later. The elementary school, a few miles away from Lasswell High School, was a low brick building in the middle of a wooded patch, with a playground out back: swingsets and a climbing structure sitting in a white field of ice. A jolly, pink-cheeked secretary signed me in and gave me a badge that said STAFF, which I clipped to my jacket pocket. The room was warm; I was already beginning to sweat.
In room 7, Mrs. Heber, the teacher who’d called in sick, was sitting at her desk, under garlands made of looped construction paper. She had a bad cold and looked as if she hadn’t slept well; even so, she’d come in before school started to write up her sub plans and print out some worksheets. “You look like you have some experience under your belt,” Mrs. Heber said. “Have you been a teacher?” I told her it was my first time teaching at the elementary level, but both my children had been through Maine schools.
“Well, there you go,” she said. She stapled some pages together and handed them to me. I read a sentence: “Have the kids add ‘I Found a Four Leaf Clover’ to their fluency binder’s
table of contents.” Mrs. Heber showed me the math activity worksheet, a grid of squares with an accompanying color key. “This is a little confusing,” she said. “The kids won’t have seen this before but it’s really fun. As long as you get it, they’ll get it.”
“I hope you feel better,” I said. “Thanks for preparing everything so well.”
“Good group of kids,” Mrs. Heber said. “I haven’t told you about my little handfuls. My two handfuls are Parker and Benjamin. Keep an eye on those two—they’ll try to get silly.” She wished me good luck and left.
I drew up a seating chart to try to learn the children’s names beforehand, gave up, and looked around, trying to get my bearings. The desks, made of wood-grain Formica, were tiny, arranged in a large square, with handwritten names taped to the tops—I’d forgotten how small second-graders were. The chairs were made of maroon plastic and they were stacked around the edges of the room, which had gray carpeting. The walls were crowded with a bewilderment of sights—calendars, headphones on hooks, yellow cardboard clocks with movable hands, a number strip that went around the ceiling, letter diagrams, a cartoon of parts of the body, a poster saying “How Do You Feel Today?” with pictures of children in various states of emotion, hand-crayoned figures of “ROOM HELPERS” mounted in plastic pouches against an electric-orange background. There was a bright yellow bookcase stuffed with a kaleidoscope of kids’ books, and a green chalk blackboard superimposed with pastel Post-its and charts with primary-colored stickers going down the side. Behind Mrs. Heber’s desk hung an intricate “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,” colored pink, aqua blue, pale green, and violet, with sub-objectives spelled out in rectangles. Under “ANALYZING KNOWLEDGE” was a box that said:
Analyzing Errors
in Reasoning
Identify logical
or factual errors
• Question the validity of
• Listen to insure
• Assess
• Expose fallacies in
Listen to insure? I started to get nervous—I couldn’t take it all in, and I didn’t know where anything was. Just then the teacher next door popped in to say good morning. “If you need anything let me know,” she said. “They’re a good group of kids, but they’re very social. They love to talk.”
“If you hear an uproar coming from this room,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, you’ll hear me, too,” she said, which made me feel better.
A bell rang—an old-fashioned bell with a real clapper—and children began arriving in ones and twos. I said hi and they shyly said hi. Backpacks were hung on hooks, snowpants were removed, chairs were unstacked and distributed. “You guys really know what you’re doing,” I said.
“You’re really tall,” said one tiny girl, Anastasia—she was wearing several strings of green plastic beads in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. Bryce, a tiny freckled boy, pulled out a chapter book from his backpack and told me he’d finished it last night—The Lightning Thief. I congratulated him. I’d forgotten that kids could have freckles. I found a stub of chalk and wrote “Mr. Baker” on the board.
I asked Anastasia if now was the time when I should pass out the four-leaf-clover poem for their fluency binders. “You have to ask the paper passer,” she said. I asked who the paper passer was. “Tessa, but she isn’t here yet.”
Some children’s voices came over the PA system, reading the date and the weather forecast in singsong unison. They told a knock-knock joke that I couldn’t make out. The principal came on to announce several birthdays and to congratulate a team of Lasswell Elementary students who’d won an Odyssey of the Mind tournament over the weekend. Nobody in the class listened. Then, on cue, everyone grew quiet and serious and put their hands on their chests, and we said the Pledge of Allegiance together.
“Hi, everybody, I’m Mr. Baker, I’m the substitute,” I said. “Is the paper passer here?” Tessa dashed over and began passing out the poem. A minor problem arose: normally poems destined for the fluency binder were copied onto three-hole paper, but this time, as several children told me, they lacked holes. “Oh, no,” I said.
“I know where the hole puncher is!” said Anastasia. She rummaged on a side table covered with heaps of art supplies until she found it. The hole puncher began traveling around the room, punching holes in the four-leaf-clover poem, leaving a flutterment of paper dots on the carpet. A boy asked me for a Band-Aid—he had a red patch on his leg where he’d fallen on a snowdrift. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I think if you just let it air-dry and don’t mess with it, probably that’s the best thing you can do.”
A plump girl with a kind face and pink shoes, Cerise, helped me take attendance—five students were sick that day, and two were there but were in a remedial math class. Another girl helped me take the lunch count—how many kids were getting a hot lunch, how many were getting SunButter and jelly, how many had brought their own lunch. When everyone had written the title of the poem in their table of contents and clicked their three-ring binders closed, it was time, according to the sub plans, to line up to go to Monday morning assembly.
Carter, who was smart and officious, told me the rule: silence in the hallways.
“The boys are always less good in the hall,” said Ellie, who was also smart and officious. We processed, fairly silently, in a line to the cafeteria, where a murmuring crowd of children sat on the floor. The teachers stood against the wall; at a certain moment all of them raised their hands, holding up two fingers, and the assembly went quiet. In the front, a woman used a bucket and some milk cartons to show how many quarts were in a gallon and how many pints were in a quart. “Now, how many pints in a gallon?” she asked.
Two!
Eight!
Four!
A reading enrichment teacher read a poem by Natasha Wing, based on “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” It was about some children who catch a leprechaun in their house on the night before St. Patrick’s Day: “They set all the traps round the room with great care / In hopes a wee Irishman soon would be theirs.” The children stare at the captive leprechaun so that he won’t disappear, and they demand that he tell them where he’s hidden the gold. He tells them that it’s buried under a rock in the back yard. But the leprechaun is a trickster: no gold for the children. End of poem.
“Now close your eyes and put your hands on your head,” said the reading enrichment person. “Think of the characters. Think about the setting. Think about the beginning, the middle, the end. Think about the problem. Think about the solution.” We thought about all these things. She asked who the characters were, what the setting was, what the problem was. Hands went up, the right answers came back. “You guys did it all,” the reading enrichment teacher said. “You retold the whole story, problems, solutions—wow!”
We walked silently back to the room. “Can I have a drink, because my throat hurts?” asked a sniffly girl named Jessamyn. I said she could—there was a sink with a drinking fountain by the bookcases. According to the sub plans, I had to get through the four-leaf-clover poem quickly, because we had to have a spelling test and then snack time and then a reading of a Tacky the Penguin book before writing a story about a leprechaun. “Okay, guys, listen up,” I said. “Everybody got three holes in their poem? Good. Everybody take a seat. Guys! So this poem is a— GUYS! Chip chip aroo! Hop! Hip! This poem is kind of weird and I need your help with it.”
They quieted down and we read the poem together. It was supposed to be funny—it’s by a light-versist named Jack Prelutsky and it’s about a kid who finds a four-leaf clover that brings only bad luck—but the kids didn’t go for it. Perhaps it wasn’t the right note to strike on St. Patrick’s Day, especially coming immediately after the poem about the trickster leprechaun. I read:
I barked my shin, I missed my train,
I sat on my dessert.
“Ew,” said Ellie. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
When we got to the end, Anastasia said, very simply, “I have a lot of four-leaf clovers in my garden.”
“I have grass in my yard,” said Benjamin.
It was time for the unit 17 spelling test. Several kids suddenly discovered that they needed to sharpen their pencils: there was a lot of earnest grinding away at the fancy electric pencil sharpener hidden behind the teacher’s desk. They all knew where it was.
“All right, let’s do this! Parker! Have a seat. Has everybody written their name at the top of the page? GUYS!”
“Do you want me to clap them out?” said Tessa, with an eager expression.
“Sure, clap them out,” I said.
She frowned importantly and held her hands over her head and went clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.
Immediately the whole class went clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.
About the spelling test, the sub plans said: “You read the words on the pink sticky note, giving sample sentences for each word.” I could do that. “Were,” I said. I made up a sentence: “We were going to Kohl’s to buy a pair of flip-flops. Were.”
“Kohl’s?” said several voices.
“Macy’s?” I said. “Walmart? Somewhere.”
“I’ve been to Macy’s,” said Jessamyn, who was wearing a yellow shirt that matched her barrette.
I went on to the next word. “Look. Look before you leap, then leap like a madman and then look again. Look.”
They wrote.
“Number three,” I said. “Down. Down we go, deeper into the ocean than we’ve ever gone before. Down.”
“Where there are some strange fishes,” said Bryce, the boy who’d read The Lightning Thief.
“Leopard fishes,” said Anastasia. “Glowing leopard fishes that have glowing eyes!”
There were twelve words altogether. The toughest one was through. I remembered learning how to spell it for the first time. After the test was over I wrote through on the board. “The beginning is pretty simple,” I said. “T-H, th, and R, thr. But then you think, Hmm, there are all kinds of strange letters in there. It looks like it should be ‘throg-hah.’”