Substitute

  “Gettin’ sharp!” said Elijah, and laughed.

  “—very authoritative,” I muttered, out of earshot of her.

  Mrs. Vaughn kept pacing around. “Mitchell, Lindsay, Jared, I want you to get started. Hope, I want you to sign on to IXL, on B-1! Hannah, at your seat! Fourth-graders! If I don’t see everybody working within the next minute, you will be doing it at recess! Irene, I want papers. Work on your papers in your math folder. Tina, what are you working on? You have a division paper, don’t you? You finished your division paper the other day—why don’t you get another one for your target? Dustin and Mitchell, you’ve got FIVE SECONDS, and then you’re on the recess list!”

  Jasper was grimacing and crying because he’d already lost some recess.

  “Jasper, I told you I’d take it back if you sat in your seat!”

  “I am in my seat,” Jasper said. “But you said I owed ten now!”

  “No, you weren’t listening,” said Mrs. Vaughn. “I said, Go to your seat, and I will take the second five back. So you only owe me five, from earlier.”

  “What did I do earlier?”

  “You were talking,” said Mrs. Vaughn.

  “I wasn’t talking!” said Jasper.

  “All right, stop, do your work.”

  I asked Mrs. Vaughn how long they were supposed to be doing work. “I’m happy to do something that’s a little more fun for them,” I whispered, “but I don’t want to transgress.”

  Mrs. Vaughn said, “Why don’t we give them a good ten minutes? I know when I used to sub I used to like to do different things.” She resumed her high-volume policing. “Alex! What are you working on? You need a piece of evidence to pass in. I want you on IXL B-1.”

  “I have something else to do,” said Alex.

  “Then why don’t you have a paper? Dustin, I want to see you working! Elijah, you’ve got your paper from the other day? I’m coming around, I want to see everybody working on something.”

  I whisper-worked with Lindsay on a division problem. Marcus returned from his reading test, and Kathleen left for hers.

  “Trust your brain!” Mrs. Vaughn said at full volume. “Marcus, what’s up! JASPER! You haven’t done any work yet? Okay, girls!” She moved Tina and Connie away from each other.

  A boy brought up a math paper to me. “That looks complicated,” I whispered.

  “OKAY, FOURTH-GRADERS!” Mrs. Vaughn said. “Before we go any further! Just because there is a sub in the room doesn’t mean there are THREE BOYS in the bathroom at the same time. It doesn’t mean there’s more than one girl in the bathroom at the same time. You know you sign out, and if somebody’s signed out, you stay here. Mitchell, did you sign out?”

  “No.”

  “Then you owe me ten minutes. Alex, you owe me ten minutes. Dustin, did you sign out?”

  Dustin nodded.

  “Have a seat and get to work, then. And Alex, you will be doing work at recess if I don’t see these problems done. What did I just say? Sit. Hey, smarty-pants, sit. Jasper! You’re going to owe me more time!” Mrs. Vaughn was on a rampage, and the day had hardly begun.

  I took a tiny chair next to Dustin, who was working on a page of geometry. He had to circle the shapes that were regular polygons, and then he had to write the definition of various words. “What’s this one mean?” he asked.

  “Dodecagon,” I read. “It’s a decagon plus two. What’s a decagon, do you remember?”

  “I remember,” said Grant, next to him. “It’s ten sides.”

  “Right,” I said. “How many sides does a dodo have? I know, that’s an impossible question. But anything that sounds like a dodo usually has twelve sides. I think. I may be wrong.”

  “No, you’re right,” said Dustin.

  He went on to the next problem, a five-sided regular shape. I held up my hand, fingers splayed. “Pent is five. You know the Pentagon, in Washington, where all the generals plan wars? It’s a building they deliberately built with five sides.”

  I went over to Irene, who was fuming at her computer. “I can’t get onto my Educate, so I don’t know what to work on.” Her password was flower904 and it was being refused. I tried it for her, checking that caps lock wasn’t on. Login failed.

  “ALL RIGHT, GUYS,” interrupted Mrs. Vaughn. “We have ten minutes before mini-groups. Mr. Baker would like to do something!”

  I said, “I don’t want to cramp your style . . .”

  “No, that’s fine,” Mrs. Vaughn said. “Felix needs to still work. Ada can still work.”

  “Let’s just keep going until everybody’s happy,” I said.

  “WHY DOESN’T EVERYONE PUT THEIR MOUTH AWAY,” said Mrs. Vaughn. “Felix, you can finish yours at recess, because you owe me some time.”

  I asked Mrs. Vaughn if Ms. Collins ever read to the class. I’d found a world history factbook with a chapter in it about the industrial revolution. “During this time, no,” she said. “But if it’s interesting for them, that’s fine. There’s probably a lot of good things in there.”

  “I want to keep on doing math,” said Grant.

  “You can keep on doing math,” I said. “I just thought I might read.”

  “You’re very tall,” said Elijah.

  “So are you, my gosh,” I said. “You’ve got nice sneakers, too.”

  Mrs. Vaughn pointed. “JARED, I NEED YOU AT YOUR SEAT. CRYSTAL, I NEED YOU AT YOUR SEAT. Mr. Baker is going to break things up a little bit.”

  I said, “Anyone who is still working on math, just keep going. Have you all read the Magic Tree House series?”

  Yes!

  “My gosh, you’re way ahead of me. We could talk about something in world history.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, world history,” said Mitchell.

  “VOICES!” shouted Mrs. Vaughn. “VOICES NEED TO BE OFF!”

  “Can we take a vote?” said Lindsay.

  “No,” Mrs. Vaughn said.

  “Well, a sort of informal vote,” I said. “Do you guys know when women in this country got the vote? They weren’t allowed to vote, right?”

  Mrs. Vaughn pointed at a fidgeter. “NO, YOU’RE NOT DOING THAT. GUYS, YOU’RE NOT BEING VERY RESPECTFUL—”

  Here I cut her off. “It’s fine,” I said. “Mrs. Vaughn, it’s honestly just fine. It doesn’t have to be pin-droppingly silent. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “They’re very nice kids,” I said, “and I’m perfectly happy.”

  Mrs. Vaughn couldn’t stop. “Jared, sit down right now!”

  I told them about how an injection-molding machine worked, that it melted little plastic particles that came down in a tube and used a huge screw to squash the molten plastic into a mold. I told them about China, where they invented gunpowder. I showed them a picture of a steam engine and talked about pistons and expanding gases and paddlewheels. “Think of a world in which something doesn’t exist,” I said, “and one guy thinks, I want to build that. That’s an amazing ability.” Were there other inventions that they particularly admired? What did they use every day that they really liked?

  “Basketball hoop,” said Joanna. “We learned about it in my old school. The man didn’t like that people were too pushy and stuff, so he made up a new game.” We talked about basketball and volleyball for a while. The class was remarkably quiet. Mrs. Vaughn left to visit some other room. I asked the class for more inventions.

  “Glasses?” said a girl, Francie, who wore glasses.

  “Glasses! Now, that is an invention. How do you think they figured out that if you looked through glass, it would actually make you see better?”

  “Telescopes, maybe, I don’t know,” Francie said. She began looking up the history of eyeglasses on her computer.

  A specialist arrived to take Marcus and Felix to reading enrichment.

&nb
sp; Jasper said, “Something else that was invented was the iPhone Five!” We talked about iPhones and Steve Jobs. I showed them the cracks in my iPhone 4s. “It still works perfectly,” I said. “Now, that is a good machine.”

  “Steve Jobs had died by the time of the iPhone Five,” said Grant.

  “But he still lives on,” said Jasper.

  “Is this one invention?” I asked them, holding up my injured phone.

  No, said the class.

  “There are dozens of inventions in here,” I said. “There’s a camera, there’s a radio transmitter, there’s a screen.”

  “I know who was the first person who wore spectacles,” said Francie. “It was an ancient queen.”

  The watch was another great invention, said Dustin. Elijah raised his hand and described Foucault’s pendulum. “It proves that the Earth does spin. Every hour it knocks a pin down.”

  Ada described a sundial. “They would have this round thing in the garden. From the way the shadows would reflect on it they would tell the time.”

  We talked about hourglasses, measuring time by sifting sand. “Or they could burn a candle,” I said. “And you can measure years of time if you just look at a tree grow.”

  Grant explained the counting of tree rings. “If you cut down the tree,” he said, “and you count how many rings, that’s how many years it has lived.”

  I said, “Why do you think there are rings in a tree? Anyone know?” I pointed at Irene. “Do you know?”

  “No,” said Irene.

  “Because some parts of the year are cold,” I said, “and the tree is hibernating, waiting for things to warm up, and some parts of the year are warm and it’s growing like mad.”

  “Every year grows a new layer?” said Irene.

  “It’s growing a new layer,” I said. “In the cold months the wood has a different kind of look than in the warm months.” I told them what I knew about the dating of old wood using dendrochronology. “So that’s another way to measure time. Okay. Are we done?” I was running out of steam. Ms. Collins still hadn’t returned. “No.”

  Jared raised his hand. “One invention is the electric sharpener.”

  “Electric pencil sharpeners—yes!”

  “We have one in class,” said Francie.

  “There’s a little man inside of it with a chain saw,” said Jasper.

  “It wastes electricity,” said Francie.

  “Do you like the fact that electric pencil sharpeners make a lot of noise?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “I think there’s a little mouse in there, munching,” said Tina.

  We took the top off the mechanical sharpener and talked about the grinding gears inside. We talked about can openers. “What’s another favorite invention?” I asked.

  Connie said, “How about mirrors? When were mirrors invented?”

  “Great invention!” I said.

  “Charles Henry Gould invented the stapler,” Elijah called out.

  “Good research,” I said. “Who invented the mirror?”

  “I’ll research that up!” said Grant.

  “Me, too!” said Connie.

  “Research it up,” I said.

  While they were doing that, I tried to write “Charles Henry Gould” on the whiteboard, but it was a fancy electronic whiteboard.

  “You have to turn it on,” said Tina. “Jasper! How do you turn it on?”

  “I’m your technogeek,” said Jasper, leaping up.

  “I think I’ve figured it out,” called Grant, one of the mirror researchers. “It’s a person named Justus von Liebig. A German chemist. He created the modern mirror.” Grant rapidly read a paragraph of an article from LiveScience: “In the first century AD, the Roman author Pliny the Elder alludes to the first recorded use of glass mirrors in his encyclopedia Natural History, but the mirrors apparently never came into general use at the time.” Connie, who’d originally asked the mirror question, brought up her computer to show me the article.

  “Good,” I said.

  “SmartBoards are a good invention,” said Jared.

  “These SmartBoards are awesome,” said Jasper. “You plug it into your computer and into the projector, and when it comes on you just calibrate it with one of these markers, with your finger, and then whenever you press this down, you can draw green, and when you don’t want it anymore, you use the eraser and wipe it off, because there’s a sensor inside of it, and there’s a sensor inside of the eraser.” Jasper was clever—what was he doing getting yelled at by Mrs. Vaughn and sitting out recess?

  “I know who invented the lock!” said Elijah. “The lock is James Sargent.”

  “Soccer was invented in China,” said Grant.

  “Someone invented school,” said Jasper.

  “Ah,” I said. “Who invented school, and WHY?”

  “I’m looking for who invented homework,” said Jared. “I’m mad at him.”

  “Whoever did that is bad,” said Tina.

  Ms. Collins arrived with a handful of papers. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess her clock was five minutes slow. Was it okay?”

  “It was fine,” I said, “we’ve just been talking about inventions.”

  “We were learning about world history,” said Grant.

  “Good,” Ms. Collins said.

  “They did some of their actual work,” I said, “and then Mrs. Vaughn was getting mad at them for not being respectful, and I said, I’m just fine—and then, I don’t know.”

  “Perfect,” said Ms. Collins.

  “They’re very good with the math facts,” I said.

  “I drill them daily on math facts,” Ms. Collins said. “I get you again in the afternoon.” She turned to the class. “Have a seat, please! Let’s log off the computers!”

  —

  I WALKED TO ROOM 2, Mrs. Wells’s class of second-graders.

  “Hi!” said the class.

  “Class,” said Mrs. Wells, “transition.” She was in her fifties and expensively dressed. She intoned a two-note chant, “Class-class,” and she touched a set of windchimes with her fingertips. “On three we should be looking at me. One, two, three. Thank you. All right, friends. Mr. Baker is a sub who’s in our building today. I need to finish a little bit of testing, so he’s here to help out for a little while. So here is what’s going to happen. I said we would have a brain break, which we will. After the brain break, we’ll get started with our reading today. And we’ll go from there.”

  She had her computer hooked up to the projector, and she waited for the image to come on. “Thank you, Green Table, for waiting patiently and quietly,” she said. “I am noticing that.”

  I said hello to Mrs. Colette, another ed tech. Mrs. Wells logged on to a brain break website called GoNoodle.

  “Who’s my helper today? Faith. You get to pick. Look up there.” She pointed to some goggle-eyed cartoon figures. “Do you want Freckles Sinclair? Do we want to go with Weevil LaBeevil again? Do we want to go to Zapp von Doubler? Oogles Fitzlemon or McPufferson? Tiny O’Flexem, Rad Chad, Flappy Tuckler, Tangy Bodangy, or Squatchy Berger?” Faith picked Squatchy Berger. A music video came on—an inspiring tearjerker of a song by Sara Bareilles called “Brave.” One of the people in the video was an exuberant black kid who danced in a library with easy, beautiful moves—but because the kid was fat the class laughed uproariously every time he appeared. “I wanna see you be brave,” sang Sara Bareilles, in the chorus. Over the song, Mrs. Wells told me what I should be helping the class with. “We’ve been working on biographies,” she said. “So while I’m testing if you could just walk around and have them read a little bit of their biography to you. Maybe they can just talk to you about why their person became famous, or just anything they can tell you about their biography.” More hysterical laughter at the fat black kid.

  When the song
was over, Mrs. Wells said, “Okay, friends, have a seat, please. I was just curious. I wasn’t quite sure what was so funny about this video.”

  “The fat guy!” said Carla.

  “That’s not nice!” said Melody.

  “That’s rude!” said Terry.

  “Eyes on me, please,” Mrs. Wells said. “What I took away from the video was words about how to get your brave on. I like the fact that no matter what size or shape anyone was, they felt really confident to go out there and dance. And I know that if I were a person who was going out to dance, and I thought I was doing a good job, and people were laughing, that would probably make me sad. Next time we watch this video, I want you to look at it with new eyes, and the eyes I would like you to look at it with is, Wow, this is amazing that someone is out there and being confident about who they are. No matter what obstacles they might have. Maybe they aren’t your typical-looking dancer that you would see on TV, but they’re feeling good about who they are. Okay, friends, that’s enough of a lecture.”

  I walked toward the front of the class and hit my head on the windchime. I muffled it with my hand.

  “Now listen carefully to my words, please,” Mrs. Wells continued. “On two. One, two. Blue Table. We are going to read for the first half hour. Just stop for now, Kevin, because listening doesn’t mean moving a table. Thank you. Friends. I have asked Mr. Baker, when he comes around to read with any of you, he is going to talk to you about your biography. He is going to learn about your historical person. You’re going to tell him about that person. Friends, I really notice that I have Melody’s attention, because she’s looking right at me. She’s not coloring, she’s not writing, and that to me shows me someone giving me level three with their bodies, which is cooperation. So, Green Table, go get your books and find your quiet spot. Jeremy, can you go get your book bin, I think I’m going to have Mr. Baker start with you. Red Table, go get your book bins.”

  “Why is your name Baker?” asked Carla.

  “Because I bake enormous cakes,” I said.

  “Yellow Table, go get your book bin,” said Mrs. Wells.

  Jeremy and I found a side spot. He began searching through his book bin for his book, which was about Jackie Robinson. Jeremy had a snuffly cold but was friendly and cheerful.