Substitute

  “Sharks eat people,” said Bucky.

  “So you’re learning about nature,” I said.

  Vince offered to go make more copies of the project sheet.

  “Vince is on it,” I said. “He’s off to make copies!” I looked around. “What the hay? People are under control here.”

  “That’s because we’re cool,” said Jill.

  “I know you’re cool,” I said.

  “Too cool for you,” said Jill.

  “Too cool for school,” said Marcia.

  A quiet girl, Nancy, was stuffing a mound of dog-eared homework into her backpack. “That is way too much homework,” I said. “What can you do about that?”

  “I don’t know,” Nancy said, sighing. She zipped it away. With her permission, I lifted her backpack, which was ungodly heavy. “I have back problems now,” she said.

  The class continued quiet. How did that happen? “I just want to say, I love this level of work and inspired activity—thank you.”

  “Have you got a riddle for me?” said Stefan.

  No, I didn’t, I said, but I was working on it.

  Vince came back with thirty copies of the 3-D model project worksheet. I turned off the lights. “Calmness,” I whispered. Somebody’s phone vibrated. Vince wanted to turn the lights back on so he could see his sheet better. “Let’s try moving you by the window,” I said.

  “No, I’ll just deal with the dark,” Vince said.

  It was so serenely calm in the room that eventually I got out my computer and typed for a while. After fifteen minutes, Jill suddenly looked up and broke the silence. She said, “Your lipstick’s all over my rim!”

  “Wow,” said Daisy.

  Jill described a commercial for Orbit gum—Sarah Silverman is pitching a TV show to some executives when her morning coffee cup comes in and calls her babe. She says, “We’re not together.” The coffee cup says, “I have your lipstick all over my rim.” Jill said, “I just got that!”

  “We’re happy for you,” said Bucky. Then more quiet working. I whisper-asked someone to open a window. After another ten minutes the talking began, first softly, then in normal voices. Bucky was snickering at a Mr. Bean GIF in an app called iFunny: Mr. Bean exuberantly crossing his legs next to a person in a body cast.

  Marcia explained to Daisy how to make the atmospheric layers to scale. “For every ten miles, I did two centimeters,” she said. “And then you put all the facts around it.”

  Somebody’s phone made a crystalline ding. Daisy said, “I’m going to the office in ten minutes to do announcements. Wait, is that clock slow?”

  “Yeah, she put it five minutes back,” said Stefan.

  “So we wouldn’t start to pack up,” said Jill.

  “That’s outrageous,” I said. “Then you don’t know what the actual time is.” All day I’d been confused about when classes were beginning and ending: the bongers always seemed to be bonging early. The clock was deliberately set wrong—in science class!

  I told Marcia that her project was a marvel. She’d produced little informational flags on toothpicks, mounted in bits of clay, bearing the height and temperature of each layer. Oh, Earth, you are a lucky planet.

  “Tootle-ooh, guys,” said Daisy.

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Stack and pack.

  The chairs went up. A game of tabletop hockey began. “Another day of school,” I said, “bites the dust.”

  Daisy came back, disappointed because there hadn’t been any announcements for her to make. She cheered up quickly, however, shouting at Liam, who followed her around as she picked up trash from the floor. “You’re making me uncomfortable before I punch you,” she said. “I’ll beat you up.”

  “I’ll fuck you up,” said Jill, in a growly black accent.

  “Hey, hey,” said Bernard.

  “Fuck you,” said Daisy.

  I told Liam to stop following Daisy around and pick trash up in a different part of the room. Vince called Bucky a dickhead.

  Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

  Bye, guys. Thank you. See you. Enjoy.

  Bye, Mr. Baker!

  I wrote a note for Mrs. Moran: “Thank you for letting me fill in in your classes—the kids were funny, alert, and (at times) focused—but always a pleasure to be around—best regards, Nick Baker.”

  I ran into Shelly, the teacher of the how-to-be-a-substitute class, in the parking lot. “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Well, it was an interesting, stimulating day with the ninth-graders,” I said.

  “I heard that can be a challenging group,” Shelly said.

  “They’re kind of hilarious, though,” I said. “They know how to enjoy life. I’m not sure how interested they really are in the layers of the atmosphere above fifty kilometers.”

  “Only if it impacts them,” she said.

  “That’s reality,” I said. “But thanks a million, this has really been fun, and I’ve learned a whole lot.”

  “Will you stick with it next year?” Shelly asked.

  “I may well.”

  End of Day Eighteen.

  DAY NINETEEN. Wednesday, May 14, 2014

  LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, EIGHTH-GRADE SCIENCE

  SIMPLE MACHINES

  BETH CALLED AT 5:50 A.M. to send me to the middle school, where I spent the day urging Mr. Lyall’s eighth-grade science students to fill out several worksheets on simple machines. I read to them from the textbook, and we talked about rakes and baseball bats as levers, and about the reduced friction on the puck in air hockey—all that went okay. But none of the students could do anything with the worksheet’s main word problem: A 600-N box is pushed up a ramp that is 2 m high and 5 m long. The box exerts a force of 300 N. What is the efficiency of the ramp? Some kids plugged numbers into half-remembered formulas and got wrong answers—efficiencies of 200 percent. Many pencils were sharpened. Kimberly, Michelle, and Bethany talked about a vampire show. I was no help, because I’d never learned about newtons. By the third class, I gave up on trying to push the box up the ramp and, after a quick web search, wrote the name of a series of videos on the whiteboard: “10 Brilliant Rube Goldberg Machines.” I tried to explain who Rube Goldberg was, but nobody cared. “GUYS! LOOK UP ‘TEN BRILLIANT RUBE GOLDBERG MACHINES!’ Watch those videos, and be enlightened.”

  “Do we have to?” said Katylynn.

  “It’s optional,” I said.

  Rita was drawing a tattoo on Roslyn’s arm. “Do you want a tattoo?” she asked me.

  “No, I want you to look up ‘Ten Brilliant Rube Goldberg Machines.’”

  “I hate machines! I’m a girl,” said Rita.

  I wrestled a ruler from Shane’s hand. His pills were wearing off.

  “What kind of music do you like?” asked Natasha.

  About half the class watched the first Rube Goldberg video, in which many items burn and boil and fall and toil in order to turn the page of a newspaper. It reminded me of teaching.

  “It makes no sense,” said Aaron. “They broke a laptop just to turn a page of a newspaper.”

  I said, “So the question is, is that an efficient machine, or an inefficient machine? Bingo, you’ve learned the lesson.”

  More people watched the videos, one by one. They talked about them and laughed and were attentive. “Full screen!” said Roslyn. Even Shane watched them, looking over somebody’s shoulder because his iPad was confiscated. I could hear the clicking sounds of the Rube Goldberg machines emanating from fifteen iPads.

  Toward the end of the day, Todd showed me how to make a Chinese firecracker; Aaron told a story about his great-grandfather, who injured his nose while chopping wood; and Ryder said he wanted to be an air force pilot when he grew up. “My dad works at the air force base in Portsmouth. He used to repair the planes. Now he teaches classes.”

  What
air force plane did he like best?

  “F-18 Hornet,” he said. “The Super Hornet. I like how it looks. It’s my dad’s favorite plane. I like the Strike Eagles, too.” He brought out his iPad and scrolled through some beauty shots of Strike Eagle planes in various poses. Then he showed more pictures, scrolling slowly through a Keynote presentation he’d just made for health class. “That’s my family,” he said. “That’s my mom, my dad, my sister, my mom again. These are my friends. That’s my sister swimming. She’s really good. She just needs to practice how her arms go into the water. I like fishing. There’s me two days ago.” He was holding a fishing rod in the picture. “And here’s my quote.” The quote was by Bernard Baruch: Be Who You Are, Say What You Feel. Those Who Mind Don’t Matter, and Those Who Matter Don’t Mind.

  I wrote a note for Mr. Lyall. “Dear Mr. Lyall, Many thanks for letting me sub in your class. Classes on Work and Machines went well—some serious confusion over the reverse side of the Work and Power worksheet (“Using Machines”). Kids were good-natured, respectful, funny—Best regards, Nick Baker.”

  Day Nineteen was history.

  DAY TWENTY. Thursday, May 15, 2014

  HACKETT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, THIRD GRADE

  STINK BLOB TO THE RESCUE

  AT 8:25 A.M. I was in the parking lot of Hackett Elementary School, putting on my linen jacket so I would look like a proper substitute teacher and jamming my giant squirt bottle of Purell into my briefcase. Hackett was the school where I’d spent that somewhat hellish day with fifth-graders two months earlier. But now I was seasoned, maybe.

  Room 4, Mrs. Fellows’s third-grade classroom, had three rows of wood-grain desks and red plastic chairs, some of which were already occupied. An ed tech, Mrs. Spaulding, a youngish high-octane gal in yellow denim pants who looked like a swimming coach, was in the room and the early-arrival children were doing arithmetic. “Everyone knows what to do,” said Mrs. Spaulding. “Right, everyone?”

  “Mhm!”

  “Good morning,” I said. A girl named Antoinette was wearing a tricolored floral hair ornament. “I like your sparkly bow,” I said.

  “There’s a lot of bling in this room,” Mrs. Spaulding said. “The girls love bling. Not the boys.” She took me aside for a quick orientation session.

  “They know exactly what to do,” she said. “You’ve got a few young fellas who might give you a run for the money, but you’ll see. All you’ve got to do is keep them busy and remind them to do quality work. They’re good boys.”

  “Just to forewarn you,” I said, “sometimes the noise gets a little loud in my classes.”

  “I can help you out with that,” Mrs. Spaulding said.

  I said, “I don’t mind, actually. If it’s bothering you, or if you think it’s a bad thing, then yes. But I figure it’s just part of what happens with a substitute.”

  Mrs. Spaulding showed me the sub plans, which were four pages long and said PIZZA PARTY TOMORROW!! in green marker at the top. “What we do in our morning meeting,” she said, “after you introduce yourself, is tell them the expectations you have about quality work. They know what fun time is, which we don’t mind—but we also know what transition time is. We also have kids that owe recess time today because of some behavior. They know, believe me. They’re great students. But they’re eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds. Read through the plans and if you have any questions let me know.”

  Mrs. Spaulding’s one-on-one student, Nell, arrived. “We have a sub today,” Mrs. Spaulding told her. “His name is Mr. Baker, and he’s going to be a lot of fun!” She winked at me.

  “Let’s hope,” I said.

  The first half hour of the class was called WIN Time; WIN stood for “What I Need.” They were doing adding and subtracting with regrouping. Regrouping involved drawing number blocks, turning a ten block into ten one blocks and ten one blocks into a ten block—Montessori with pencils. Not a bad thing.

  Mrs. Spaulding was a talker. She chatted continuously through WIN Time—about the pizza party, about book buddies, about Mr. Baker, about regrouping, about the merits and demerits of the Kindle, about declarative and interrogative sentences. It was a wonder that any subtraction with regrouping got done, but it did. If she were a student, she’d definitely have lost recess. But she meant well. The room around us was arranged like an Istanbul bazaar, or a game of miniature golf, with little varicolored cubbies here and there for specific tasks, and its wall space and whiteboards were overlaid with posters and student art and flowery borders and learning targets and taxonomies of learning and codes of cooperation. A voice-level chart specified that 0 was silent, 1 was a whisper, 2 was regular inside, 3 was outside loud. A smiley cardboard pencil with a red tongue and goggle eyes held a scroll: “7 Good Writing Traits.” The seven traits, each printed on a different bright color, were Ideas, Voice, Organization, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, Conventions, and Presentation. “Voice is the soul of the piece,” said white letters on a magenta background. “It’s what notes the writer’s personal style, as all his or her feelings and convictions come out through the words.” Learning target ELA.01.WPL.01.03 was: “I understand that brainstorming ideas for a specific audience and purpose is a part of planning my writing.” Under a big purple star hung an inspirational quotation: “Every time a bell rings an Angel gets their wings.”

  “Good morning, Patsy!” said Mrs. Spaulding. “You’re the student of the day! Hi, Clark, how are you?”

  “Good,” said Clark.

  “Good! You’ve got a new math sheet to do. Make sure you sign up for lunch! Hi, Dyann! Make sure you do your own work. These are four-digit numbers, kids, make sure you raise your hands if you have any questions.”

  She stopped talking for five minutes and let the third-graders do math. Then she started up again, in her number 3 “outside loud” voice. “This is Wilson Lemieux. We’re going to send him to the nurse. He has the cheek disease. They call it the fifth disease. It looks like you have a slapped face. Morning, Cody. Morning, Donny. Morning, Emerson. Clark, sign up for lunch and get started.”

  The lunch chart was a red grid on the whiteboard. Each child put a magnetic-backed glass bead under chicken quesadilla, cheeseburger, SunButter and jelly, or “cold,” meaning brought from home. Half the class was cold, and nobody was having SunButter.

  Talia, a girl with a neat Louise Brooks haircut, showed me her drawing. It was of a girl with a large smiley head and Louise Brooks bangs, with tiny yellow hearts on a hair bow, and earrings with purple peace symbols on them, and green tights with hearts, and a skirt with a big peace symbol in the middle of it. Her shirt said, “Best Friends for Ever!” It was totally wonderful.

  “Reese and Glenn, let’s get started,” said Mrs. Spaulding. “Have a seat. I want to see some effort on that math! If you’re done you can practice your spelling words. If you have any unfinished work in your folder, do that.”

  The principal, Mr. Pierce, came on the PA system: “Good morning, please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and school promise.” After the pledge, the children and Mrs. Spaulding chanted the promise: “TODAY IS A NEW DAY. I WILL ACT IN A SAFE AND HEALTHY WAY. I WILL DO WHAT I KNOW IS RIGHT. I WILL THINK BEFORE I ACT. I WILL TAKE CARE OF MYSELF, MY FRIENDS, AND MY SCHOOL. TODAY I WILL BE THE BEST ME I CAN BE.”

  “Keep working, let’s go!” said Mrs. Spaulding, when everyone had sat back down. “Cody!”

  The principal told us the lunch choices, and then he said, “The winner of the pizza party from the food drive last month is—Mrs. Fellows’s class.”

  That was us. The class leapt up and cheered.

  “Nice going, guys,” I said.

  “Sit down and work,” Mrs. Spaulding said. “Shh. Focus on your math. Study your spelling words. We’ve got five minutes before meeting.”

  A boy named Stanley came up wanting help with a word problem. Milkshakes cost $1.83 apiece, and somebody was buying a milkshake f
or himself and two of his friends. How much would the milkshakes cost in all? Stanley had drawn number bars and gotten the right answer. Micah, a shy boy, was having trouble with a question about a toy store. The storekeeper, Billy, had put 1,573 toys on the shelf. At the end of the day, customers bought 862 of the toys. How many toys does Billy have left?

  Mrs. Spaulding raised her hand. “Eyes on Mr. Baker, please,” she said.

  “Good morning, everyone,” I said. “I’m filling in for Mrs. Fellows today. I’m Mr. Baker. I’m going to try to do the things that you normally do in class, because this seems like a really good class. Some of it I might need your help with. And one of the things that’s really helpful, when there’s a substitute, is if one person talks at a time when you ask me questions, because the substitute is learning, too. I’m trying to figure out what works in this class, and you guys have it down to a science.” I took attendance. Aubrey? Scarlett? Clark? Skylar? Patricia?

  “Let him do the talking, please,” said Mrs. Spaulding.

  Reese? Wilson? Kennedy? Stanley? Donovan? Paisley? Emerson? Micah? Eric? Ruth? Nell? Glenn? Roberta? Dyann? Cody? Talia? Antoinette?

  I said, “So, Patsy, can you do me the great favor of taking the attendance sheet and the lunch count to the office, please?” I called the class over to a gray area rug under the whiteboard for morning meeting.

  Mrs. Spaulding continued with her two-note commands: “Pencils down! Chairs in! You kids know the ropes. GUYS. Stanley, give Mr. Baker some space! Everybody scoot up, let’s make a nice circle! Who’s got the list of who’s sharing today? Can I have it, please?” She studied the list. “Okay, guys, LISTEN UP, PLEASE!”

  “Did everybody get a lot of sleep last night?” I said.

  “I got up at seven-thirty,” said Dyann.

  “I got up at like six,” said Skylar.

  “I think the flowers and plants do a lot of their growing in the middle of the night,” I said. “They soak up all that water—”