“And then four times five is twenty,” said Eric. “Plus that two. So it’s twenty-two, and there’s your answer: two hundred twenty-four.”
We applauded. He was a whiz.
Patsy came up and did 56 x 8. “First you multiply six times eight, which equals forty-eight,” she said. “You put the eight down, and you put the four up. And then you do eight times five, which equals forty, plus four, so it would be forty-four. And that’s your answer, four hundred forty-eight.”
“Nice job,” said Mrs. Spaulding, as we clapped for Patsy. We did a few more problems. Some kids counted expertly on their fingers; most knew how to get the answer.
Then Aubrey passed out blue correcting pens and we went over the morning subtraction problems, one by one, painfully slowly.
“Everybody, eyes on the board!” said Mrs. Spaulding. “Clark!”
The class was getting tired of arithmetic and so was I. “Wow, there are a lot of numbers in life,” I said.
“Ugh!” said Wilson
“Wilson!” said Mrs. Spaulding.
Subtraction problem 4 was 8,261 − 4,950 = ______. Kennedy did it at the board. “One take away zero would be one,” she said. “And then six take away five would be one. And then you can’t take nine from two, so you have to cross the eight out and put a seven, and then twelve take away nine would be three. And then seven take away four would be three.” Phew.
As number fatigue grew, the class began to confuse multiplication with subtraction: one minus one became one, not zero.
“I’m going to put some names on the board if the voices don’t stop!” said Mrs. Spaulding.
After math, said the sub plans, we were supposed to play Bingo, but the Bingo boards were not in evidence, and Reese wanted to present his share, a bird’s nest. He walked around the class letting people touch it. “I think it’s from a blue jay,” he said. “It was on the last step of my porch. I saw it and I got my mom. She said my brother had found it and he put it on the railing, but it must have blew off. I was like, ‘Hey, maybe I could share it tomorrow!’ So here I am, sharing it. We have another one on the window by our upstairs bathroom. It’s huge.”
“Shh, hey, guys, be respectful!” said Mrs. Spaulding.
Skylar asked why it had a leaf hanging from the bottom.
“Because the bird made it that way,” he said. “I can’t exactly answer that.”
Paisley asked why there was a bit of ribbon inside the nest.
“Because the bird put it in there,” Nathan said.
“It must have liked it,” said Paisley.
Reese said, “I just noticed that there’s some kind of yellow-white hair around the top.”
“Maybe it’s your mom’s hair,” said Roberta.
“Maybe it’s yours,” said Reese.
Clark asked how he knew it was a blue jay’s nest.
“I’m guessing,” said Reese, “because the other nest outside our bathroom is a blue jay’s, and it has a piece of that ribbon, too.”
“Well done, good sharing,” I said. “You know what it makes me think about, guys? If you were a bird, and your job was to make a secure home for your eggs, how would you do it?”
Paisley said, “I would get some straw, I would get some wood, I would get some paper, I would get everything I could take.”
Reese said, “Paisley, you’d be a bird.”
I said, “So once you gathered—”
“LISTEN, PLEASE. MR. BAKER’S TALKING!” said Mrs. Spaulding. “SIT DOWN, STANLEY, OR IT’S A CHECK MARK.”
I drew a branch. “So once you gathered that stuff, how would you build the nest? Remember, birds are miraculous. They can do things with their arms, but their arms are wings. So they can’t hold on to anything with hands. They have to do everything with their beaks. What’s up, Stanley? So here’s the bough. First you’ve got to pick a good spot, that’s up far enough out of the way of cats, and raccoons. Then, once you’ve picked the right spot, you have to be an architect.”
“COULD YOU PLEASE BE RESPECTFUL TO MR. BAKER?” said Mrs. Spaulding. “He’s done a wonderful job today. Turn around, watch him!”
“Some birds use mud as glue,” I said. “But then they do the thing you can see in this nest, which knocks me out. They make it soft and round and perfectly safe for the eggs, so the eggs won’t get hurt, and they won’t fall out. Have you ever seen a bird trying to build a nest?”
“Shh!” said Mrs. Spaulding. “He’s talking, Reese!”
I said, “Every single piece of that nest had to be flown one at a time in the bird’s beak. It’s like making cotton candy.”
“It’s really soft,” said Reese, stroking the inside of the nest.
“The bird is making something really soft that’s the shape of an egg, even before the eggs are born,” I said. “How do they learn how to do that? It’s instinct.”
“Mother Nature,” said Talia.
“Mother Nature!” I said.
Reese was still feeling the inside of the nest. “It might actually be dog hair,” he said.
I nodded. “We have a corgi,” I said. “He sheds all over the yard, and the birds make nests of his dog hair.”
Scarlett said, “I have a bush right next to my window, and in the middle we have two robins nesting in it. And three eggs. We watched it, and it took them six weeks to get that nest done.”
“Six weeks!” I said. “Think how hard that is.”
“I know how they made it,” said Scarlett. “Can I go out to the board?”
“Please,” I said.
“We have about five minutes before we start packing up,” Mrs. Spaulding warned.
Scarlett started drawing how the birds in her yard built their nest. “They put three or four sticks. And then—my dog sheds like crazy. It’s a German shepherd. And then they take grass and slip it in through the trees. And they start curving it, and once they’ve done curving it, and making it like a bowl, they go out in my back yard and get the moss that’s on the ground, and they lay it in here, for the babies, and they nest in there.”
A hand from Paisley. “Next door at my house, I looked in a bush and I saw a bird’s nest. I actually saw a bird in it but I didn’t want to disturb it, so I just backed out.”
“That’s a really good thing to do,” I said. “These birds are really struggling to make their home, and be in private, and sometimes you want to just leave them alone, right?”
“Can I show how they built it?” asked Paisley.
“If you can in about twelve seconds,” I said, “because we’re going to start packing, stacking, racking, and flacking.”
“So this is the bush that the bird—” said Paisley.
“YOU’VE GOT ABOUT THIRTY SECONDS, PAISLEY,” Mrs. Spaulding said. “Ope, Skylar, talking!”
“And I’m right here,” said Paisley, drawing herself on the board, “and I backed up. And once an egg fell on the ground and it almost breaked, but I picked it back up, and brought it to the mom.”
“The saver of birds,” I said. “All right, guys, thank you for being a really fun class to be with. Now, pack and stack.”
“DESKS CLEANED OFF,” Mrs. Spaulding said. “WE’VE GOT SEVEN MINUTES.”
“And if anybody has ‘Stink Blob to the Rescue,’ hand it in,” I said.
“Shhh! Mr. Baker is speaking!”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m just gathering stray copies.”
Mrs. Spaulding went to full volume. “QUIET, KIDS, GO GET YOUR BOOK BAGS, PLEASE. PACK AND STACK. GUYS! MAKES SURE YOU’VE GOT THOSE YELLOW PAPERS IN YOUR BAGS. SUPER IMPORTANT.”
Reese erased the spelling words from the board.
“Oh, stop it, Stanley,” said Mrs. Spaulding.
Stanley slumped angrily in his seat. Mrs. Spaulding had given him a check mark. “I hate this school,” he said to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’ve been here for four years,” he said bitterly.
Reese wrote, “Mr Baker is the best,” on the board.
“Aw, thanks, man,” I said. “It was fun being in your class.”
“CLASS, WE HAVE A SPELLING TEST TOMORROW,” said Mrs. Spaulding.
“Thank you for being our sub,” said Talia and Paisley.
“Thank you for being good students!”
I wanted them not to get rode wrong on the spelling test, so I wrote, “I RODE my bike on the ROAD.”
“You should probably write ‘on the side of the road,’” said Talia, with a serious expression.
“You’re right.”
Talia used an orange marker to put a caret in the sentence where the words should go, and I wrote “the side of.”
“BACK AT YOUR DESKS,” said Mrs. Spaulding, holding up her hand. “FIVE, FOUR. THREE. AT YOUR DESKS, EVERYBODY.”
“Do we have any homework?” Kennedy asked.
“Just look at the stars and sleep,” I said. “I don’t think with a sub you should have to do homework. Do you?”
“No,” said Kennedy. “So should I say to my mom the sub said no homework?”
“Yes. Tell her the sub said you did such good work today you can take the night off.”
“I DON’T WANT TO SEE ANY YELLOW PAPERS OUT,” said Mrs. Spaulding.
Kennedy wrote out a note in her day planner for me to sign: “Sub said I did so good so I have no homework.” I wrote “It’s true,” and signed it.
The buzzer buzzed.
“DON’T FORGET SPELLING WORDS, AND LET’S SAY THANK YOU TO MR. BAKER!”
“THANK YOU,” the class said in unison.
“Thank you all, thank you very, very much!” I waved.
“Mr. Baker, I have bus duty,” said Mrs. Spaulding.
“Can I sit in the hallway?” said Stanley.
“Just hang out in here and be happy,” I said.
“I don’t want to hang out in here,” he said.
“I’VE GOT MY EYES ON YOU GUYS, I KNOW YOU CAN BE GOOD!” said Mrs. Spaulding, before she ducked out.
“Bye, Mrs. Spaulding!” said Antoinette.
The second buzzer buzzed, but it wasn’t quite time to go: we had to wait for third-graders to be called on the PA system. A soccer ball came out from somewhere and scooted around under the desks.
“Mr. Baker,” said Reese, “do you want to see something that I drew?” He showed me a picture of a monster.
“Nice shading,” I said. “Fire-breathing!” Reese’s mother came to the door to pick him up. Great kid, great bird’s nest, I said to her. When it was time, I said, “LINE IT UP AND BE QUIET! Lead the way.”
Backpacks bouncing, they threaded their way through the hallways and out the front door, and one by one they leapt onto the high first steps of their buses. While I was back in the classroom writing a note for Mrs. Fellows about what a privilege it was to be in her class, Mrs. Spaulding came by. “Everybody’s cool?” she said.
“Everybody’s cool,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
“The kids really enjoyed your sharing,” she said. “They work hard. They’re good kids.”
“They’re good kids,” I said. “Thanks, take care.”
I picked some stray pencils up off the floor, and stacked up the stink blob worksheets and the math papers. Easy peasy. I heard the janitor emptying trash in the hallway.
Day Twenty, finished and done.
DAY TWENTY-ONE. Friday, May 16, 2014
LASSWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, KINDERGARTEN
KEEP YOUR DEAR TEACHER HAPPY
ON FRIDAY, Beth asked me to teach kindergarten at Lasswell Elementary School. I didn’t want to. I’d been substituting all week, and I was tired, and I thought that kindergarten would be even harder than gym. The only vivid memories I had of my own kindergarten experience were that we’d done fingerpainting, which was fun, and that I’d once gone number two hugely in my pants during nap time: the teacher had handed me extra toilet paper under the door of the stall. “I’m not at all sure I’d be good at it,” I said, “but I’ll do it if you really need me to.”
“Frankly I’m running out of people to call,” she said. “You’ll like them, they’re cute.”
The air was soft and the ferns were visibly unfurling on the way to Lasswell. I found the little flat building pocketed among the pines. “Are you ready for this challenge?” said the school secretary, signing me in.
“Yes, I am,” I said.
“Awesome!” She gave me the keys to the room and a badge. “It’s Mrs. Price’s room,” she said. “Room twenty-seven.”
Mrs. Price’s room was stylish and relatively uncluttered: six primary-colored tabletops served as two-person desks, and a comfortable-looking gliding rocker sat in the corner. On the whiteboard was a five-tiered voice-level chart: 0 was no talking, 1 was a whisper, 2 was table talk, 3 was a strong speaker, and 4 was outside. The class rules were framed in a border of rainbows and smiling cartoon clouds:
Rule #1—Follow directions quickly!
Rule #2—Raise your hand for permission to speak!
Rule #3—Be a bucket filler!
Rule #4—Make smart choices!
Rule #5—Keep your dear teacher happy!
A framed plaque on a shelf said, “It takes a big Heart to help shape LITTLE minds.”
Westin, who had a big, wobbly, laughing head, was the first kindergartner I met. “My other friends are coming in,” he said.
Ava, with short brown hair and a collared white shirt, said, “You want to know what I saw? I saw a white frog at the bus stop, and in the bus I saw two baby flies. My bus driver kissed them. Not kissed them, killed them. He put them in a paper towel and threw them away.”
“I’ve got a Chihuahua named Boa,” said Madeline.
I asked if they’d known that Mrs. Price wouldn’t be in today.
“I saw Mrs. Price at my friend’s bus stop, and she was sick,” said Madeline. She had a stuffed bird named Princess. “She was being bad in daycare, so I put her in time-out.”
Westin wanted me to know about the system of rewards and punishments, which involved Tallies and Mighty Oh Nos. If the class got seven Mighty Oh Nos, then the teacher erased the row of tallies. “Mighty Oh Nos are because we do a bad job,” he said. I told him I probably wouldn’t be keeping track of Oh Nos or Oh Yeses that day. Hazel was the class star of the day, Westin said.
Just then Hazel walked in crying. She was wearing a shirt with big blue flowers on it.
“She misses her mom,” said Madeline.
“Have a seat right here and tell me about it,” I said to Hazel. “What’s your mom like?”
Through shuddering sobs, Hazel said that her mom was nice and that she missed her a lot.
I asked her if her mom went off to work.
“She works at home,” Hazel said. “She makes blankets.”
“Are they soft blankets?” I asked.
She nodded. “They’re baby blankets,” she said.
“It’s a great thing that you love your mom and she loves you,” I said. “It’s about the most important thing in the world.”
Hazel smeared her tears and sniffed.
I told a loud kid named Garrett, in a Myrtle Beach T-shirt, to get some work out and do his thing.
“Do these kids know the SOPs?” I asked Hazel.
She shook her head.
“Are they supposed to be working at their desks?” I asked.
Hazel nodded.
“Listen,” I said to her. “You’re very brave and you’re doing really good, and I’m going to help you all I can, okay?” She nodded. I thought a change of subject might be a good idea, and I asked her if she had any pets.
“Three dogs and t
wo fish,” she said. She said she didn’t have to walk the dogs. “We let them outside to go to the bathroom.” I asked her who in the class was her friend.
“Everyone,” she said.
“That’s very generous,” I said.
She got out her morning work, Word Rings. Word Rings were done in pairs. One person held the Word Ring and played the teacher, while the other person had to read the words, which were written in marker on laminated colored paper.
“You know what I like about this classroom?” I said. “Everything is neat and organized. Is Mrs. Price nice?”
“She’s really nice,” Hazel said.
“Whoa, you’re really tall,” said Garrett, who was writing on someone’s whiteboard.
I asked him to figure out what he was going to do at his desk.
“We don’t have desks, we have tables,” Garrett said.
“Then will you figure out what you’re going to do at your table and/or desk?”
“Garrett gets into lots of trouble,” said January. “Also Westin. He’s been hurting people.”
Westin was flinging around a prism-shaped eraser.
“Hi, Westin,” I said. “What are you up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Good. Let me have the eraser.” I told him to pick a morning work.
A loud long bell rang, and I wrote my name on the board.
“Mr. Black?” said Garrett. “Mr. Blacker?”
“Are you kind of a baker?” asked Abby.
I said that maybe a long time ago my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather baked bread, but that I didn’t much. “My wife bakes bread,” I said. There was a sudden coruscation of sonic energy centered on Garrett and Westin.
“SHHHHH! MY NAME IS MR. BAKER, and I can tell you’re a really good bunch of kids, and you’re going to be absolutely great in this class. And one thing—”
Garrett started talking.
“SHH! One thing you’re going to do is help me know what the next step is all day long, because Mrs. Price has arranged this class so that everything works really well—right?”
“Yeah,” said Noah.
“So in order for the class to work today, you’re going to have to do a little teaching of me about what the next step is.”