“Why is it suddenly so quiet?” I asked.
“Because that fleabag of a kid is gone,” said Luke, meaning Kyle.
“There are some people in here who are really annoying,” said Sydney.
“I don’t think boys get that their voices project everywhere,” said Darryl, whose own voice was not soft. “Not you, Timothy, you’re in every single one of my classes, and I never hear you.”
“Ew, gross,” said Georgia. She dropped something soft in the trash can. “It’s a sandwich my dad made. He doesn’t know how to make stuff.”
Thomas said his favorite subject was social studies. He began drawing a tree holding the three branches of government; the elected officials and judges were twigs.
“That’s a tree?” said Georgia.
I sent Max on a mission to collect fallen pencils.
Across the room, near a door, arose a minor unhappiness. Casey, one of the kids I was supposed to keep an eye on, had hit a girl named Brittany in the eye with the edge of his iPad case.
“Does my eye look infected?” said Brittany.
“Your brain looks infected,” said Georgia.
I got Casey’s attention. “Casey, what are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” said Casey, squirming against the doorjamb.
“Running around and hitting people,” said Darryl.
“Will you stand still, so that I don’t have to do something drastic with you?” I said.
Boop. “Melanie Delapointe to the office for dismissal!”
“Sorry,” said Casey, to Brittany.
“It’s cool,” said Brittany.
Cayden, Georgia, and Darryl started singing “Wrecking Ball.”
Boop. Second wavers left.
“Bye!”
I scrubbed at the two spots of my blood on the carpet until they were gone, and I wrote a short, fatuous note to Ms. Nolton: “The kids were excellent—friendly, funny, and quiet when asked.” I turned out the lights. In the office I signed out and turned in my lanyard and apologized for not taking attendance during the first STAR period.
“That’s okay,” said the secretary.
“They were great kids,” I said.
“So you’ll come back?”
“Absolutely.”
Later that afternoon I had a beer with Larry Reed, a retired social studies teacher from Marshwood High School, the school that my children had attended. Larry offered some helpful tips. When you introduce yourself, he said, write your name on the board, but don’t say, “I’m Mr. Baker, I’m the sub.” Avoid using the word substitute if you can, he said—because as soon as you say you’re the substitute, you show the class that you have identified yourself with that role, and that undermines your authority. Also, get to know some students’ names right away—kids like to be called by their names. “And let them know your expectations for the class,” he said. “Not in a hardass way, but in a concise way, in a conversational way. Say, ‘We have some work to do today, and here are my expectations. I expect you to be in your seats. I expect that when I’m talking, you’re listening.’ And tell them, again in a conversational voice, what the consequences will be of their not meeting your expectations. You can say, ‘It may be that I will write you up for a detention. I may not be giving the detention, but I will be giving your name to the office.’ Just leave it at that.”
I nodded, taking notes. “The first test,” Larry said, “is usually ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’ To which you can simply say, ‘If you have to go, you have to go, but I expect you back within five minutes, and you are responsible for any work that you miss in that five minutes.’ That tells them something, too.”
Never make a threat that you can’t follow through on, he said. “I’ve heard teachers say, ‘If you don’t be quiet, I’m going to throw you out the window.’ You can’t follow through on that. You can say, ‘You’re being disruptive, and next time you’re disruptive I’m sending you out of here.’ You want to be friendly, but you don’t want them to be your friends.”
Teach from your strengths, was Larry’s last piece of advice. Tell them things you know. Have something up your sleeve that you can talk about, when the sub plans run dry. Never be in the position of having nothing to teach. “That’s where the nightmares begin,” he said.
Day Four, done.
DAY FIVE. Friday, March 21, 2014
LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, EIGHTH GRADE
TOAST
BETH CALLED ON FRIDAY, sounding peeved, and said that a science teacher had suddenly gotten sick; they needed me again at the middle school. I said okay. I probably shouldn’t have, because I’d hardly slept. My joints hurt, and I’d lain awake for hours writhing over a phone call I’d gotten on Thursday morning from Mrs. Fallon, Lasswell Middle School’s assistant principal, about what she referred to as a “blood incident” from the day before. Several students in Ms. Nolton’s class had mentioned that there had been an “issue with blood in the classroom,” Mrs. Fallon said, and a custodian had noticed traces of blood in the sink of the boys’ bathroom. And, she added, “Ms. Nolton said that there was a drop of blood on one of the whiteboards.”
“Oh my god,” I said. A whiteboard? I’d definitely been carrying around one of the personal whiteboards at one point. I must have bled onto it.
Mrs. Fallon had some advice. “I know it was your first day in the building, and by all accounts everything went really well,” she said. “In an event like that, don’t hesitate to go to the next-door teacher.” It would be better, she said, not to use the boys’ bathroom; I should use one of the teachers’ bathrooms instead.
I apologized for bleeding all over the school.
“That’s all right, it happens,” she’d said. “We disinfected everything.”
In any case, they wanted me back. I stumped downstairs to start up Mr. Coffee and frowned at the clock. It said twenty after the hour. Plenty of time to take a shower, I thought. But in my sleep-robbed brain fog, I misread the hour: it wasn’t five-twenty, it was six-twenty. Still believing I was comfortably early, I made some sandwiches and drove north. Things weren’t that bad, I reflected. I’d had a nosebleed. It happens. Get back on the horse.
The phone rang while I sat waiting for a stoplight. It was a secretary from the middle school. “Are you substituting for us today?” she asked. I said I was, I was on my way. “Because school starts at seven-thirty,” she said, “and it’s ten to eight now. We’re just wondering where you are.”
“Oh, no!” I said. “I misread the clock. I’m terribly sorry, I’ll be there in a jiffy.” I swore and gunned the engine up a long hill.
I’d screwed up again. Couldn’t even read the clock. What was I thinking?
The parking lot was nearly full, but there was a slot near one of the far snowheaps. I was huffing and puffing by the time I reached the office. “It’s unforgivable, really,” I said to the secretary.
“Trust me,” she said, “it’s not the first time it’s happened.” She pointed me in the direction of Mr. Lyall’s science class over in Team Ganges. It was a long yellow cinderblock room with lab tables that were filled with eighth-graders who had gotten to school on time, as I had not. However, as it happened, my presence was not yet needed: homeroom that day was devoted to something called “Advisor/Advisee,” or AA, led by some sort of kindliness specialist, a Mrs. Dunne, who wanted everyone to study a handout from the Southern Poverty Law Center. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!” Mrs. Dunne said, over a steady hum of conversation. “LET’S TAKE A LOOK AND SEE WHERE WE’RE SIMILAR AND WHERE WE’RE DIFFERENT.” The handout was meant to teach tolerance—it was about “friendship groups” versus cliques. Friendship groups were okay, but cliques were bad, because they often “exerted control over their members.” Together she and the class went through a set of multiple-choice questions: I ______ sit with the same people at lunch every day. (A) always, (B) sometime
s, (C) never. Most students answered “always.” When someone I’ve never talked to before speaks to me, I feel ______. (A) annoyed, (B) afraid, (C) excited. Many said “annoyed.” One said “afraid.” I ______ meeting new people! (A) hate, (B) don’t care about, (C) love. Some said “hate”; one girl said “sometimes.” According to the answer key at the bottom of the page, if you answered mostly A’s you should “ask yourself if you’re in a clique.” Everyone was talking at once. “SHHH,” said Mrs. Dunne. “If I said hi, and I’ve never talked to you before, that’s going to annoy you?”
“If I’m in a bad mood,” said a girl, “yes.”
“I’m fine about everyone,” said a boy.
Further murmurs of dissent. Mrs. Dunne said, “I’m going to agree with you: the selections here kind of stumped me. I think we need a (D) answer—‘I’m fine about meeting new people.’” After a while, she gave up on the tolerance lesson—the class just was not into it. She left.
It was my homeroom now. This was the moment to introduce myself and take command, but I had a strange attack of sleep-deprived shyness and didn’t. I turned toward several kids sitting nearby. “So now normally what happens?”
“We have, like, free time,” said Olivia, a short, bouncy girl.
A boy, Sean, asked me how long I’d been a teacher.
Not very long, I said—I’d taught some college writing here and there.
“Yeah, you look like a writer,” said Sean.
“You kind of look like the guy on the back of The Giving Tree,” said Prentice. He had small, puffy, amused, wicked eyes.
“Well, I’ve got a white beard.”
“Can I call you Santa Claus?” said Olivia.
“Please don’t,” I said. “You can think of me that way.”
“Do you give out presents?” Prentice said.
“No.”
“You don’t bring Jolly Ranchers in? You should, next time you sub at this school.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. I stood up and cleared my throat. “So—guys. I just want to say I’m sorry I’m late to your class. Mr. Baker is my name, and—um—I’m the sub.” Bad, dumb, wrong. I flapped the tolerance handout. “I’m interested in this survey,” I said, “because I have found, when I go into a Maine school, that the kids are nice. When somebody comes into your group, it’s kind of a tricky thing. It’s a delicate balance. You’ve got some friends and some people who are maybe a little bit new to the group, and they’re not totally accepted but they’re somewhat accepted. Everybody’s trying to figure out their position. It doesn’t seem to me that this is a terribly cliquish place. Do you think it is?”
“Yes,” said Olivia.
“You can’t say hi to everyone,” said Sean. “Hi, Olivia!”
“Hi, Sean,” said Olivia. “See, now we’re in a clique!”
“Anyway,” I said, “I don’t know what they want you to do with these survey questions. I guess they want you to think about them and sort of become better people?” I stood for a moment. The class, having satisfied their curiosity about me, which was minimal, resumed their much more interesting conversations. They were a clique, and I was not a member. Why fight it? “And now you have a free moment to, ah, live your life,” I said.
One of the secretaries came by to give me a batch of photocopied letters from the superintendent’s office, urging parents to fill out a form that they’d recently received from the Military Interstate Children’s Compact Commission. “The DOE”—Maine’s Department of Education—“feels it would be helpful to know how many students we currently educate dealing with a parent/guardian serving overseas or based here in Maine and the unique difficulties these students face,” said the letter. I handed out the letter; the kids stuffed it in the side pouches of their backpacks as the next-period bell bonged.
Mr. Lyall was in the middle of a unit on the periodic table and the chemistry of matter. The homework for the night before had been to choose one element from the periodic table—a poster of the table was on the wall—and build a small, three-dimensional construction-paper cube covered with fun facts about that element, held together with Scotch tape. Some kids had thrown themselves into the project, making minutely detailed drawings on the facets of their cubes, using many colors of markers, and some had barely begun. Nobody was finished. I went around the room asking people about their elements, and making cries of wonder and admiration: “Wow, that’s beautiful. That’s amazing.” One kid, Stephen, had made a yellow paper cube about neptunium. On one of its facets, he’d written, in tiny, careful letters, Where you would “Bump Into” it: neptunium, because of its high radioactivity, is only used in laboratories. If you are not a scientist, you will probably never see it in your life. A cheerful boy named Bruce, who had chosen selenium, was making some repairs to his cube. “It kind of got smushed cause my dog stepped on it,” he explained. Melissa, a big girl dressed in purple, had made a cube about argon, with the chemical symbol in fat purple letters. Even though it’s not poisonous, she wrote in yellow, it can still cause suffocation. Ryder, a boy in a blue button-down shirt, had chosen magnesium, which was used to make JET ENGINES—he’d surrounded the words with red flames. Over a drawing of a saucepan on a hot stove, he’d noted magnesium’s boiling point: 1,994 degrees Fahrenheit, 1,090 degrees centigrade. Plus it doesn’t stink, he wrote, in green letters outlined with black.
“My element was boron,” said May, who was obviously organized and got all A’s.
“Nice choice,” I said. “Did you find anything interesting out about boron?”
“It’s used in bleach, soap, and ceramics,” she said promptly.
“Great work,” I said. “What I like about this assignment is that for the rest of your life you’ll feel a special affinity for boron, right?”
“Yes,” she said, doubtfully.
After they’d deposited their element cubes in a plastic tray by the windows, they were supposed to read two chapters from a textbook called The Nature of Matter and answer some questions, but because of Mrs. Dunne’s anti-clique survey, there wasn’t time to do the reading. While they were putting final touches on their cubes, I skimmed the textbook to learn about the differences between physical and chemical changes. Crumpling paper is a physical change, a burning match is a chemical change. Got it. A rotting apple is a chemical change, and rust is also a chemical change, because the iron reacts with oxygen in the air. I read one of the questions: What kind of change occurs on the surface of bread when it is toasted—physical or chemical? Explain. But . . . wasn’t it both? The heat dries the bread, making it crunchy, which is a physical change, and the bread turns brown, which is a chemical reaction.
A peppy, bifocaled ed tech named Ms. Shrader appeared—actually she was a substitute, filling in for the regular ed tech, who worked one-on-one with Lisa, a quiet, affable girl who had a learning problem. Ms. Shrader helped Lisa with her element cube—she’d chosen copper—and then she came over to talk to me. She’d taught language arts, social studies, and gifted-and-talented at the middle school for twenty-five years; after that, she’d worked as an ed tech for high-functioning autistic students, which was a dream job. “That was the most fun I ever had,” she said. Now she was a substitute. “This is what I did and who I was.”
I asked her if getting her certificate had prepared her for being a teacher.
“Nope,” she said. “My ed classes did not prepare me.”
“Teaching is a whole new world,” I said.
“It’s so not what people think it is,” Ms. Shrader said. She waved her arm at the students. “It’s very easy to say you can do this, this, and this. But get in a classroom with twenty-five kids and find out how easy it is. It’s not. Some things are possible, though. Kids want somebody to tell them what to do. You have to read the crowd. Some of these kids are on the bus at six-ten in the morning.”
“It’s a long day for them,” I said. br />
“A very long day,” she said. She checked the clock. “OKAY, GUYS, YOU CAN GO. SEE YOU LATER, HAVE A GREAT DAY!” Out in the cacophonous hallway, I heard her say, to another teacher, “Lord, have mercy.”
I had a moment of stillness between classes, and a quick bathroom break, before twenty-two more fourteen-year-olds filed in, holding their fragile paper element cubes. Arsenic. Gold. Silver. Neon. “Why does neon glow?” I asked Tamara, whose cube was covered with bullet points and boiling points.
“Um, I can’t remember,” she said. I talked to Raymond, a smart kid, about depleted uranium weapons. Shelby told me about lithium. “It’s found in the Earth’s crust,” he said. “When lithium touches water it lights it on fire. I’m not really sure how that works, since it’s found in the Earth’s crust.” One of the tape dispensers ran out of tape and was refilled, but the new tape was not very good—it wasn’t sticky enough. The students watched their newly taped cubes self-destruct several minutes afterward, seam by seam. We set that dispenser aside.
The students colored, they taped, they talked; I said, “Nice job, excellent, good going.” The pile of finished cubes grew like a heap of alchemical treasure in the homework bin. This was a nifty assignment—there was something about having to turn a list of inert facts into a three-dimensional, decorative, faceted object that seemed to help kids think better.
I made a stab at teaching what was in the textbook, rather than merely ordering the class to read it, per the sub plans. If you make a smoothie, I said to them, is that a physical change, or a chemical change? Physical, they said. Good. If you take a bite of an apple and put it on the windowsill and wait for a while and it turns brown, is that a physical or a chemical change? Some said physical, some said chemical. I explained why it was chemical. “So—when you’re done with your cube, just read the two chapters and answer the questions on page seventy-two and eighty-seven.” I casually knuckle-tapped the numbers of the questions they had to answer on the whiteboard, as if I were a real teacher. Bethany was smiling to herself, working her thumbs on her cellphone. “Or just text your friend,” I said. About two-thirds of the kids got to work on the assignment. Rodney and Bradley played catch with a uranium cube. I marched over, feigning sternness. “You want to come to the front and explain how depleted uranium works?”