Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Throg-hah!” said Carter.

  “But no, it’s through. You have to journey all the way through those U-G-H letters to get to the end. Okay, and now it’s snack time, folks.”

  Everyone pulled out their snacks. Some lined up at the sink to wash their hands. Cerise showed me where the Tacky the Penguin picture books were—propped on the ledge against the blackboard. People sucked on juice pouches and ate Goldfish crackers while I read the story of Tacky the Penguin’s trip on an ice floe to a tropical island, where he meets a strange soft, hairy, gray rock that turns out to be an elephant. I secretly skipped some pages to get to the end. Must keep to the schedule.

  Ms. Keeler, an amiable, gentle-voiced ed tech, came in to help while the kids wrote and illustrated a story about what they would do if they met a leprechaun. We spent almost an hour on this activity. I wrote leprechaun on the blackboard, and surprise and favorite. The class had, it seemed, developed a certain animus toward leprechauns. “I would hide in my room till it was morning time,” said a girl named Evelyn. “I’d catch it in a jar and flush it down the toilet,” said Ellie. “I’d dissect it,” said Spencer, and he drew a black cage with a leprechaun trapped inside. “I would give it a piece of cake with poop inside,” said Tessa—Ms. Keeler helped her spell poop. “I would steal his gold cake,” wrote Dominic. “I would feed it cheese,” said Marina. “I would feed it an elephant,” said Jordan. Cerise was more affectionate; she said she’d keep her leprechaun with her forever. After the ed tech went to lunch, Tessa asked if they could use sparkly stickers to decorate their drawings, and I said sure—which was not the right answer. The sparkly stickers came from a sacred upper cupboard, and several indignant girls told me that the class was forbidden to use anything in the upper cupboard. “Yes we can, if the teacher says!” said Tessa. It took several minutes to sort that disagreement out—and then it was 11:10 and time for the forty-minute gym class.

  I raised two fingers to signal for them all to be quiet. Again we traipsed wordlessly through the hallways. In gym they lined up along a line on the floor and the teacher put on Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” at high volume. They started running around the gym in circles. “I’ll see you at eleven-fifty,” the gym teacher said.

  Out in my car, I drank the second cup of coffee, staring at a dead oak leaf, resting. My knees hurt.

  Back in gym, my class was finishing something called NASCAR, in teams of two. One child sat on a blue stool perched on a wooden square with rolling wheels, and the other pushed his teammate around the gym. Jayson and Parker won, they informed me, having pushed each other around the gym fifty-two times. Everyone was sweaty and completely wiped out. Tessa, whining, said she wanted to go to the nurse because her stomach hurt badly. I told her to try a drink of cold water. They all went into the bathrooms near the cafeteria and then they lined up in the cafeteria’s lunch line. “This is your lunch break,” said the sub plans.

  I ate a sandwich at my desk and wondered if I’d taught anything at all that morning of use to anybody. It didn’t seem as if I had. Did it matter? Yes, I think it did matter, more so in elementary school than in high school, because being able to read is a universally useful skill. The basic problem was that we live in a jokey, chatty world—which is a good thing—but a room full of eighteen jokey, chatty children is an inefficient place to learn.

  I thought of my own second-grade teacher, Mrs. Richards—a dark-haired woman with a sly smile. She liked a report I did, “Workers Who Keep Us Well”—I drew a dentist’s office, with a patch of cracked plaster on the wall, and a garbage truck with two men behind it holding garbage cans. The garbagemen kept us well, I wrote, because they took away all the garbage. Once I went up to Mrs. Richards’s desk to ask her a question and unintentionally caught sight of her black, spiral-bound gradebook, where she’d written everyone’s name in beautiful cursive. “Nosy!” she said, which hurt my feelings. She was a really good teacher. She taught us how to spell elephant and umbrella, and how to carry the one in addition. And she taught us the golden rule.

  After lunch my class was hoarse and crazy tired. Three girls said their stomachs hurt. Parker, my “handful,” was making roaring noises near the bookcase, and Jordan was singing “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Cerise said, “Dominic said something not very nice to me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Dominic, do not say not-very-nice things.”

  “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” said Anastasia.

  Four children—including two of the roaring boys, as it happened—left to go to a Title I remedial program.

  “It’s time for silent reading,” said Cerise.

  “You are so right,” I said, having studied Mrs. Heber’s plans. “Silent reading, guys, it’s time for SILENT READING.”

  And then a miracle happened. In a matter of minutes the whole class had pulled out little squarish picture books, or chapter books, or nature books. They all went quiet and they read or looked at pictures. Some sat on the floor. Some had their heads on their desks and their books balanced on their laps. It was so quiet I could hear pages turning. A whole half hour passed without any noise at all, except for once when my cellphone rang, embarrassingly. I was agog. What amazing children. What an amazing school.

  Then it was one o’clock, and I peeked at the sub plans, which had grown as finely crumpled as old dollar bills from my having carried them around with me for hours. “Please read another Tacky book (or two),” they said. No! The Title I kids came back. The noise level rose four notches. Anastasia told me that Mrs. Heber had just finished reading the class Charlotte’s Web. I couldn’t bear to read another Tacky book, so we played a game. Someone read a sentence from Charlotte’s Web, and left out a word. “Fern loved blank more than anything.” Charlotte! No, Wilbur! “She loved to stroke him and put him to blank.” Bed!

  But soon I felt guilty that I wasn’t following the plan, and I reluctantly embarked on the story of Tacky the Penguin going to a summer camp called Camp Whoopihaha, where they made s’mores. We talked about the way marshmallows burn at the end of a stick, and then a teacher dropped by to remind me that I had recess duty, and to say that I had to be absolutely sure that no kids strayed onto the large, hazardous ice pond that had formed a few days earlier around the swingsets. “Well,” I said, slapping the big book closed. “I guess it all turns out okay for Tacky at camp. Tacky is DONE.” There was a scramble of putting on snowpants and finding mittens, and the bell rang. Ellie and Cerise told me the rules of winter recess: If you had snowpants, you could climb on the snow piles; if you didn’t, you had to stay on the pavement. If you were caught climbing on the snow three times without snowpants, you had to go stand by the wall. But fifth-graders could climb on the snow even without snowpants. I asked them what Mrs. Heber usually did at recess. “She’ll walk around and make sure that kids aren’t throwing snow or bullying,” said Ellie.

  Another substitute teacher, Ms. Healey—studious, quiet, in her forties—was on duty with me. She’d been substituting in the district for a year and a half, but she never took assignments at the high school. “High school is harder because they’re full of themselves,” she said. “I don’t have the assertiveness that’s necessary.” Suddenly she called, “STAY OFF THE ICE! STAY OFF THE ICE!”

  Two kids ran up to me and said, “Mr. Baker, there’s a ball out on the ice.”

  “Yeah, the ball is going to stay there,” said Ms. Healey. “Someday it will be retrieved.”

  A nurse came out to let us know that some kids were frolicking dangerously on a second smaller ice pond in the back; it was hidden behind a four-foot mound of gray snow.

  “STAY OFF THE ICE!” called Ms. Healey.

  “Mr. Baker, there’s a ball on the ice,” said Jordan.

  “I know, that’s just the way it is,” I said.

  After an interval of running and screaming and snowsuited misrule, a
ll the classes lined up in five lines near the doors. There was some jockeying for position at the head of the lines.

  “Mr. Baker, there’s a ball on the ice,” said Benjamin.

  “I know.”

  “Another tip,” said Anastasia quietly. “You can pick door holders.”

  “Thanks!” I said.

  “Wait till everyone’s quiet, then pick the quietest line,” Anastasia said.

  I let Ms. Healey pick the quietest line—I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings—and I watched the faces fall of the quiet children in the lines who weren’t picked. Anastasia was one of the door holders. We crowded back inside our classroom—snowpants were shucked off, more girls felt sick, Cerise had hurt her chin somehow, and Evelyn held an ice pack on her elbow after a fall from a snowbank.

  Tessa, the paper passer, passed out the “Mystery Picture” math worksheets. One sheet was filled with a grid of squares, some cut in half by diagonal lines, with a row of numbers along the side, and a row of letters along the bottom. On a second sheet was a color key: D-8 = G, and G stood for green. I-11 = Y, and Y stood for yellow. The idea was to color in the squares according to the key, and if you did it right, you were rewarded with a blocky likeness of a green four-leaf clover against a yellow background. “Does everyone have a green crayon and a yellow crayon?” I asked. The roaring boys were roaring again by now; somebody was lustily working the crank on the paper towel machine; Tessa was singing “Happy”; and my explanation, repeated four or five times, did not reach as many children as I would have liked.

  Cerise, who was an artist, had, while I was across the room listening to a girl tell me about the time she broke her collarbone, embarked on her clover: it had wide, neatly crayoned green and yellow stripes against a white background. Two other girls quickly followed her example. Anastasia and Bryce did it exactly right. I walked around showing the confused kids how the numbers and letters corresponded to the squares. Anthony, who was smart but had some trouble talking, made a scribbly red and blue shamrock. “Did I mess up?” he said anxiously.

  “Well, technically you were supposed to follow the numbers and letters, but it’s a fine-looking clover,” I said. “You just got a little carried away. I’ll write a letter to Mrs. Heber saying I didn’t do a good job of explaining the math activity.”

  “It’s your fault!” said Anthony, laughing, relieved. “You’ll get a bad note!”

  After half an hour of effort on the mystery picture grid everything started to fall apart. The noise reached a sort of thick, chewy consistency, and then there was a string of tiny emergencies and entreaties. Somebody poured out a box full of plastic coins. Carter wanted me to ask him to add some numbers together in his head. Anthony, who was angry about something, found some fossil rocks, which made interesting noises when banged together. Twenty magnifying glasses rattled out onto a chair. Parker scrambled over a desk and had to be talked to. Tessa got hold of some glass marbles, which made a loud clacking sound on the table. Bryce wanted to list for me all the figures of Greek mythology he knew—I asked him who taught him to read; he said his parents had. Ellie showed me the bell the teacher dinged when it got too noisy, and she dinged it repeatedly—but by then Tessa had found a set of metal wind chimes, which also dinged and jingled. I waved my arms and clap-clap-clapped and ordered the class to start cleaning up.

  “How’s it going?” I said to Patrick, a quiet, pale boy whose shamrock sheet was untouched. He’d methodically torn the paper off most of his crayons.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really pay attention that much.”

  I put him to work picking up crayon wrappers off the floor. Benjamin announced that he was one of two designated scrap-monsters, whose job was to pick up stray scraps of paper. Carter said his task was to check inside people’s desks to be sure they were neat. Jordan was the supply shelf helper. “I tidy up there,” he said. He began neatening the plundered box of sparkly stickers. “Great, excellent, I love it!” I said. I told Tessa to stow the marbles.

  Dominic asked, “Have we been good today?”

  “Well, yes,” I said. “At the end it got kind of chaotic.”

  “Because if we’ve been good Mrs. Heber puts a marble in the jar.”

  I laughed. “You’re kidding—the marble jar that Tessa poured out onto the table?”

  “Yes.”

  More cleaning, some chair stacking, and then a voice came on the PA system—time for the first bus run. Half the class hustled off, backpacks bobbing. Some of them had a long bus ride to look forward to. “Bye!” I said. More chair stacking, and a second bell. More students left. A few last kids left for after-school class, which was held in the cafeteria. “Bye!”

  And then the room was empty and still. I slumped in my chair. While I was writing a note for Mrs. Heber, the custodian came by and emptied the trash cans. I apologized for the disorder, especially for the blizzard of tiny paper circles from the three-hole puncher.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I have a backpack vacuum. This is not that bad. I’ve seen it worse than this. I’ve got eighteen classrooms, twenty bathrooms, two hundred and fifty desks, worktables, and so forth.”

  I whistled.

  “Yep, I do that in under eight hours, five days a week. I’ve been doing it for eleven years. You have a good day.”

  Anastasia came by with her mother, who was, as it happened, a fourth-grade teacher at the school. “How did it go?” her mother asked.

  “It went well,” I said—half lie, half truth. “They’re really nice kids.” Which was truth.

  To Anastasia I said, “Thanks for being in the class. You were great, very helpful.”

  “She said to me, ‘I wish he could be a sub forever,’” said Anastasia’s mother.

  I thanked them and waved goodbye. I turned out the lights, washed my hands, and splashed water on my face. I felt like crying, from exhaustion or despair or joy, I’m not sure which.

  At the office, as I handed in my STAFF badge, the jolly secretary said, “Are you ready for a nap?”

  “Yep, it’s nap time,” I said.

  She laughed. “So did you like the little people?”

  “They’re good people.”

  “Would you come back again?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Awesome.”

  Driving home, I again wondered if I’d managed to teach anything useful that day. Suddenly I remembered that I’d shown Anthony how to spell found when he was working on his leprechaun story. That was something. Found is a good word to know how to spell.

  So ended Day Two.

  DAY THREE. Tuesday, March 18, 2014

  HACKETT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, FIFTH GRADE

  I SUCK AT EVERYTHING

  “I DON’T KNOW if you’re interested in subbing today,” said Beth, at 5:35 the next morning. I wanted to sleep, but I said yes. “Great,” she said, sounding relieved. I was to report to Hackett Elementary School, where I would be holding the fort for Mrs. Browning, who taught fifth grade. Fifth grade—that didn’t sound too bad. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, and then I made some coffee and brought a cup up for my wife, filled a thermos, fed the dog, fed the cat, made two sandwiches, and drove to Hackett, a small, unprosperous town some miles down the road from Lasswell. I passed a pizza shop and a for-sale convenience store, then a trailer park, and then some woods, and then a low sign in a snow pile that said Hackett Elementary School. I parked in a far corner of the lot and sat. It was a quarter to eight. A teacher got out of her car, hunched against the wind, carrying a full canvas bag, and made her way to the school entrance. Every morning a million elementary school teachers go to school to do their jobs. It was ferociously cold out, but clear—all the clouds had been blown out of the sky.

  The school was almost identical to Lasswell Elementary, with a cozy, glassed-in office and a friendly secretary who showed me
how to slide the magnetic strip on the door of my classroom in case of a lockdown drill. Mrs. Browning had left two pages of instructions and a stack of worksheets. “Students know that you will be keeping track of their dojo points,” it began. “No peanuts allowed in my room ever. We have a student that is allergic to them.”

  Mrs. Browning’s walls were crowded with signs and posters, including the same taxonomy-of-learning poster that Mrs. Heber had taped up. There was a good deal of advice about writing, carefully hand-printed in several colors of marker: “Reread all entries about seed idea, ‘draft’ in your mind.” “Any sentences or words repeated? Can I think of different words or phrases to replace them?” “Is the first word of every sentence capitalized?” “Polish your work so it is ready for publication!” There was a lovely child’s colored-pencil drawing of a desk that said “What Does a Clean Desk Look Like?” with pointers to important features: “Name tag left alone.” “Only tissue box, water bottle and sanitizer on your desk.” “Backpack hung up on rack, emptied and neatly put away.” “All school supplies in box/bag in between books, or on top of them.” There was a photograph of a penguin leaping up out of the ocean near a cliff. It said:

  I MUST GO

  MY PEOPLE NEED ME

  Several lists of standard operating procedures were up on the whiteboard, including one SOP on tattling that said:

  Being mean, trying to get someone in trouble

  Making up things that are not a big deal

  I heard a long, low buzzer that sounded like something from a prison movie. “What the hell was that?” I said aloud.

  A reading specialist dropped by to warn me that the class could be rowdy. “They have a lot of energy,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll put your thumb right down on them.” Then a hearty bald man appeared—Mr. Holland, the music teacher. “You’re not Mrs. Browning,” he said. I asked him if they did a lot of singing in music class.