“I don’t have a question,” said Brian.
“Then why are you staring at me?”
Students put their earbuds in and began poking at iPads.
Mr. Domus came over and asked me how substituting was going. I said it was going fine, but I hadn’t been of much use to anyone that day.
“It’s hard to be a sub when the ed tech is out,” Mr. Domus said. “You have no clue who is who and what’s what. I think it’s really just law. Legally they have to have an ed tech in the class if it specifically says in the IEP that a student has to have support.”
Half the kids were out, Mr. Domus said, interviewing for the vocational tech program. There were only a hundred spots available. If you got in, you could come out with, say, a nursing assistant certificate. “That’s what my wife did,” he said. Later she became an RN.
I watched him wander the class, encouraging, joshing. The kids liked him. Soon it was lunchtime.
In the teachers’ break room I took out a sandwich at a circular table. Mrs. Rausch complimented me on my Scrabble mug, which had a big N on it. She said she’d taught Mr. Domus. “Jimmy was a good student,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for twenty-seven years. Isn’t that crazy?” She’d gone to U Maine Farmington to get her teaching degree, as had Mr. Domus. She had a gripe about having to teach kids how to use graphing calculators, because it took them a very long time to understand how to use them. “They’ve been given iPads,” said Mrs. Barrons, “and they can just type in the graph and touch it and it’ll do the calculations. But we can’t let them use the iPads because they can get online and they check answers, and they can email back and forth. So they have to use the graphing calculators. You have one piece of technology that’s so easy, and one that’s so clumsy to work with, and they have to use the one that’s clumsy.”
The two younger teachers at the table, Ms. Thwaite and Mrs. Sever, began an involved discussion about Mary Kay cosmetics. Mrs. Thwaite had bought an expensive Mary Kay starter kit, but she was unhappy with the people who skimmed off her commissions. “I don’t feel they deserve anything from me, because they’ve not supported me.” She still had more than two hundred dollars’ worth of stuff to sell, and she was thinking of moving to Florida. “I think it sucks,” Ms. Thwaite said. “I could cut my losses altogether and burn a bridge. I need to call them and ask them is there a way I can be affiliated with another director and another recruiter. I need to find out how can I disconnect from these people.”
“Meanwhile, she’s going to nag you and nag you to start doing the crap that she wants you to do,” said Mrs. Sever.
“Really?”
“Oh god, yes,” said Mrs. Sever. “Why wouldn’t she? She wants you to achieve at that level so that she can get more money.”
“It’s a pyramid,” said Mrs. Rausch, eating a stick of celery.
While I was at the sink washing my Scrabble mug I ran into Ms. Hopkins, the history teacher, who looked even paler and sicker than she’d been on Monday. She was waiting for the microwave to beep. I made a feeble joke about the need to practice isolationism.
She smiled sadly. “It’s not possible if you’re a teacher. You get something at some point.”
“I hope you feel better,” I said.
Mr. Domus was already back in class, having eaten some leftover pasta. “It’s my wife’s grandmother’s sauce,” he said.
“I love leftovers,” I said.
“Oh, there’s nothing better,” he said. “Casseroles, soups, sauces. Her grandmother is a very old-fashioned cook and the stuff is just—oh, it’s rich. We reap the benefits. They’re as tight as I’ve ever seen a grandmother and a granddaughter. Works out good for me.” He looked around. “Austin, we’re not texting, are we, bud?”
“No, man!”
“Okay, just want to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.”
Renata flung her hands up and said, “This is so stressful! We are not a good team.”
“We need to practice team-building skills,” said Liam, one of her team members.
Heather’s iPad was playing music. “I’m just putting on this awesome playlist,” she said. “Eric Clapton, hmm—never even heard of him.”
Mr. Domus made an appalled sound. “Really?”
“I’m no good with names,” said Heather.
“The first group he was in was . . .” Mr. Domus closed his eyes, trying to remember. “Later it was Derek and the Dominoes. Cream. First it was Cream.”
Mr. Domus and I agreed that “Layla” was a great summer song. “He’s one of those guys who’s lasted the changing times,” he said. “He’s that talented. That raspy rock voice.” He went up to the front of the room to look up something on his computer.
Near me, Monica, a girl with a gold scarf in her hair, said to her group, “Did you see that really bad Skittles commercial, the banned one? The one that goes ‘Taste the rainbow’?” (It’s a spoof commercial in which a newlywed groom splashes Skittles candies all over his bride.)
Her tablemate, Wesley, said, “He’s like, ‘I’m coming!’ He sprinkles everywhere.”
Monica said, “They put it on full screen, and they didn’t tell me. They’re just like, Watch this. I’m like, Okay.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Domus had found one of his favorite Cream songs on his laptop. He started playing it over a pair of small loudspeakers. I asked him if teachers had played music in class when he was in school. “Mm, a little,” he said. “There was still quite a mix of the new, modern-age teacher and the old traditional teacher of the sixties and seventies. It was much more rigid. We had fun, but it was a lot more work than it is now.” RSU66 was a very spread-out district, he said. “Transportation is a huge issue, because no one can walk. No one can walk.”
I mentioned that I’d heard that some of the bus rides took an hour and a half.
“If a kid does band,” said Mr. Domus, “or sports, or stays to do work and can’t get a ride, we do late buses. They don’t leave here till four-thirty. So it could be five-thirty before he’s home, after leaving at six a.m.”
Brian called out, “What’s this?”
“Clapton,” said Mr. Domus.
“Guns N’ Dandelions!” said Austin, which got a laugh from Mr. Domus—it was a running joke, apparently.
He turned back to me. “It’s funny because I’ve always been an upperclassmen teacher,” he said to me. “For nine years I did juniors and seniors. I had to switch this year. For juniors, you had your lower groups, and they were what they were, but the honors were really good. They were pretty driven, they were decent writers. They were good to be around. But I find that the sophomores are even better. The sophomore honors kids, they’re like the perfect mix.” He went off to the bathroom and I sat and listened to the class talk and work while more Clapton played.
Two girls, Lissa and Mary, were talking about a girl they knew. “She dyed her hair,” said Lissa. “Did she dye it, or did she let it go back to natural? Because I do remember it was blond.”
“Well, it was blond,” said Mary, “but then it was darker.”
“I’m never going to dye my hair,” said Lissa. “Somebody told me I should dye it. I’m way too dark for that.”
Austin said, “I was born a straight-up redhead.”
Lissa turned to look at him. “So your hair was red, and then it turned blond, and then brown?”
“Yep,” said Austin.
“And your eyes are like blue and green,” said Lissa.
One group in the back was talking quietly about literacy rates in the reform era. Nearby, Jordan, in a varsity jacket that was too big for him, was telling a story about a time someone threw a fish at his head.
“I decapitated a fish once,” said Isaac.
“You know what’s worse?” said another boy, Jamie, who sat on the edge of the bad-kid group. “Running over a squirrel on a bike.�
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“Done that,” said Isaac.
“No,” said Jamie. “The squirrel went into the spokes and part of it went this way and part of it went that way and some hit my shoulder.” He was smiling, although the memory pained him. He wanted very much to be one of the interesting bad kids.
“My dad killed a squirrel with our garage door,” said Lissa. “It slapped down right on top of it.”
“That’s awesome,” said Jordan. “My mom was driving in Florida, and it was really hot and she had the windows open, and a bird flew into her window and bounced into her lap.”
Mr. Domus returned and began whistling to the music. “Which class are you heading to next?” he asked me.
“Biology,” I said.
“Oh, wonderful.” He pointed out where the science rooms were.
Renata had colored the rim of a Sharpie cap and stuck it on Liam’s face. He couldn’t rub the mark off. It looked as if he had a cut.
“Guys, fix my desks as we start to wrap up!” said Mr. Domus. The kids began straightening up the room. “Austin, what do you want to hear, buddy? I’ll play you one song before you leave.”
“Uh, like, Def Leppard!”
“POUR—SOME—SUGAR ON ME,” sang Isaac.
Mr. Domus didn’t want to play that. “How about this one?” He put on Def Leppard’s “Photograph” instead, and turned it up.
“I know this one,” said Lissa.
“Perfect!” said Wesley.
“I’m out of luck, out of love!” sang Def Leppard.
“Be sure my desks are nice and tidy!” said Mr. Domus over the music.
Students clumped by the door. When the bells bonged, Mr. Domus turned the music up louder. “I see your face every time I dream!” went the song.
“Have a good day!” Mr. Domus said.
Biology was taught by Ms. Bell, a cheery, spherical woman in her twenties, who, although she was naturally soft-spoken, had trained herself to yell-talk to be heard. “Okay! My rule is you guys can pick your own assigned seats, as long as you’re in the first two groups of four! There should be plenty of seats! As long as you’re in the FIRST TWO GROUPS OF FOUR you guys can pick your own assigned seats for attendance purposes!” The classroom was large, with black laboratory tables. “Sit anywhere you want as long as it’s in the FIRST FOUR TABLES! Anywhere you’d like!” She passed around some work packets. “’Kay, LISTEN UP,” she said. A kid made a retching sound. “By a raise of hands, how many of you are feeling comfortable with the Punnett squares and how to do them?”
Many hands went up. One hand went halfway.
“I’m good,” said a boy, Troy, with a baseball hat on.
“What I’d like you guys to do for the first ten minutes! While I’m taking attendance! Grab out the Punnett square activity, and try those last two problems, and then I will quickly show you the answers, okay? So! Quietly work on those last two questions!”
“What if you already did them?” said Dennis smugly. He was wearing a pair of new Adidas.
“If you’ve already done them, then you can work on your next worksheet! Or study for your test!”
She pointed to two names on my schedule that I should keep an eye on in this class—Drew and Jamie. “They might need your help in writing for them.”
Jamie seemed to be working fine by himself, so I sat down with Drew—he was the kid I’d met in Mr. Bowles’s class, who had been thinking about how much it would cost to be kept alive if he’d electrocuted himself and become a potato. Drew nodded at me and began cracking his knuckles one by one.
“That is some serious knuckle cracking,” I said. Drew smiled. “So did you get this worksheet yesterday?”
“I wasn’t in yesterday, I missed the bus by a minute.”
I asked him if he had a long bus ride.
“From the school to my house it’s two hours,” said Drew. “From my house to here it’s like an hour and a half. I’m one of the first pickups, the last dropped off.”
We went on a walk to get Drew a computer, because his iPad was broken and Ms. Bell had sent out a PowerPoint presentation on genetics that everyone in the class was supposed to have looked at. When we got back, a boy was asking how a widow has anything at all to do with a hairline. They were working on the heritability of the widow’s peak.
Two kids, Ryan and Norman, were playing an irritating game with pennies.
The first question Drew had to answer was What is genetics? Drew didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. I talked about what a trait was. A cat could be all brown, for instance, or it could be brown and white. Genetics was about how that trait gets passed on.
“Like a skill or something,” said Drew.
“Yes, it could be a skill,” I said. “A monkey could be an astonishingly clever climber of trees.”
“I inherited my tallness from my father,” said Drew.
“Okay, that’s a trait that you inherited. The study of that is genetics.” After some coaching from me he wrote, using phonetic spelling, study of how traits get inherited. The second set of questions had to do with Gregor Mendel—who was he and what did he do. Drew didn’t know.
Ms. Bell was helping another group of kids. “Sexual reproduction,” said Ryan suddenly, in a loud robot voice.
“Hello?” said Michelle, an alpha girl, from across the room.
“What are egg and sperm?” asked Ms. Bell.
“Cells?” said the boy.
“In order for the sperm from a guy to get transferred to a woman, you have to have what?”
The boy muttered something.
“Alex, I want you to say the word. Three-letter word.”
“Sex?” said Alex softly.
Michelle made a long peal of laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I know, it’s hard for you guys to actually say that,” said Ms. Bell. “But that’s what it’s called.”
I clicked forward in Ms. Bell’s PowerPoint presentation till I came to some slides about Gregor Mendel. “He was obsessed with peas,” I said, skimming the bullet points. “He kept growing pea plants, and asking, Why is this pea wrinkly, and this one’s smooth? He was completely fixated on pea plants. He was a monk. He’d take the seed from a smooth plant and a seed from a wrinkly plant and figure out which is going to win. Spent his life doing that. Generation after generation of pea plants.”
“He’s researching these pointless things,” said Drew.
“And yet it turned out to be an incredible discovery. His big discovery was that some genes were dominant and some genes were recessive.”
Drew wrote monk and grew peas and then tried to crack his wrist. “For some reason I can never crack my wrist forward,” he said.
“That’s probably just as well,” I said.
“I used to crack it over and over. It made a sound every time.”
Next Drew was supposed to define F1 generation, F2 generation, and gene. We talked about what genes were while I scanned a few Wikipedia articles.
Drew said, “It’s like in Spider-Man, when he first gets bit. He goes asleep, and in the dream it shows the transformation.”
Yes, the genes were getting intermingled, I said.
Drew wrote that a gene was a chemical that determines traits. “Is freckles a trait?” he asked. “I got my eyes from my dad. Brown. My mom’s eyes are blue. Brown’s dominant over blue. I learned that in middle school.”
“Right, so there’s a brown-eyed allele and a blue-eyed allele. An allele is a possibility.” Was this true?
“Like a dice,” Drew said. For his definition of allele, he wrote, different options for a gene. We’d finished page one of the six-page worksheet.
Ms. Bell called the office on the intercom. “Can you let the nurse know that I just sent Tabitha Furness down for an allergic reaction to butter?”
“I swear
,” said Drew, “I’ll have moments where I just can’t write. I’ll start writing and I’ll just jumble it up.” From the distressed look of his handwriting, he had some powerful form of dyslexia.
We slowly finished a page on dominant and recessive notation, and we stumbled through the words homozygous, heterozygous, genotype, and phenotype.
“This pencil’s dominant over the paper,” said Drew.
“Phenotype and genotype,” I said, scrolling through more paragraphs from Wikipedia, “is a meaningless bit of needlessly complicated vocabulary.”
“I’ll forget it by tonight,” said Drew. “Slough it off. I’ll have a dream about it. Wake up sweating. ‘What the hell was that?’” We laughed.
I said, “The genotype is the code, and the phenotype is what it actually looks like. Like if the pea is wrinkly or not. I guess the way to remember it is ‘phen,’ with the P-H, is physical, and ‘gen’ is genetics.”
We did a few Punnett squares—those four-piece squares that allow you to calculate how many blue-eyed wrinkled peas will result from the union of two alleles.
“I have my dad’s eyes,” said Drew. “My sisters take after my mom physically, but the way they are is a mixture of my mom and dad. My sister swears like my dad. Everyone makes fun of her for that.”
I asked him if he took after his mother in swearing.
“No, my mom swears a lot, too. But my dad swears more. I don’t do a lot of swearing around the house—yet.”
It was almost time for the buses. “I enjoyed that,” I told Drew.
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