Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  The sub plans said that at 2:20 the whole class was supposed to build their read-to-self stamina during something called DEAR Time. DEAR stood for “Drop Everything And Read.” I was required to time them with a stopwatch. According to a chart, the class had lasted for a full twelve DEAR minutes one day, three DEAR minutes the next day, and three DEAR minutes the day after that. I asked Solaris, who seemed smart, what I should do. “Do you think this class has got it in them to do DEAR Time?” The place looked like Grand Central Terminal.

  “If you don’t want to, we don’t have to do DEAR Time,” Solaris said helpfully.

  Good, let’s skip it and move on, I thought. I passed out a fresh worksheet called “The Beautiful Butterfly,” which Mrs. White had printed out from HaveFunTeaching.com. Dorrie began a lengthy hand-washing session. I said, “Dorrie, come on, you’re done, you’re done, you’re done! God dangit!”

  Solaris read about butterflies, which have a thorax, an abdomen, and a nectar-sipping proboscis. “The world’s smallest butterfly,” read Blaze, “is The Blue Pygmy. It has a wingspan the size of a nickel.” Agnes read, “The lifespan of most butterflies is only twenty to forty days. Some butterflies only live for three to four days.”

  I had to banish Boyd to the pillows again, whereupon he was attentive. “Check that out,” I said. “Our lives are almost a hundred years. Their lives are three days.”

  “That’s so sad,” said Blaze.

  Braden said, “I knew a bug that only has a lifespan of one day. It’s some kind of little yellow bug that lives in Oklahoma.”

  “Centipede?” asked Blaze.

  “No,” said Braden.

  “How long do centipedes live?” asked Blaze.

  “I actually once revived a cicada,” said Braden. “I had this beer bottle cap, and I filled it with water, and then I put the cicada in there, and I circled it with rocks. I closed my eyes for a second, and when I opened my eyes, it started fluttering its wings.”

  Agnes said, “Male mosquitoes don’t really harm you, they just make you itch. But female mosquitoes are even worse, because when they land on you, they do the same thing as male mosquitoes, except they spit something into your skin. And then you get sick, and you could die from it.”

  “Good thoughts,” I said. There were five multiple-choice questions about butterflies they had to answer. The word pygmy caused some merriment. “Not pyg me, pyg you!” said Braden.

  I found a chair next to Boyd. “I appreciate it,” I said. “You sat quietly and you didn’t go wild. Let me hear you read.”

  Boyd read me the first paragraph about the butterfly flawlessly, with almost no hesitation over thorax or abdomen. Together we went over his IEP log sheet. “Morning work I finished,” Boyd said. “Math test I finished. I think today was great. So you put a little star.”

  “Mr. Baker, I have two pink monkeys,” said Summer.

  “I’m right in the middle of a conference,” I said. “But wow.”

  Summer laughed.

  “The only thing is sometimes you get a little wild,” I said to Boyd. “You know that, right? Using your T stool as a weapon, that kind of thing?”

  Boyd said, “It’s just that for breakfast I have Crispix and then I have something that’s loaded with a lot of sugar.” I asked him if he took any medication. He didn’t. “My brother does,” he said.

  Mrs. Thurston’s head appeared at the door. She’d heard Hugh making noise in the hallway. “Next time he’ll be spending some recesses with me if he makes that much noise,” she said.

  Hugh flumped in his chair.

  “See, it reflects badly on me,” I said. “You’re bringing me down, you’re bringing yourself down, and you’re bringing human life down.” We laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. “I know you’re rational.”

  I signed Boyd’s behavior log sheet. “And then I bring this home and I have my parents sign it and I bring it back,” Boyd said.

  Denny lay on the floor while Rollo poked at him. I called for chair stacking.

  “Can we play Hangman?” asked Agnes.

  “Well, the class is kind of out of control,” I said. “As you can see.”

  She drew a scaffold on the board anyway.

  A bell rang and they lined up. Tatiana walked up crying. “Mr. Baker, Hunter whacked me in the face with his backpack.”

  “I’m so sorry, kiddo,” I said. “Right on your nose? I’m really sorry. Thanks for being a really nice kid in this class.”

  The first-wave buses were ready. “Bye, guys.”

  Megan was crying now, too. She said, “I said, ‘Are you my friend?’ and they said no.”

  “They get really hyper,” said Agnes.

  “Where’s my skull?” said Boyd. He found a squishy foam skull in his backpack.

  Second wave. “Bye, thank you!” I said. I listened to their voices die out as they jostled bus-ward. Next door, Mrs. Thurston began sharpening pencils for tomorrow.

  Blaze left me a letter, written in six colors of marker: “TO Mr: Baker From Blaze I you Mrs. Baker your the best teacher in the world!” On the easel, Agnes had written, “Mr. Baker is the nicest ever.” Below it Summer wrote, in small letters, “He sure is!”

  I found a green Post-it and wrote a note for Mrs. White: “Students were great today—attentive, good-natured, and alert—aside from a few chaotic moments. Thanks for letting me fill in in your class.”

  I made sure the Memorial Day paragraphs were stapled to their respective “Hamburger Writing” worksheets and stacked them neatly on Mrs. White’s desk, along with the butterfly papers, the math tests, the copies of Scholastic News, and the plural noun worksheets. I put Because of Winn-Dixie back where I’d found it, with the bookmark at the page where I’d stopped reading. My bottle of hand sanitizer was almost empty. I sat for a moment. Then I left for home.

  Day Twenty-four, finito.

  DAY TWENTY-FIVE. Thursday, May 29, 2014

  LASSWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, FOURTH GRADE

  HIGH ON SUMMERTIME

  THE NEXT MORNING I was in one of the modular classrooms at Lasswell Elementary in place of Mr. Seaborg, who was, judging by the newspaper headlines taped to his door, a huge Red Sox fan. His fourth-grade sub plans were handwritten on yellow legal paper. First there was music class, and then a math packet to do, then lots of other things. The last paragraph said: “If you have ANY issues with Micky, please send him to the office.”

  A girl named Stacy sipped iced tea and asked me if I’d substituted at Lasswell before. I said I had. “I’ve never done fourth grade, though. This is a whole new world for me.”

  Peter had a T-shirt on that said “Don’t Fear My Awesomeness.” A rowdy boy, Vance, came in with a fake mustache stuck to his upper lip.

  “He has a whole package of them,” said Colt.

  After the pledge, they chanted a class chant: “WE THE STUDENTS IN MR. SEABORG’S AWESOME FOURTH-GRADE CLASS WILL LISTEN AND FOLLOW DIRECTIONS, BE SAFE, AND ACT RESPONSIBLY. WE WILL HAVE A SENSATIONAL FOURTH-GRADE YEAR. YEE HAW!”

  While the class was off at music, I skimmed through Hatchet, the book Mr. Seaborg was reading to them. It was about a boy trying to survive in the wilderness after an airplane crash, and it looked good.

  “Mr. Baker, look at my tattoo,” said Juniper, a small bright girl with a ponytail. She had a flower on her arm.

  “Classy,” I said.

  “I have to get another mustache,” said Vance, retrieving a baggie from his desk.

  For the rest of the morning, they did various math packets. There was a page of clock questions (How much time has elapsed between 11:45 and 2:15?) and a page of geometry questions (Describe the difference between a rhombus and a parallelogram), and they had to fill out a bar graph about Carla’s international coin collection. Carla had thirteen coins from China, fifteen coins from Japan, four from Vietnam, and ten from Ind
ia. How many more coins does Carla have from China than Vietnam? They also had calendar problems—Amanda was born two weeks after St. Patrick’s Day, what date was she born on?

  Mattie came up to have her packet corrected. “How’s it going?” I asked her.

  “Good,” she said. “Actually, bad.”

  I looked at her paper, which had equations with small blank boxes in them representing variables. “What are you doing algebra for?”

  “Because I’m smart,” she said. But it was too hard for her. She couldn’t get her mind around − 10 = 5 and 16 + = 74.

  I went over three elapsed-time clock problems with Micky, and he seemed to get it, finally. Using plastic coins, Vance and I practiced making change for a fifty-three-cent plate of buttermilk pancakes.

  Everything they were learning so far was worth knowing, I thought: how to read a bar graph, how to make change, how to round up a number, how to go forward by weeks in a calendar and by hours in a clock. It wasn’t easy for them, but it got them closer to somewhere they would eventually need to go.

  The class started lining up. Micky and Juniper squabbled in line. “You look like one of those scientists in movies,” said Vance.

  Just as we left for the cafeteria, Micky doubled over, with something in his eye. “Don’t scrub your eye,” I said. “Grab your upper eyelash and pull it down over your lower eyelash. It’ll make some more tears and it’ll flush it out.”

  “It’s gone,” said Micky.

  I had lunch duty, meaning that I walked around the tables saying hello and smiling at kids I recognized. Stacy showed me her plum and waved. After fifteen minutes, a teacher raised her hand. Everyone in the cafeteria raised hands and the teacher made a speech about how it was too loud. When she lowered her hand, the noise immediately resumed. Five minutes passed. “VOICES ARE WAY TOO LOUD,” said the teacher. “AT THIS POINT YOUR HANDS SHOULD BE UP AND YOUR VOICES SHOULD BE OFF. IT IS MUCH TOO LOUD IN HERE TODAY, FOLKS. WE ARE BEGINNING TO EMPTY AND CLEAN TABLES. THAT DOES NOT REQUIRE TALKING.”

  Another two minutes passed, with noise again at full redline level. The teacher said, “OKAY, FROM THIS POINT ON THERE IS NO TALKING. IF I HEAR VOICES, YOU—OWE—RECESS!”

  What a blessed deliverance to escape from the cafeteria—a giant sonic meatloaf. Twenty-five minutes a day of this torture would be enough to make any slightly jiggy person hyperactive. Yet most of them took it in stride.

  Silent reading was up next. Carly opened her paperback of A Wrinkle in Time. I wrote a quotation from Samuel Johnson on the whiteboard. Nobody said anything for twenty-five minutes. The sound of pages turning was like distant cars passing on the road. I hated for it to end, but the sub plans said, “12:00 to 12:20—read aloud from Hatchet.”

  Emery told me where Mr. Seaborg usually sat when he read aloud—near the whiteboard. “Chapter sixteen of Hatchet,” I said, “by Mr. Gary Paulsen. And now he stood at the end of the long part of the lake, and was not the same—would not be the same again.” I read for a page, and then, while our hero was hunting a bird, Micky hopped up to go to the bathroom. Vance and Isaiah got up to follow him. “We have to go with him,” said Vance, “because he makes bad choices in there.”

  I followed Micky and his monitors to the bathroom and waited by the door. “You’re not supposed to wait,” Micky said.

  “Just go to the bathroom!” I said.

  The bathroom break completed, we got back in our places. I pointed to the Samuel Johnson quotation on the board. “Can anyone read this sentence to me?”

  They read: “The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”

  “You guys are good readers,” I said. I told them a few things about Samuel Johnson—that he’d written the first really good dictionary of English, and that he was kind of twitchy.

  “He had tics?” said Emery.

  “Yes, he had all these tics. He was brilliant, but when he would walk down the street he would just be sort of—” I did an imitation of Samuel Johnson twitching and lurching. “He was a genius. And this is one of the sentences that he wrote that I really like. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. Does anyone have an idea what that might mean?”

  Juniper raised her hand. “Is it about people that are different and stuff?”

  I said, “When you want something really badly, you hope to get something. You’re desperate to see the TV show. You want to go to a movie. You want popcorn at the movie.”

  “We’re not talking, everybody,” said Peter to the class.

  “Now, what happens when you get that thing?” I said.

  “You get pleasure,” said Emery.

  “You get some pleasure—but how long does it last?”

  “Not long,” said Emery.

  “And hope lasts a while,” said Carly.

  “That’s it,” I said. “You really, really want to be first in line. Or you really, really want to be done with school. Whatever it is. And when you get that thing, it’s almost as if all of that wanting that you do just goes up in a puff of smoke. And you start wanting another thing. So what he’s saying is that the most natural state of being is not a state of being where you’re enjoying the thing you’re doing, it’s when you’re hoping for the next thing. And that’s kind of true, I think. Don’t you?”

  Yep!

  Yes!

  Isaiah raised his hand. “Kind of like if you want something, you hope for it, that hope always stays with you, but you might not get what you want.”

  I said, “So what he’s trying to do is telling you something about human nature in one sentence, and I think he does it.” Then I went back to reading to them from Hatchet. After Brian, the hero, kills the bird, a moose appears and starts bludgeoning him with her head. Brian crawls to the safety of a tree, ribs and shoulder aching. When the moose moves on, he retrieves the dead bird and hobbles to his hut, grateful to be alive. “Such an insane attack, for no reason, and he fell asleep with his mind trying to make the moose have reason. Space break!” I slapped the book closed. Now they were supposed to write something.

  I read to the class from the sub plans. “Brian experienced many things for the first time during his experience in the woods. Describe one of these experiences with details from the story.” A nice, simple assignment. Isaiah asked how many sentences long it had to be. There was no good answer to that, I said; they could write short sentences, middle-sized sentences, or even one long snakelike sentence that filled a page. “Just say to yourself, I’m going to write the best bunch of sentences I can, and I’m going to go pretty fast, because I have fifteen minutes to do it. Make them cry, make them laugh, make them weep.”

  “Just chunk it out, everyone!” said Isaiah, and he began writing.

  Odette raised her hand. “I need to know how you spell hatchet.”

  I printed hatchet on the board.

  They put their fourth-grade heads down and wrote and wrote. I read many paragraphs about Brian in the woods, Brian in the cockpit, Brian in the mud with the moose.

  Odette wrote hers in neat cursive. Peter handed in his paper. “I didn’t do too well,” he said. “I did terrible.”

  I told him not to worry, and then I read aloud from the paragraph handed in by a quiet kid named Locke. “I like the part when it was pitch-black out, and Brian was in the cave. Then a porcupine came in and Brian threw the hatchet, missed, and hit the rock on the face of the rock, and sparks exploded everywhere, and lit up the room, and so Brian saw the porcupine. He was spiked several times in the leg and had to pull out each one in agonizing pain.” I told them they’d all done good work, and they clomped out for recess while I ate a sandwich in class. Somebody else had recess duty.

  Twenty-five minutes later, everyone was back. Juniper sat her tiny self down at her desk and began to cry. She and Micky had been fig
hting. “He was bullying me outside,” she said.

  “He was bullying her,” said Emery.

  “He was,” said Carly.

  “I was NOT,” called Micky from the back of the classroom.

  The class was quiet enough that I could hear Juniper sobbing into her fists. I crossed the room to loom over Micky.

  “I wouldn’t let her play a game with me,” he said, “because she’s been mean to me all day.”

  “Micky,” I said.

  “IT’S NOT BULLYING,” he shouted. “JUST BECAUSE I DISINCLUDE HER FROM THE GAME!”

  “Do not talk in a loud voice to me,” I said. “Sit right here. We’re going to talk quietly for a second. Do I need to send you to the office?”

  “No,” said Micky. “She’s been mean to me all day.”

  “Kiddo,” I said. “I’ve seen the two of you. I’ll tell you something that you’ll really profit from. A lot of the trouble you get into you’re causing yourself, because you get wild.”

  “I just don’t want Juniper playing with me,” said Micky. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “I won’t send you to the office if you’ll go over there right now and find one thing nice to tell her, and say you’re sorry if she thought you were mean to her.”

  “I don’t really know anything nice about her,” Micky said.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “She’s an incredibly nice kid. So are you.” (Not strictly true.) “You just, for some reason, don’t like each other.”

  “Since third grade, she’s been mean to me. We were in the same class in third grade.”