Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Wha?” said a voice.

  “What does that mean?” said Mrs. Painter. “What are we asking, what do we need to know? Alton?”

  “Like possible adaptions, physically and mentally, adaptions to get along with their surroundings and circumstances.”

  “Exactly. Did you hear that, Whitney?”

  “Yes,” said Whitney.

  “What did he say?”

  Whitney said nothing.

  Mrs. Painter turned to Alton. “Repeat it, because you said it very well.”

  “Like mental and physical adaptions to be able to cope with surroundings and circumstances.”

  “Exactly. So we’re looking at how animals or plants have adapted to allow them to be able to survive in a changing environment. The next learning target is Understands the physical and behavioral features of plants and animals that help them live in different environments. So what do you think we’re going to look at there? What do you know about biomes, different biomes? What were you going to say, Anne?”

  “I was going to say it’s about what an invasive species needs to invade a new space.”

  “Yes, you can talk about what an invasive species needs in order to be invasive. Or what else, Roy?”

  “It’s how the animal or plant adapts to the environment, such as a woolly mammoth had a fur coat to survive in the Arctic.”

  “Right, we talked about a polar bear versus a black bear. We talked about why you might not find a black bear in a polar region, and then we talked about the characteristics of a polar bear and of a black bear, and why they have those physical traits for their environment. For the ‘I Will Survive’ activity, we’re going to talk a lot more about that sort of thing. So basically we’re going to be talking about adap—adaption, and physical and behavioral features that allow plants and animals to survive in a particular environment. This will be your last set of key terms for the whole year. Are you excited?”

  “Woo-hoo,” said a boy.

  “IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR CELL KEY TERMS, you need to make sure you do that. IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR MITOSIS/MEIOSIS DIAGRAM, you need to do that. IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR COMPARE AND CONTRAST, you need to do that. Don’t worry about plant reproduction, because we’re covering that as a mini-lesson. Today you should be at your new key terms, starting them or finishing them, and then moving on to your BrainPOPs. Remember, you’re not going to be having your iPads after next Tuesday, so you need to be working hard so you can get those BrainPOPs done. Otherwise you’re going to have hard copies of those quizzes.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Howard.

  “Yeah, not fun,” said Mrs. Painter. She pointed to the whiteboard. “Your BrainPOP list is right here. It tells you exactly what to do. We’ll go over the matrix further tomorrow. When you’re done with them—”

  The class began to talk and boisterize.

  “ALL EYES ON ME FOR ONE SECOND. If you finish a task on your matrix, I will need the evidence of it and your matrix. So if you finish your key terms, bring me your key terms and evidence, so I can sign off. If I sign off on it, that means you got maximum points. I’m not going to write the grade on your actual assignment. I’m going to collect these at the end of the class and then put it on Educate, so it will be right there.”

  I watched the class resignedly dig through backpacks and pull out iPads and find pencils and get to work. Key terms: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, identical daughter cells, heterozygous, and homozygous.

  “It just goes on, doesn’t it?” I said. “It just keeps going on.”

  “Long, long, long, long, long day,” said Paloma.

  Bobby showed me a drawing he’d made of a man in a camouflage outfit, with a gas mask.

  “Are you going to be here tomorrow?” said Paloma.

  “No, I’m sorry to say, because I like this school,” I said.

  “You don’t seem like someone who’d teach at Lasswell High School,” she said.

  “How do you know that?” I said.

  “I don’t,” she said.

  I said, “Have you heard bad things about Lasswell? I’ve taught there. It’s not that bad. It’s not that great, but it’s not that bad.”

  “One of my brothers goes there,” Paloma said. “All the teachers there, except for two teachers, all of them hate him. He got suspended for four days because he broke two rulers.”

  I misheard. “What rules did he break?”

  “They were metal, and he broke them and bent them into a duck. They thought he was making a gun, so they sent him to the office.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “I know, right? It was this round-bellied thing, and the other ruler went up like wings. He was making a duck.”

  Bobby paged through his notebook of drawings for me to see. “Beautiful,” I said. “So you’ve got this all done, the meiosis and mitosis aspect of life?”

  “Uh,” said Bobby.

  I leaned toward a third kid, Cedric, who was absorbed in fitting a metal spring to the top of his pencil. “How’s it going?” I said.

  “Terribly good,” he said.

  I looked at his mitosis and meiosis sheet, which was half done. “You’re on it,” I said. “All these vocab words.”

  Mrs. Painter caught my eye and pointed toward a quiet kid with a peach-fuzz mustache named Melvyn, who needed help. Melvyn was comparing and contrasting mitosis and meiosis. He had written sexual and asexual in the correct boxes.

  Suddenly there was a tiny incident. “I’m going to walk out of this classroom,” said Howard. “Can Asa help me?”

  “Howard, you don’t need help,” said Asa.

  “I’m stupid,” said Howard.

  “Howard, last call,” said Mrs. Painter.

  “I need help, because I’m stupid,” said Howard.

  “Lazy?” said Mrs. Painter.

  “No, I’m stupid. I am stupid.”

  “Well, I’ll help you,” said Mrs. Painter, “but you do not need help.”

  Meanwhile I found a page in a textbook that gave the steps of mitosis. “It’s kind of a dance,” I said. “Have you ever seen a movie of it?”

  Melvyn shook his head.

  “You see the chromosomes waggling around, like square dancers, and they go off on two sides of the cell. And then the cell pinches off, and boom. Here’s how they explain it. They use fancy vocabulary, but basically, the chromatids move to opposite ends of the cell, and then they form a whole new nucleus, and then it starts to pinch, like a balloon with a string tightened around it, and then they’re divided, by gumbo. And off they go.”

  Melvyn needed to write down one more fact about mitosis. I read some more of the textbook. “Mitosis is happening all the time in your body, right?” I said.

  “Mhm,” said Melvyn.

  “Your cells get old and they die and you’ve got to get more cells.” I read from the textbook: “Cell division allows growth and replaces worn out or damaged cells. It’s the basic way you keep fresh. It’s different than meiosis. With meiosis, you get an egg and a sperm and you end up with a whole new baby. You’re not replacing anything, you’re starting from scratch.” Oh, these words! Who were the cruel authors of incertitude who came up with such similar-sounding, hard-to-remember, Greek-rooted terms for processes that, in humans at least, had such different aims and frequencies of occurrence? Mitosis happens hundreds of billions of times a day, throughout our bodies; meiosis happens only in ovaries and testicles. Melvyn wrote Replaces dead cells.

  Once Melvyn had written the ways in which mitosis and meiosis were different from each other, he then was supposed to list the ways they were similar. Finally he had to make a Venn diagram, referring to both lists. He had trouble keeping the two words distinct in his mind, and my increasingly clumsy attempts to explain just confused him. Finally he went off to get help from Mrs. Pa
inter.

  “Crap, I better do the BrainPOP,” said Paloma.

  I said, “You better do that BrainPOP, because if you don’t do that BrainPOP—”

  “There won’t be any BrainPOP left,” she said.

  “Paloma, are you done?” called Mrs. Painter from across the room.

  “Yep!” said Paloma. Then, in an undertone, “Nope.”

  “Are you on the first one or the second one?” asked Bobby, who was drawing the hand of his cartoon soldier.

  “The second one.” Paloma began playing part of a BrainPOP on the life cycle of the cell, but she forgot to plug in her earbuds. The BrainPOP narrator’s voice filled the room: “Prior to mitosis or meiosis—” She turned the volume down.

  “Whee!” said a girl.

  Bobby asked Paloma the answer to a question about the life cycle of the cell.

  “They live, and die,” said Paloma.

  “There’s a funny song by the Cruisers, I think,” Bobby whispered. He whisper-sang, “‘Life sucks, and then you die.’”

  “That’s the worst song ever,” said Paloma.

  “It’s kind of depressing,” I said.

  “It’s not a dark song, it’s a funny song!” said Bobby. (It’s by the Fools.)

  “Mrs. Painter,” said a smart kid. “On the BrainPOP, I just finished doing natural selection and evolution, but whenever I hit save it always—”

  “I know,” said Mrs. Painter. “That happened to Eva, too. Just screenshot it. Not a big deal. You don’t have to redo it, I trust you.” She checked the clock. “THREE MINUTES, so if you’re working on BrainPOP, make sure you either pause where you are, or don’t start a new quiz if you haven’t.”

  I watched the class begin its end-of-class routine. This is what they did five or so times a day: snatches of work saved on BrainPOP or IXL or somewhere on the network, papers handed in for grades or signatures or stuffed away, pencils stowed or abandoned, iPads zipped, backpacks shouldered, hair floofed, shirts pulled down in back where they’d ridden up. And at the same time, small heaps of key terms began to smolder and self-immolate in their minds.

  “ALL RIGHT, THIS IS WHAT I NEED FROM YOU,” said Mrs. Painter. “I need you to close your iPad. Leave on your desk your evidence, if you have any, and your capacity matrix. I’m coming around. If I need to sign off on an area, you need to let me know. HOLD ON TO YOUR STICKY NOTES, AND WRITE YOUR INDIVIDUAL SOP ON THE BOTTOM.”

  “Obviously, we’re all stupid,” said Paloma.

  “We’re not stupid,” said Bobby. “Just under-intelligent.”

  “It ain’t over till it’s over,” I said. “Seems like you’ve got a lot on the ball to me.”

  Mrs. Painter collected Paloma’s capacity matrix. When she was gone, Paloma showed me two anime drawings she’d made in colored pencil—both of short-haired youths in jumpsuits with multicolored hair. “This one is a boy, but he totally looks like a girl,” she said.

  “Wow,” I said, “these are nice. When did you do these?”

  “This one I did last night, and this one I did two nights ago.”

  I said how good they were—they were good. “I love the hair.”

  The principal’s voice came over the PA system. “Your attention, please, for the end-of-day announcements.” He began talking about the girls’ soccer team.

  “VOICES OFF,” said Mrs. Painter, but everyone kept talking.

  “Don’t let them break your spirit,” I said to Paloma, quietly.

  “No,” said Paloma. “I kind of break my own spirit sometimes. I stopped drawing once my dad died. That was a year ago.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “I just got back into it,” she said.

  “Attention, girls’ lacrosse players,” said the principal, “practice has been canceled today. Attention, students, we will be collecting iPads next Monday and Tuesday. Please bring in all the equipment that was issued to you at the beginning of the school year.” Sports physicals for next year were available for free on June 17 with the school nurse, he said. “And that’s going to conclude the announcements for this afternoon. Have a great evening, everybody.”

  “Thanks for your help,” said Mrs. Painter, holding a handful of sticky notes.

  “It’s a pleasure,” I said. To Paloma I said, “Good luck with your art.”

  “Bye,” she said.

  On the way out I ran into the potter from February’s substitute training class. She’d done some time at Hackett Elementary and at the high school; now she was a long-term sub at the middle school, teaching math.

  “Lordy,” I said.

  “It’s easy,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s a piece of cake,” I said. “I’m glad you’re on the job.”

  “You, too.”

  I sighed and unlocked my car—all set with Day Twenty-six.

  DAY TWENTY-SEVEN. Tuesday, June 10, 2014

  WALLINGFORD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, THIRD GRADE

  THAT’S JUST THE WAY SCHOOL IS

  I WAS SITTING in Mrs. Compton’s third-grade class at Wallingford Elementary at eight-thirty in the morning when Mrs. Hulbert, the teacher next door, came by to let me know that the school was going to be having a lockdown drill that morning in the cafeteria, just after snack time.

  I had a substitute ed tech in the class, Ms. Lamarche. “This class can be pretty chatty,” she warned me.

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  “My hair used to be long,” said a boy named Andrew, rubbing his head. “Yesterday I got a haircut.”

  “It looks good,” I said. “Summer’s here.”

  “I’ve been in this room quite a bit,” Ms. Lamarche said, “so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.” When more kids began arriving, she took charge of the lunch count. “MAKE SURE YOU GUYS MAKE YOUR LUNCH COUNT ON THE BOARD, NOT ON THE IPADS, OKAY? And Marshall, we’ll be watching you today.”

  Mrs. Compton’s sub plans said that a student, Colleen, had selective mutism and spoke to nobody. “If it is necessary for her to respond to you, have her use a whiteboard.” I was supposed to write, and I did write, the following things on the board:

  —Make your lunch choice

  —Hand in library books

  —Finish Lulu packet

  —Check Showbie Morning Business for 5 worksheets!

  —Read on your Kindle if finished

  Most kids chose “brunch for lunch”—French toast sticks with syrup, a sausage patty, a hash brown patty, and oven-baked beans. Andrew went around letting his classmates feel his shorn head. “Everyone on the bus made fun of me,” he said.

  Mrs. Compton was a great believer in the digital future—so much so that she had the children learning penmanship not with pencils or pens in hand, but with iPads flat on desks: the kids had to trace, with unsteady fingertips, over the dotted image of cursive letters on their screens. That morning they were learning to handwrite the letters p and g on their iPads. Book reading happened on Kindles, and Mrs. Compton was a follower of the CAFE method of reading—Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanded vocabulary—which she itemized in a wall chart with a green polka-dot background. Comprehension was especially taxing and meta-cognitive: “I make and confirm my predictions. I check for understanding. I determine the author’s purpose. I retell the story. I find cause-and-effect relationships. I distinguish between fact, opinion, and propaganda. I make connections text-to-text and text-to-self.” Below the green polka dots was a display of reading comprehension strategies that Mrs. Compton had found somewhere online, each personified by a cartoon animal. Digger the Dog determined important ideas. Kit-Kat Connector activated background knowledge. Jabber the Reteller, a toucan, synthesized and retold. Questioning Owl asked questions before, during, and after reading. Iggy the Inferring Iguana made inferences and predictions. Another wall poster offered writing advice: �
��Choose a strong idea. A strong idea is clear and exact. Narrow down general topics. Each paragraph should have a topic sentence. It will tell the reader what the paragraph is mainly about.” There was a tip sheet on how to stretch a sentence:

  Who? My cute puppy.

  What? My cute puppy curls up.

  Where? My cute puppy curls up on the rug.

  When? My cute puppy curls up on the rug each night.

  Why? My cute puppy curls up on the rug each night to chew his bone.

  Math required a math vocabulary wall chart, which included factor, product, median, mean, mode, and range—the last four defined with the help of a poem:

  Hey diddle, diddle,

  The median’s the middle;

  You add and divide for the mean.

  The mode is the one that appears the most,

  And the range is the difference between.

  The word average, one of the few math words employed in everyday speech, had apparently been scrubbed from the arithmetical lexicon.

  Near the windows and the large, loud turbo-fan—which I kept turning off, because it was loud, and Ms. Lamarche kept turning back on, because the room was hot—there was another wall chart for common problems. “I have to go to the bathroom.” “I have to go to the bathroom, but somebody is already out and it’s an emergency.” “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.” “I don’t know what this word is.” “I don’t know what the directions are or mean.” “I finished my Math Menu and already signed up to take the assessment, now what?” “I finished my Literacy Menu and already signed up to take the assessment—now what?” No answers or solutions were given: instead, there were square barcodes that children could scan with their iPads using a scanner app in order to summon an official, digitally delivered response.

  Marshall, in a red T-shirt and black basketball shorts, was the difficult kid, and Ms. Lamarche bossed him around and shouted at the class to focus; I tried to be Zen-like about her fussing because she knew the class well and wanted to be in charge. After fifteen minutes of cursive iPad practice and arithmetic and miscellaneous Showbie Morning Business—Showbie is a “paperless classroom” iPad app—we went to Care Time in the cafeteria to recite the school rules and pledge the pledge. When we had all reassembled in class, I talked about why cursive had been invented, and then I timed them, to see if they wrote five letter Ps in a row faster when they printed or when they wrote in script. I told them to have a close look at the beautiful cursive General Mills G on the Cheerios box.