Nicholson Baker - Substitute - Going to School With a Thousand Kids

Feeling duly chastised and contrite, we all walked to the cafeteria, where there was a massive molten fondue of noise. I went back and ate a second sandwich in my room, wondering whether this was in fact the worst day of my life. When I picked the class up half an hour later, Jess, a thin, sweet-faced girl with a pastel hairband, said, “At lunch some kids were saying you looked like Santa.”

“Well, they have a point,” I said. “I have a white beard.”

“They say you’re going to give us presents,” said Jess. “I was trying to stop them because it’s really rude. I could see them saying it in kindergarten, but not in fifth grade!”

“It’s okay,” I said. I held my arms out. “NOW, OKAY, GUYS — TOTALLY QUIET! THIS IS SILENT READING.”

There was a moment of relative silence, broken by Zoe. “Get your butt out of my chair,” she said to Carlton.

“READuh!” screamed Danielle.

“I’m serious,” I said.

“Merry Christmas,” said Carlton. Zeke snickered.

“THAT’S SO RUDE, CARLTON!” said Jess.

And then I lost it. I got genuinely angry. “Just sit in your chairs and READ YOUR BOOKS. For god’s sake! It’s outrageous! I don’t want to hear ONE SOUND from any of you! NOT ONE PEEP!”

Perhaps because they could hear the true note of anger in my voice, or perhaps only because Mr. Pierce had paid a visit, they all went silent. We had half an hour of blissful, noiseless reading-to-self. Pages turned; the heating system hummed. When it was over, I passed out a math worksheet. The kids saw it and said, “Oh, no!” They clutched at their faces and moaned.

It was a mystery picture grid, similar to the one I’d passed out the day before in the second-grade class, except that this time the squares in the grid were smaller — there were a hundred of them — and four colors of crayon were involved. Each square held a single-digit multiplication problem—“6 x 7” or “3 x 2”—and if you got the right answer and matched it correctly with the color key and colored in the square, and if you repeated that task a hundred times, you ended up with a crude likeness of a train. Several obedient kids, mostly girls, set to work. Only a few students knew their times tables; instead, they referred to preprinted times-table matrices taped to the top of every desk. “They will try to be noisy,” said the sub plans. “Do not let them.” Hah.

“This doesn’t look like a train,” said Danielle, disgustedly, when she’d finished. I separated Nash and JoBeth, who were fencing with plastic rulers, and I told Carlton to stand by the bathroom door because he was talking incessantly about poop. The slower kids, sensibly, copied the train shape from the faster kids’ worksheets. Toby, the boy who said he’d eaten a ham sandwich over the weekend, was in despair. Not one block on his page was colored in. He’d written his name at the top. “What’s up?” I said.

“I suck at everything,” he said sadly.

“No you don’t,” I said. “Just do what you can do. It’s all right, it’s really okay, don’t worry about it, my man.” I collected all the finished and partly finished and not-even-started mystery trains, and then, inwardly gnashing my teeth, I was compelled to hand out two more diabolical worksheets. One held a multiple-choice test of synonyms — the class did a good job of circling difficult as a replacement for hard , and lengthy as a replacement for long —and one sheet held a grim story about two boys taking a test, filled with twenty antonyms in bold. “They were calm because they were not really prepared but decided to give it their worst try.” “Felix’s pencil mended twice during the test because he was pressing too softly.” “They were very anxious when they were finally able to finish and were able to turn their tests out.” This sheet gave them a lot of trouble. “What’s mended ?” they said.

Toby asked me if he could sit at a table out in the hall, because he could concentrate better there. I said he could — he looked genuinely sad. A few minutes later, an enormous ed tech in a paisley dress ordered Toby back in the room. “They can’t sit at the tables without supervision,” she told me. “They know that.” Toby obeyed, but instead of going to his desk, he climbed into a supply cupboard in the back of the room and tried to close the doors on himself. “YOU CAN’T BE IN THERE!” cried Nicole and Danielle, pulling hard at the doors as Toby’s white fingertips held them firmly shut.

“Toby, come out of the cupboard!” said the ed tech. “COME OUT OF THE CUPBOARD OR YOU’LL OWE MRS. BROWNING A RECESS.”

“He’s really unhappy,” I said to the ed tech, in an undertone. “He’s been struggling. He told me he sucks at everything.”

“Oh, he always says that,” said the ed tech.

Toby emerged from the cupboard and put his head down on the desk, shielding himself with his arms.

Jess handed the ed tech the sheet that she’d kept of wrongdoers and, to my horror, the ed tech started to write all their names on the whiteboard.

I said, “Oh gosh, please don’t write their names up there.”

“Jess said you wanted me to write the names down,” said the ed tech, annoyed. She erased the names and handed the paper back to Jess.

Jess, crushed, tore up her list and threw it away. The ed tech stumped off.

“Thanks for doing it,” I said to Jess.

I collected the synonym-and-antonym worksheets. The last task of the day was for me to read to the class from Danny, the Champion of the World , by Roald Dahl, starting from where Mrs. Browning had left off, at the beginning of chapter two. I read to them about the BFG, the Big Friendly Giant, who catches children’s dreams in glass bottles and makes magic powders out of them. “A dream,” I read, “as it goes drifting through the night air, makes a tiny little buzzing humming sound, a sound so soft and low it is impossible for ordinary people to hear it. But the BFG can hear it easily.” I looked up. The whole class was motionless. Carlton’s head was up; Ian’s head was up; Nash’s head was up; the tattletale girls were all intent on hearing every word I was saying. Everyone was listening. I kept going. I got to the part where the Big Friendly Giant uses a long blowpipe to blow his dream powders into children’s rooms. The sleeping child breathes in the powder, and begins dreaming a marvelous dream. “Then the magic powder really takes over — and suddenly the dream is not a dream any longer but a real happening — and the child is not asleep in bed — he is fully awake and is actually in the place of the dream and is taking part in the whole thing.” I reached the end of the chapter. “Wow,” I said. “Should I read some more?”

“YES,” said the class. It was the first time they’d spoken in unison since they’d said “I will be the best that I can be” at the beginning of the day. I read the next chapter, which was about kite flying. It was good, but not quite as good as the bit about blowpipes and dreams, and some kids got squirmy, but still, they all listened. Thank you, Roald Dahl — you difficult, arrogant, brilliant genius.

“You’re an awesome storyteller,” said Nadia.

The funny thing was, Dahl’s story of the Big Friendly Giant had a residual effect. The class paid more attention to my voice afterward. When I asked them to pick up the paper on the floor and stack the chairs, they did it. I thanked each of them for spending the day with me, and some of them thanked me for being a sub. “Nash,” I said, “you were going totally nuts in the middle of the day, and now you’ve pulled it together.”

“I’m like that,” Nash said. “I’m wild, and then I calm down.”