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

“That’s a hairy bastard,” I said, and we laughed helplessly at its absurdity for a while. Then together we jackhammered through it, variable by variable, making simple errors of arithmetic, correcting them, continuing. There was no answer sheet, so I wasn’t altogether sure that our answers were correct. “Do the best you can,” I said, and slumped in my chair. The bell rang; class over.

The next class, which was split in two, with lunch in the middle, had less work to do — just the Scoot Sheet, some simpler problems on IXL, and a test on graphing inequalities. I spent ten minutes pawing around in the sub folder and among the piles of papers on the desk, looking for the inequalities test. “There’s something else she wants you to do,” I said, “but I can’t find it. So I think we should just talk. What should we talk about?”

“How awesome I am,” said a small, plucky boy, Owen.

“How has seventh grade been going?” I asked.

“It has been the hardest year of my life,” said Owen.

I asked them what the biggest adjustment was in going from elementary school to middle school.

“Waking up in the morning,” said a smart kid, Thomas, with a voice like a patrician banker’s.

“Ah, yes,” I said. “Why does school start so early?”

Sunrise said, “It should be illegal for school to start before eleven. And illegal for it to end after eleven oh one.”

“A sixty-second day,” said Thomas.

“No, they’d just give you a ton of homework, think of it!” said Jason.

“If you were the superintendent of schools,” I said, “how would you design the ideal school day?”

Mackenzie, one of the pretty, dominant girls, said, “I would say you didn’t have to go.”

“Then you’d miss out on the social aspect,” I said.

“You wouldn’t meet anyone in person unless you went to some sort of party,” said Dylan.

“That’s what they make the Internet for, and Facebook,” said Mackenzie.

Her friend Darryl said, “I met my boyfriend online. He’s thirty, and he’s on Zoosk.” The two of them laughed.

“That’s kind of sketchy,” I said.

“Joke,” Darryl said. “I mean just like, we could go online and add random friends.”

I said, “Let’s say you absolutely had to require people to go to school Monday through Friday. When would you start the day?”

“Eight o’clock,” Thomas said.

“Two a.m.,” said Owen.

“I think twelve, for about an hour,” said Laura. “We all could use forty minutes of schooling.”

Thomas objected: “That would be twenty minutes of lunch and one class.”

Darryl said, “I think we should all have recliners, that are really comfortable.”

“Do you know how much recliners would cost for nine hundred students?” said Thomas.

Caleb, a realist, said, “I think it should be eight to twelve, four hours.”

Sunrise spoke up again. “No!” she said. “The school day is not going to begin at eight. It’s going to begin at twelve, and end at twelve oh one!”

I found a marker and, after inspecting it closely to be sure that it was a dry-erase, I wrote numbers on the board. “We’ve got one minute, one hour, four hours.”

“I’d probably go with an eight-hour day every day,” said a studious boy, Dana, who wore hearing aids.

“You’re crazy,” said Owen.

“The thing I’ve noticed,” I said, “is that people mean well, but there’s only so much you can do in a day. It seems like everybody shuts down after a time. You could compress what happens from, say, eight to two into half the time and still get learning done.”

“You’re right,” said Thomas.

“So why do you think they leave the day this long?” I said. “There’s something else to consider, isn’t there?”

“Specials?” said Laura.

“Lunch?” said Caleb.

I said, “What about your parents?”

“They have to work,” said Owen. “Daycare!”

“Exactly,” I said. “All right, good. What else should we talk about?”

“Something fun,” said Sunrise.

“Boys,” said Darryl.

“I think we should talk about what our dream vacation would be,” said Mackenzie. “My dream vacation would be going to Disneyland, meeting One Direction, going on rides with One Direction, and…” She trailed off.

Caitlin, another alpha girl, said, “My dream vacation would be getting dressed and then playing on my phone all day.”

I asked them what One Direction was.

“It’s a band,” said Thomas, shaking his head.

“It’s a big thing,” said Caitlin.

“They’re terrible,” said Thomas.

“They’re not terrible!” said Mackenzie.

“They are terrible,” said Thomas. “Listen for yourself.” He tapped play on a YouTube video. It didn’t play, it was loading. Wi-Fi was slow again.

“They aren’t even from America!” said Owen, who claimed to like thrash metal.

The music came on, One Direction playing “Story of My Life”; several girls sang along.

“Turn that off!” said Caleb.

The class began bad-mouthing Justin Bieber. A boy in the back named Regan was playing a video game.

“I was just looking to see if I was dead or not,” he said when I asked him about it. “But I’m not.”

“You are dead,” said Max, the kid next to him.

Darryl said, “Did you know that if you get a blood transfusion from a twenty-five-year-old you can get his energy?”

“No,” I said.

“My grandmother had a blood transfusion,” she said. “She couldn’t walk or anything, and then the next day after she got it she was painting walls and standing on ladders.”

“I had no idea,” I said. “Has anyone been to the hospital recently?”

“I was, last night,” said Caitlin. “I choked on something and it got lodged in my throat.”

“You were rushed to the hospital last night?” I said, startled.

“Not really rushed,” said Caitlin. “My mom was driving really slow. I’m not eating chicken ever again.”

Max said, “I almost died while eating ramen noodles.”

The bell rang and everyone surged toward the door. “Are you guys coming back here afterward?” I said.

“Yes!”

“Good. Have fun at lunch,” I said.

I ate a sandwich. Underneath my lunch bag I discovered the stack of twenty copies of the inequalities test, neatly paperclipped. Students were supposed to write a sentence describing the difference between an inequality and an equation — not an easy task — and they had to graph inequalities like x > 49 . I watched a video from Khan Academy concerning the four quadrants of the coordinate plane. The bell rang again. My hardy band of educational reformers returned.

“Did you work at a college?” Mackenzie asked me.

“So what shall we talk about?” asked Thomas.

“I skinned my fingie,” said Caitlin.

“I skinned my shoe,” said Owen.

I flapped the batch of inequality tests in the air. “I found these things that she wanted you to do,” I said.

“I’m sad,” said Regan, as I passed the tests out.

“What are you sad about?” I asked.

“I don’t know, things.”

I said, “Life is weighing down on you? Remember this: Sing a happy song.”

“Oh, can I sing?” said Sunrise. “Can I sing for you guys?”

“No,” said Regan.

I waited for them to find their pencils. “This is actually a test situation,” I said.

I walked around the room giving whispered hints, and then, when it seemed that a number of kids didn’t remember how to graph an inequality, I asked Thomas to go to the board and give a demonstration. “Good job, Thomas,” said Mackenzie. Memories refreshed, people labored away quietly. I took a bite of an apple. “Owen just blew on my face,” Caitlin whispered. People began handing in their tests.