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

“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.”

“Why can’t you start fresh today?”

“She’s never been this mean to me since third grade. It’s usually when there’s a substitute. And I’m tired of it. She distracts me from my work.”

“You distract a lot of people,” I said. “You’ve got a thing about getting a little wild. I want you to go over and say, ‘I’m sorry you think I was bullying you.’”

“I have ADHD,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter whether you have ADHD,” I said. “You can control it. I see you’re smart. You can write. You can do stuff.”

“Okay, I’ll go say I’m sorry.” He marched over and said, “Juniper, I’m sorry you thought that I was mean to you.” He marched back and sat down.

“Thank you,” I said.

To Juniper, I said, “I know that doesn’t make it better, but at least it’s a start. Okay?”

Juniper nodded.

“I’m hoping today could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” I said, then chuckled at the remoteness of that possibility. Juniper laughed and wiped her face.

The sub plans said it was time for “Enrichment.” An ed tech arrived with a cart full of laptops. She took Micky off to a Title I class. Juniper went to a reading class. Isaiah gave me a story of his to read. “It may be a little gross,” he said. He’d read it aloud to the class a few weeks ago.

I read Isaiah’s story aloud softly: “I split my nose open one time when I was doing flipflops on my bed.” He hit the metal frame, he wrote, and blood came out like water from a squirt gun. This was when he was six. “My brother ran around the room freaking out. It looked like a crime scene. Blood was on the floor, and my nose was hanging. My dad picked me up and scurried to the phone.” At the hospital they put three needles in Isaiah’s face. “They shot them in my nose to keep it from falling off.”

I moaned at the horror of it. “You’re a survivor. Put it there, man.” I shook hands with him.

“I still have a scar and it’s kind of disformed a little bit,” said Isaiah, holding his nose. I could see no sign of injury.

“It looks good,” I said. “They did a good job — you’re back together.”

“Mr. Baker?” said Camille. “When I was five, a light fixture fell on my face, and I had a eighty stitches right here.” She pointed to a scar at her hairline.

“No kidding, and you look perfect,” I said. “You guys are amazing survivors.”

Isaiah put his story away. Mattie gave Lewis an eraser cap.

“Whoa, this is a good class,” I said. “Enrichment. Who’s enriching their minds?”

“I don’t know,” said Stacy. “But I have to go to the bathroom.”

With Micky out of the class, I didn’t have to tell anyone to be quiet. Some added to their essays about Brian’s adventures in Hatchet . Some pulled out their unfinished math packets. Odette showed me a division problem, 3,315 divided by 22, and we did it together. There was something soothing about doing one arithmetic problem slowly and carefully — just one. Emma and Hallie worked on their Wordly Wise notebooks. They quizzed each other, imitating the voice of the woman on the Wordly Wise website, on the meaning of shun, furious, coax, clutch, caress , and prefer . “You’re building some serious vocabulary there,” I said. Emma said that the reason Micky was in Mr. Seaborg’s class was that Mr. Seaborg could control him, and they had a love of baseball in common. Mr. Seaborg was crazy about the Red Sox. “If you say Yankees in this class,” said Hallie, “it’s a swear.”

Soon a troupe of fifth-graders arrived for a laptop software session, and many of my fourth-graders left — it felt like a whole new class. I rebooted an unresponsive laptop and handed a boy a box of tissues. Suddenly it was perfectly still.

“It’s so quiet,” I whispered. “It’s wonderful.”

“It’s never like this,” Stacy whispered back.

“Did you cast a spell over them?”

The fifth-graders were doing advanced math on IXL, and they were having trouble. Evan needed help finding the height of a cube whose volume was 729. We trial-and-errored it. Megan wasn’t able to figure the height of a rectangular prism with a volume of 560 yards, a height of 8 yards, and a width of 10 yards. We got that one, too. Then Phil came up, wanting to know the length of a side-leaning shaded triangular area of 49 square inches and a height of 7 inches. I stared at the illustration for a long time. My mind ceased to function.

“She might know,” Phil said, pointing to a small blond girl with a pointy mouth.

“Are you super good at triangles?” I said.

“I can try,” she said.

“Mr. Baker, can I go get a damp paper towel?” asked Sierra. Yes.

I gave the blond girl, Tracy, the triangle worksheet. “Oh,” she said promptly. “I would imagine that you would have to divide forty-nine by fourteen.” I didn’t believe her, but she was right: the answer was 3.5. A green checkmark appeared on Phil’s laptop’s IXL screen.

Phil put a fist in the air. “She’s one of the smartest kids in our class.”

“You’re light-years ahead of me,” I said.

The room’s back forty became loud and jokey, so I went over there and asked them about their whispering skills.

“I don’t have whispering skills,” said a boy. “I have football skills.”

“Can you play whisper football?” I said.

“Blue forty-two,” he whispered, “hut, hut, hike.”

“I got it right!” said Megan, across the room.

“Praise the lord,” I said.

“I don’t like math,” she said.

The laptops went back in the cart, each with a dangling MagSafe charging cord, as a logjam of my fourth-graders returned. I asked Juniper what Micky had been doing during recess to bully her. “He wouldn’t let me play the game that everyone else was,” she said. “And he kept saying, ‘Guys, everybody, Juniper doesn’t know how to talk.’ I don’t really know how. I say aminal and emeny .”

“That’s so cruel, and so silly,” I said.

“Mr. Seaborg says he’s just trying to get a action out of me. A ride. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know how to say a lot of words.”

“You seem to be doing pretty well,” I said. “I’ve noticed good words coming out.”

The computer cart was closed and its padlock twirled. Vance’s mustache bag reappeared. With five minutes to go, I put on “Imagine.”

“Why are you playing music?” asked Juniper.

“Because it’s been a long day,” I said.

Isaiah said he liked country music — he liked Luke Bryan, doing “That’s My Kind of Night.” I’d never heard of Luke Bryan, but I found the song on YouTube and played it.

“This is my favorite song,” said Isaiah.

“This is my mom’s favorite song!” said Odette.

They sang along with Luke Bryan: “I got that real good feel good stuff, up under the seat of my big black jacked-up truck.”