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

“This is my sister’s favorite song!” said Mattie.

A bell rang and a grandmother in a flowered muumuu appeared at the door to pick up Aiden. We switched to Luke Bryan doing “Drunk on You.” Four kids, crouching around my laptop and dipping their knees, knew the lyrics: “I’m a little drunk on you, and high on summertime.”

The four-note gong sounded, calling kids for first-wave buses. Bye, I said. Lewis told me he liked a Christian song called “Do Something” by Matthew West. When I put it on, three kids knew it. “It’s not enough to do nothing,” they sang. “It’s time for us to do something.” Second wave was announced and in a fingersnap they all were gone.

“You survived another day with us!” said the secretary. “We’re thankful.”

Heck, I thought, I love this.

End of Day Twenty-five.

LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, ED TECH

I KIND OF BREAK MY OWN SPIRIT SOMETIMES

BETH SAID I HAD A CHOICE: I could either teach first grade at Lasswell, or be a roving ed tech at the middle school. I slapped together some sandwiches and hissed northward through a rainy mist to the middle school — past a striped VW Beetle for sale, past a pile of stripped logs at a lumberyard, past a dead lump of a porcupine on the road.

“Everybody’s out today,” said Pam. I reported to room 232, special ed math, where a girl was eating a bagel. Mr. Fields, the bustling gent who had first told me about the voices in Waylon’s head, was my dispatcher. I was going to do a tech block first, with Mr. Walsh, he said. “So, Nick, you’re kind of tall. How tall are you?”

“Six four and change,” I said.

“You were probably six five and change in your younger days,” Mr. Fields said. “You haven’t shrunk yet? You’re over forty, aren’t you? Heh heh.”

“I’m fifty-seven,” I said.

“Oh, you’re a puppy!” Mr. Fields said. “Did you play basketball in high school?”

Actually, I said, there was no basketball team at my high school.

“Cut it out!” said Mr. Fields, amazed.

Cheryl, in the corner, asked for tissues, but the box was empty. Mr. Fields said, “You can use a paper towel, Cheryl, and when you come back we’ll have tissues, so you don’t have to report us to the tissue police. See that look? Cheryl always gives you that look when she doesn’t like what you said. Judy, beside her, is always a gentle soul. Beside her is Kelly, another gentle soul. Tyna, over there in the corner, is a very gentle soul, and Glenn, beside her, is something of a Mexican jumping bean. Over here we have the quiet duo of Billy and Gene, who are just enrapt in their video games. Hey, fellas, it’s coming up on seven thirty-five, you know you should be off those contraptions. Thank you.”

The principal came on the PA system. “Can I have your attention, please?”

“Yes you can, boss!” said Mr. Fields. “Hey, Gene, you should have that thing away. You can break the spell, do it!”

The class pledged its allegiance. Lunch was a hot meatball sub with shredded cheese. Band would meet from 9:55 to 10:40. A pair of glasses were found outside by the buses. The seventh-grade boys’ lacrosse team had made a good effort as they faced the Falmouth Yachtsmen the night before. All library books were due back by June 10. “Please check your lockers, your closets at home, your bedroom, all other places where those library books may be hiding.” Two students came on to announce a Team Orinoco dance, with special guest DJ Blake Burnside. “Enter to win an iTunes fifteen-dollar gift card and party like it’s 1999 at our beach party, with drinks, food, and a lot of fun tattoos and leis.” That concluded the announcements.

Bong, bong, bong. I followed Judy down to tech class. “WALK ON THAT STAIRWAY, BOYS,” said an ed tech. “THAT’S VERY DANGEROUS.”

Mr. Walsh, a compact baldie with a mustache, shook my hand and said I was supposed to work with Dana, who wore hearing aids. “He pretends he doesn’t hear a lot.”

Mr. Walsh called out names for attendance and I sat on a stool in the hot, bright room. There were a dozen educational robots arranged on a table. “Dana’s not here,” said Mr. Walsh to me. I said I’d just float around.

Mr. Walsh addressed the class. “OKAY! What we did yesterday was we did the Yucca Mountain sheet, explained the controls, gave you an opportunity to work a robotic arm.” He had the loudest voice I’d heard yet in school. “We’ll have a little competition today, to see who does it the quickest. We’ll do that first, and after that we’ll do the Fryeburg Fair.”

“Caca or Yucca?” asked Jackie.

“Yucca,” said Mr. Walsh. He turned to the whiteboard, which said CACA MOUNTAIN ACTIVITY. “Somebody changed that on me.”

The class paired up, and each team of two picked out a robot arm and two “casks”—cylindrical wooden blocks meant to represent sealed containers of nuclear waste. The robot arms were black and yellow, and they made a high, revving, whining sound when they moved, like tiny chain saws. “I’ll give you two minutes to practice,” said Mr. Walsh, “and then we’ll start the competition.”

I read the Yucca Mountain activity sheet, which was professionally laid out, with copy furnished, so it seemed, by some sort of a pro-nuclear lobbying group. Maine’s nuclear power plant, Maine Yankee, was closed in 1996, said the sheet, after 26 successful years of electrical generation —not mentioning that the plant was shut down by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because it had falsified safety records. Nuclear waste was held in crash-resistant casks, the sheet explained, specially designed to hold radioactive materials safely . It briefly told the story of Yucca Mountain, the underground site in Nevada where American nuclear waste was supposed to go. As of 2008, construction was stalled and at this time, it appears as though the depository under Yucca Mountain will never be built and millions of dollars will be wasted. A callout offered reassurance: You would have to live near a nuclear power plant for over 2,000 years to get the same amount of radiation exposure that you get from a single diagnostic medical x-ray. I wondered what the residents of Fukushima would say about this activity sheet.

“I’d like to have everybody put their shoulder up to start with,” Mr. Walsh said — meaning the robot’s shoulder. “SHOULDER UP, ELBOW OUT.” The students worked their controllers with their thumbs. “If you should drop a cask, you need to put it back on the circle.” He checked his stopwatch. “READY. SET. GO.”

The clumsy machines swiveled and joggled and eventually took hold of their dangerous spent-fission cargoes, while their operators cursed and laughed. The object was for each team to lift two casks and place them into a plastic box and close the lid. Several casks fell on their sides.

“Be nice to James, he’s special,” said Forrest.

“You do it, I can’t!” said Anna.

One cask rolled off the table onto the floor. “You just exploded the Earth,” said Tucker.

The winning time was one minute, fifty-one seconds. “ALL RIGHT, WE ARE GOING TO MOVE ON TO THE NEXT ACTIVITY,” said Mr. Walsh. I liked Mr. Walsh, who had discovered that the only way he could survive as a middle school tech teacher was to develop a voice like a union activist’s and shout all talkers down.

“How many people have been to the Fryeburg Fair?” he asked, handing out an activity sheet. Many hands went up. He read to us from the sheet: the fair was the largest in Maine, with oxen pulls and wood-chopping contests and pigs and chickens and rows of porta-potties. “ALL RIGHT,” said Mr. Walsh. “YOUR TASK. In this activity, you are an employee at Blow Brothers and your boss has told you to load four porta-potties into the back of the truck body. These are going to be your porta-potties, right here.” He held up a handful of gray plastic cylinders, narrower than the wooden nuclear waste cylinders.