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

“Those are really skinny porta-potties,” said Vicky.

“WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO DO — is you’re going to have to put them in one of the five holes,” Mr. Walsh said. The holes were drilled in wooden blocks, representing the porta-potty trucks. “You need to be careful. They’re kind of difficult to stand up. And if I see anybody tipping the table, or shaking it, you’ll be going somewhere. So don’t be shaking the table. ALL RIGHT?”

He gave the class a few minutes to practice, and then the race began. Robots clenched and whined and dropped porta-potties here and there. “I just spilled my bucket of pee all over you guys,” said Tucker. “She’s covered with it.”

“I’m done, because I don’t want to do any more,” said Anna.

“Gavin cheated,” said Jackie. The winning time, by a two-girl team, was two minutes, thirty-five seconds.

“LISTEN UP, WE’RE GOING TO STOP,” Mr. Walsh said. “Bring the porta-potties up to me, put the robots in the middle of the table, and take your sheets with you.” Tomorrow, he said, they would be doing robotic heart transplants, pretending to be cardiac surgeons at Maine Medical Center. When everything was put away, ready for Mr. Walsh’s next group of roboticists, he said, “ALL RIGHT! I guess you guys can go. HAVE A GOOD DAY.”

Back at math special ed headquarters, Mr. Fields described some of the students I might be asked to help that day. “Diane wears kind of like a red fleece and pulls her hair back, very plain girl — nice kid, works hard. Bobby Bowman is this big solid kid—”

“Kind of crew-cutty,” said Ms. Quinn, one of the other ed techs.

“Crew cut, dark-rimmed glasses,” said Mr. Fields. “He’s a nice kid. He can do everything fine — he just kind of like daydreams a lot. He needs a little bit of ‘Hey, hey!’” He banged a file cabinet with his fist. “‘Are you in there? Anybody home?’”

“Don’t hit him, though,” said Ms. Quinn.

“No, he’s very gentle, he doesn’t take much of a prod. Another guy, Frank Wood. He’s a shorter guy, about yea big and about twelve pounds. Tends to wear T-shirts, short brown hair, kind of goes in every direction.”

“I thought it was reddish,” said Ms. Quinn.

“Brownish blond, strawberry blond, something like that. Nice kid, very quiet, but he’s not a real good reader, or a good writer, so he might need some help.”

I had a free block, and I went out to the car and ate a sandwich until it was time to check in with Mr. Fields. He told me about more special ed students I might encounter. “There’s one girl named Katy, or it could be her friend Lynda,” he said. “We call the two of them the Katy-Lynda, because they’re basically alike. Little kiddy girls. There might be a guy named Adam, and there’s a guy named Shawn — he’s a blond-headed kid. They might need help with the writing. Adam can do pretty much everything, he’s just got to have a nudge. The girls are kind of helpless. But they can do more than they predict.”

Health class was my next destination, taught by a long-fingered, tough-but-kind woman named Mrs. Fitzgerald. “Just hang out,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said to me. I sat down at a table on the side of the room, near Katy and Lynda and the pencil sharpener.

“Today is your day to talk to me about big things that you read in your alcohol article,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said to the class. “Your job is to teach the class, so I can just sit back and fall asleep.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” said Renee.

“Doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “So say Marjorie starts first. She’s going to talk about something that’s a big thing to her that she learned about alcohol. And if I call on Ray next, Ray has two choices. He can make a connection to what Marjorie said, or he can come up with a whole new alcohol fact. Got it? This is what they do in college.”

“Lots of fun,” said Ray quietly.

“In some colleges, anyway,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “Sometimes you’re in a class of a hundred and fifty and they just lecture to you for eighty minutes. But sometimes there are discussion classes. You’re expected to come prepared for class and you’re expected to discuss. It’s a big responsibility. So who would like to go first?”

Randy, in Top-Siders, raised his hand. He said, “I picked out from the article that you’re actually more likely to hurt yourself and others and commit more crimes, and go to jail.”

“Can anyone make a connection to that and explain why?”

Toby said, “It messes with your nervous system and your brain. You could think that something is completely normal and fine, when your real conscience knows it’s wrong.”

“So it affects thinking skills,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “It’s really hard to stop and think when you’re under the influence of alcohol. How many of you have seen someone who has had too much alcohol, but they think they’re just fine?”

Hands went up.

“Look around the room, that’s your evidence,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “When people drink alcohol, they think they’re fine, because their brain is under the influence of what?”

Alcohol.

“Of what?”

Alcohol.

“And alcohol is a what?”

A depressant.

“A depressant, nice job. So I’m under the influence of a depressant, and I think I’m doing just fine. There’s absolutely no reason I can’t teach, there’s absolutely no reason I can’t drive. If your brain is not under the influence of a depressant, then you would look at me and say, I don’t know what’s wrong with her, but there’s something way different about her. She can’t even walk straight. She’s mumbling and she’s not making any sense. But my brain is telling me I’m just fine, because I’m under the influence of a depressant. Is it okay that people either love the Yankees or they love the Red Sox?”

Yes.

“Is it okay if you’re friends with somebody who likes the opposite team? Can you tolerate that normally? Do you like it? Not particularly. I don’t particularly like it when someone’s a real Yankees fan, but I can still be friends with them, and I don’t have to fight them. I don’t have to argue with them, and I don’t have to beat them up, and I don’t have to kill them over it. But that’s what people do when they’ve been drinking. There have been people at Fenway Park and at Yankee Stadium that have died because they have worn the opposite team’s jersey. Emotions escalate, and people end up being shot or killed or seriously injured — over what? When we boil it all down, it was over what?”

A team.

“They liked a team that I don’t like. Deal with it! Deal with it. But it’s not easy to deal with it when you’re putting a chemical in your body that changes the way you perceive things.”

A tall floor-mounted fan sent a breeze of coolness over the drowsy class as we learned more about the horrors of alcohol. Melanie raised her hand to say that what she’d learned from the article was that alcohol is made by fermenting certain fruits. Mrs. Fitzgerald dismissed that fact as irrelevant. Alcohol was a poison, she said. Our liver filters out poisons, and alcohol is filtered out by your liver, therefore we know that alcohol is a poison. It couldn’t help you get better grades, and it couldn’t help you decrease the stress you feel from school. “We don’t want to be drinking to decrease stress. Are you serious? You want to put a poison in your body to decrease stress? It’s not a strategy to help you with stress. When you look at the reasons why teenagers use, I just want to tell you, they look like a bunch of excuses to me. You guys are too smart to use those as excuses. You guys are too smart to think that alcohol’s going to relax you. You know better than that.” What we needed were healthy relaxation techniques, she said. “Think of something that you personally do that decreases your stress, that makes you relaxed, that would be considered healthy.”