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

“What?” she said. She had a kind, despondent face.

“What’s your comparison?”

“A farm.”

“Great idea! So the nucleus is the place that everything is directed from? That’s a tough one. What did you come up with?”

She paged through the cell packet. “I couldn’t find anything.”

I pulled up a chair. “What place on the farm is where everything gets made, and is sort of the center of the farm?”

“The barn.”

“The barn, interesting,” I said. “Not the farmhouse, the barn, I see that.”

Gabrielle said nothing. Her packet was filled with words like mitochondria, cytoplasm, ribosomes , and vacuole , and she didn’t know how to pronounce them, or what any of them meant.

“Mitochondria,” I said. “What are those? Those are the squiggly things, right?”

She was silent.

“I don’t know what that would be on a farm. Do you have any rivers, or creeks, or irrigation ditches?”

She looked up at me and smiled slowly, waiting for me to go on to someone else, which I did.

Matthew had chosen a movie theater as his analogy. He’d drawn the plan of a movie theater on a blank piece of paper.

“Great idea!” I said. “Did you come up with that?”

“No,” he said.

“So what would the projection booth be? Hm, interesting.”

He stared at the page, waiting for me to move on. I swiveled and talked to a kid behind me, Cooper. “What’s happening, man? Good stuff?”

He shrugged. “Yeah.” He’d just written a definition for endoplasmic reticulum .

“That’s a word, eh?” I said. “Good god, you sometimes wonder why scientists don’t come up with simpler words. So what are you comparing yours to?”

Cooper looked up at me. “Jail,” he said.

“Nice. So what equals a nucleus in a jail?”

“The warden?” Cooper said.

“Ah,” I said. “Good one. And the endoplasmic reticulum? What does that do? I don’t remember.”

He’d written, Moves stuff around. Made up of complex membranes. “The guards?” he said.

“The guards, yeah,” I said. “They push around those carts. Good choice. This is a pretty interesting assignment.” I waited. Cooper didn’t want me there. I was pretty much poison in this class. “Good luck,” I said, and greeted Dawson.

“I’m doing the Boston Red Sox,” Dawson said.

“I’m doing a grocery store,” said Egan, the boy next to him. “It took me ten minutes to write all this stuff down.”

I asked Egan what the nucleus was in a grocery store.

“The manager, because in a grocery store the manager is in charge.”

“Good point,” I said. “Do the bathrooms at a grocery store count? What would they be equivalent to? Or the cash registers? That’s hard. This is a hard assignment. I kind of like it, though.”

“Yeah, I can’t remember what those things are called that get rid of waste,” Egan said.

“Is it the mitochondria?” I said. “Or is it the endoplasmic reticulum?”

“The endoplasmic reticulum stores proteins,” said Egan. “Maybe it’s the mitochondria. The mitochondria gives energy.”

“I’ve got a question for you,” I said. “What would money be?”

“Money would be the protein,” Egan said. “Because money goes into the store, and the endoplasmic reticulum stores it.”

I said, “Then maybe the endoplasmic reticulum would be the cash register? Or the safe?”

“Yeah,” Egan said, not entirely convinced.

I turned back to Dawson. “So the Red Sox,” I said. “What would be the batting cage?”

“I don’t know,” said Dawson.

“I don’t know either,” I said.

“I think the proteins would be the food stands,” said Dawson.

“I think the ribosomes would be the food stands,” said Booker, who sat next to Egan. “Because ribosomes make protein, and food is protein. Depending on what you have in the food.”

I read Dawson’s definition of the nucleus: holds the genetic information of the cell .

“That’s the coach,” said Dawson. “John Farrell.”

“The man,” I said. “Good luck, dudes.”

I crossed the class to a couple sitting together. “What’s happening here?” I said to Fletcher, who swiped something away on his iPad.

“I’m trying to be stupid is all,” Fletcher said.

“That’s top priority,” I said. “Are you doing one of these comparisons?”

“Huh?” said the girl, Vanessa.

“Are you doing one of these comparisons with the cell?”

“I already did that,” said Fletcher.

“We already finished that,” said Vanessa.

“I compared mine to a school,” said Fletcher.

“Mine was the mall,” said Vanessa.

“I like that,” I said. “So what’s the nucleus of a mall?”

“I don’t remember,” said Vanessa.

“I said mine was the principal,” said Fletcher.

“Because the principal’s office holds the genetic information?” I said.

“He controls the building,” said Vanessa.

“And then what are the bathrooms?”

“Nothing,” said Fletcher.

I sat in a chair on the side of the room for a while, waiting to find out how I could be useful. The class, I was happy to notice, was loud and shouty.

“Getting a little noisy in here,” said Mrs. Christian.

I asked Matthew what he generally bought to eat when he went to the movies.

“I usually get candy and soda,” he said.

“So at a movie theater, what is the ribosome?”

He pointed to the projector in his drawing. “That,” he said. He’d written, In a movie, you press play. A ribosome acts just like a projector.

“Fascinating,” I said. “How did you figure that out?”

“Mrs. Craig helped me.” Mrs. Craig was the ed tech for whom I was substituting.

“Did you do any Golgi bodies?”

Matthew pointed to the ticket counter, which in his drawing corresponded to the Golgi apparatus.

“Holy crap,” I said.

“I like my arrow,” Matthew said. He’d drawn a fancy green arrow.

I was boggled by too many partial analogies. “It kind of scrambles your brain a little bit,” I said.

“Sexual reproduction!” said Zoe loudly.

Back to Gabrielle. She had drawn a barn and some farmers. The farmers were the Golgi bodies in her comparison.

She pointed to vacuole . “I can’t find that one,” she said.

I flipped around in a textbook. “I think the vacuoles are more important in plant cells,” I said. “You’ve got an animal cell. Maybe you can move on.”

She needed to know what corresponded with mitochondria . I showed her a page of the textbook, which said that the mitochondria acted like a digestive system, breaking down nutrients. “So on the farm, what breaks things down? The soil, the insects in the soil? No, let’s see. The tractor?”

“Animals?” said Gabrielle.

“The animals chew the grass and digest it,” I said. “That’s a good one. No comparison is exact.”

“What is that one?” she asked, pointing to the words endoplasmic reticulum .

“I thought you’d never ask,” I said, flipping around in the textbook. “It’s a series of folding membranes in which materials can be processed and moved around inside the cell. What moves things around in a barn? A wheelbarrow?”

“A grain tub?” said Gabrielle.

“A grain tub. Do you know about farms?”

She nodded. She lived on a farm. We kept going. Ribosomes make stuff, I said.

“The cows?” she said.

“Cows make milk,” I said, nodding. Cytoplasm was the next term she needed to analogize. I said, “It’s a gloopy substance that’s all around the cell. What’s all around you on the farm? People breathe it, and animals breathe it, and plants breathe it.”