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

“I was going to say it’s about what an invasive species needs to invade a new space.”

“Yes, you can talk about what an invasive species needs in order to be invasive. Or what else, Roy?”

“It’s how the animal or plant adapts to the environment, such as a woolly mammoth had a fur coat to survive in the Arctic.”

“Right, we talked about a polar bear versus a black bear. We talked about why you might not find a black bear in a polar region, and then we talked about the characteristics of a polar bear and of a black bear, and why they have those physical traits for their environment. For the ‘I Will Survive’ activity, we’re going to talk a lot more about that sort of thing. So basically we’re going to be talking about adap — adaption, and physical and behavioral features that allow plants and animals to survive in a particular environment. This will be your last set of key terms for the whole year. Are you excited?”

“Woo-hoo,” said a boy.

“IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR CELL KEY TERMS, you need to make sure you do that. IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR MITOSIS/MEIOSIS DIAGRAM, you need to do that. IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR COMPARE AND CONTRAST, you need to do that. Don’t worry about plant reproduction, because we’re covering that as a mini-lesson. Today you should be at your new key terms, starting them or finishing them, and then moving on to your BrainPOPs. Remember, you’re not going to be having your iPads after next Tuesday, so you need to be working hard so you can get those BrainPOPs done. Otherwise you’re going to have hard copies of those quizzes.”

“Uh-oh,” said Howard.

“Yeah, not fun,” said Mrs. Painter. She pointed to the whiteboard. “Your BrainPOP list is right here. It tells you exactly what to do. We’ll go over the matrix further tomorrow. When you’re done with them—”

The class began to talk and boisterize.

“ALL EYES ON ME FOR ONE SECOND. If you finish a task on your matrix, I will need the evidence of it and your matrix. So if you finish your key terms, bring me your key terms and evidence, so I can sign off. If I sign off on it, that means you got maximum points. I’m not going to write the grade on your actual assignment. I’m going to collect these at the end of the class and then put it on Educate, so it will be right there.”

I watched the class resignedly dig through backpacks and pull out iPads and find pencils and get to work. Key terms: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, identical daughter cells, heterozygous , and homozygous .

“It just goes on, doesn’t it?” I said. “It just keeps going on.”

“Long, long, long, long, long day,” said Paloma.

Bobby showed me a drawing he’d made of a man in a camouflage outfit, with a gas mask.

“Are you going to be here tomorrow?” said Paloma.

“No, I’m sorry to say, because I like this school,” I said.

“You don’t seem like someone who’d teach at Lasswell High School,” she said.

“How do you know that?” I said.

“I don’t,” she said.

I said, “Have you heard bad things about Lasswell? I’ve taught there. It’s not that bad. It’s not that great, but it’s not that bad.”

“One of my brothers goes there,” Paloma said. “All the teachers there, except for two teachers, all of them hate him. He got suspended for four days because he broke two rulers.”

I misheard. “What rules did he break?”

“They were metal, and he broke them and bent them into a duck. They thought he was making a gun, so they sent him to the office.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“I know, right? It was this round-bellied thing, and the other ruler went up like wings. He was making a duck .”

Bobby paged through his notebook of drawings for me to see. “Beautiful,” I said. “So you’ve got this all done, the meiosis and mitosis aspect of life?”

“Uh,” said Bobby.

I leaned toward a third kid, Cedric, who was absorbed in fitting a metal spring to the top of his pencil. “How’s it going?” I said.

“Terribly good,” he said.

I looked at his mitosis and meiosis sheet, which was half done. “You’re on it,” I said. “All these vocab words.”

Mrs. Painter caught my eye and pointed toward a quiet kid with a peach-fuzz mustache named Melvyn, who needed help. Melvyn was comparing and contrasting mitosis and meiosis. He had written sexual and asexual in the correct boxes.

Suddenly there was a tiny incident. “I’m going to walk out of this classroom,” said Howard. “Can Asa help me?”

“Howard, you don’t need help,” said Asa.

“I’m stupid,” said Howard.

“Howard, last call,” said Mrs. Painter.

“I need help, because I’m stupid,” said Howard.

“Lazy?” said Mrs. Painter.

“No, I’m stupid. I am stupid.”

“Well, I’ll help you,” said Mrs. Painter, “but you do not need help.”

Meanwhile I found a page in a textbook that gave the steps of mitosis. “It’s kind of a dance,” I said. “Have you ever seen a movie of it?”

Melvyn shook his head.

“You see the chromosomes waggling around, like square dancers, and they go off on two sides of the cell. And then the cell pinches off, and boom. Here’s how they explain it. They use fancy vocabulary, but basically, the chromatids move to opposite ends of the cell, and then they form a whole new nucleus, and then it starts to pinch, like a balloon with a string tightened around it , and then they’re divided, by gumbo. And off they go.”

Melvyn needed to write down one more fact about mitosis. I read some more of the textbook. “Mitosis is happening all the time in your body, right?” I said.

“Mhm,” said Melvyn.

“Your cells get old and they die and you’ve got to get more cells.” I read from the textbook: “ Cell division allows growth and replaces worn out or damaged cells. It’s the basic way you keep fresh. It’s different than meiosis. With meiosis, you get an egg and a sperm and you end up with a whole new baby. You’re not replacing anything, you’re starting from scratch.” Oh, these words! Who were the cruel authors of incertitude who came up with such similar-sounding, hard-to-remember, Greek-rooted terms for processes that, in humans at least, had such different aims and frequencies of occurrence? Mitosis happens hundreds of billions of times a day, throughout our bodies; meiosis happens only in ovaries and testicles. Melvyn wrote Replaces dead cells .

Once Melvyn had written the ways in which mitosis and meiosis were different from each other, he then was supposed to list the ways they were similar. Finally he had to make a Venn diagram, referring to both lists. He had trouble keeping the two words distinct in his mind, and my increasingly clumsy attempts to explain just confused him. Finally he went off to get help from Mrs. Painter.

“Crap, I better do the BrainPOP,” said Paloma.

I said, “You better do that BrainPOP, because if you don’t do that BrainPOP—”

“There won’t be any BrainPOP left,” she said.

“Paloma, are you done?” called Mrs. Painter from across the room.

“Yep!” said Paloma. Then, in an undertone, “Nope.”

“Are you on the first one or the second one?” asked Bobby, who was drawing the hand of his cartoon soldier.

“The second one.” Paloma began playing part of a BrainPOP on the life cycle of the cell, but she forgot to plug in her earbuds. The BrainPOP narrator’s voice filled the room: “Prior to mitosis or meiosis—” She turned the volume down.

“Whee!” said a girl.

Bobby asked Paloma the answer to a question about the life cycle of the cell.