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

“We will freeze!” said a boy.

“No, we will not,” said Mrs. Shorter. “Yesterday, our best time was a minute and ten seconds. Our goal is to somehow get it under a minute. Remember, your first job is to get yourself to a safe place. Okay! PLEASE SECURE THE BUILDING!”

A hundred children pushed and shuffled as quickly as they could into the kitchen and found a space to stand in the cooler, the chemical room, the storage room, the back room, or the office. All five doors were shut.

“We’re still not getting through this doorway fast enough,” said Mrs. Shorter.

Everyone flushed back out to the cafeteria. “I smell hotdogs,” said Devin.

Mrs. Shorter gave some pointers about moving deeper into the kitchen faster, being silent, and not holding hands. “We also noticed room hopping,” she said. “If you’re in a room, it’s not who you’re with, it’s the fact that you’ve gotten yourself to a safe place. Remember, this is for your safety! Okay, PLEASE SECURE THE BUILDING!”

The second trial did not begin well and Mrs. Shorter stopped it partway through. “That was horrendous,” she said. She started them again. I timed them on my phone. One minute, thirteen seconds.

“Nice job, guys,” I said.

“You’re tall,” said a boy.

We went outside to practice another lockdown on the playground. Wayne brought along the red emergency bag, which held a key and a whistle and a walkie-talkie.

Mr. Stowe, the teacher who’d won a spa ticket, was master of ceremonies for this drill. He wasn’t a shouter; I liked him right away. “Three loud whistle-blows tells you secure the building,” he said to the group. “When you hear the three whistles, it is your job, as quickly as you can, to rush behind the basketball hoop and down to the trail. It’s kind of muddy, so our feet might get a little dirty, but that’s okay. We are going to walk down the trail. If it were a real emergency—”

“You would run,” said Rianna.

“You would be going as quickly as you can, and you would continue on that trail, all the way to the center of Wallingford to make sure that help was on the way. Today, we are just going to walk probably fifty yards or so down the trail. It needs to be silent. Right now you’re just going to be playing.”

The kids sprinted off to play.

“Do you want to be in charge of the whistle?” Mr. Stowe asked me.

“No, I don’t want to be in charge of the whistle!” I said.

Mr. Stowe inspected the whistle dubiously. “Lisa was the one who used it yesterday, and now she’s out today. Hm.” He wiped the whistle off thoroughly with a shirttail and blew it three times.

The children racewalked down a narrow trail through woods. Marshall and his confederates shot off at top speed. Mr. Stowe yelled and I tongue-whistled to call them back.

“Oh my gosh, look how far they ran,” said Myra.

We walked back to the building and lined up.

“I was running like never before,” said Clayton, who was winded and hot.

When my class had lined up, I said, “Excellent emergency management training activities. Nice going.”

“I ran all the way down the trail,” said Marshall.

Mr. Stowe reviewed the drill — what went well, what didn’t go well. Everyone had moved quickly, and hadn’t tried to stick with their friends. “In a real emergency, continuing to run like that is the best thing you can do. For today, I would say that some of you went a bit farther than fifty yards. And we could have been a little bit more quiet. I know it’s exciting, we’re running off into the woods, but we need to be as quiet as we can.”

“We went like seventy yards,” said Cecil, back in class.

“We went like seventy thousand yards,” said Marshall.

“We went like ninety yards,” said Cormac.

“EVERYBODY SIT IN THEIR SEATS, PLEASE,” said Ms. Lamarche.

Each kid had a Math Menu on his or her iPad and was supposed to do what it said for forty minutes. Every time a student tapped in the correct answer, the iPad chirped like a smoke detector with a low battery. I went around asking what nine times seven was. Half knew, half guessed or looked it up on the matrix taped to their desks. The sub plans said they were supposed to be working quietly, so I bellowed, “EVERYBODY BE QUIET, RIGHT NOW. You simply cannot concentrate if everybody’s talking this loudly.”

The intercom came on. “Is Imogen Reynolds there today?”

Yes! said the class.

“Okay, thank you.”

Imogen had a bad cough and went to the nurse. Ms. Lamarche turned the fan on — gosh, it was loud. Wayne wanted help with a word problem: The amazing upside-down carnival is coming to town, and they need help filling out their brochure. Can you fill in the missing information? He had to find the perimeter of the roller coaster and several other rides in a chart, but he’d forgotten what perimeter was. We worked out the answer, which was eighteen feet. Why was the roller coaster so small? Why was a third-grader doing perimeter problems on his iPad when he still hadn’t mastered addition or subtraction, or his times tables?

“What’s nine times seven?” I asked Cecil.

“I’m past my nines, I don’t remember them that good.”

“For today, just remember that one. What’s nine times seven?”

“Sixty-three,” he said.

Every time I helped somebody with some higher-level problem, I asked him or her what nine times seven was. Some couldn’t learn it, some could. “Burn it into your brain,” I said. It didn’t matter, except in school.

“Burn it, burn it, burn it,” said Jonas.

“My brain’s going to be illegal!” said Clayton.

A few kids were doing clock problems, but most were struggling with perimeter measurement. Demi showed me her screen: The perimeter of a square family room is 36. How long is each side? After five minutes of coaching and drawing pictures and counting out wooden blocks, she got the answer. It was obviously too hard for her. Because so much happened on iPad screens, the class was out of the habit of using scrap paper to draw shapes and lengths.

“Mr. Baker, I don’t get it,” said Elijah. “The perimeter of a square piece of tissue paper is one hundred twenty centimeters. How long is each side?” In order to answer the question, Elijah had to remember that a square was made up of four equal sides, and then, after sketching the square, he had to construct a proto-algebraic equation in his head:

+ + + equals 120 centimeters

This expression, he had then to understand, was the same as

times 4 equals 120 centimeters

Then he had to remember how to divide 120 by 4, which relied on his knowing that 12 divided by 4 is 3. His iPad finally chirped with the right answer, but Elijah, I’m sorry to say, was lost.

I swerved back to tutor Wayne, who’d been hit with an even harder problem: The perimeter of an air hockey table is 26 feet. It’s four feet wide. How long is it? After five minutes of drawing pictures and thinking about the nature of rectangles, Wayne got the answer, and his iPad chirped. He sat back, smiling and relieved. Along the way he’d tried to multiply 26 by 4, and he’d insisted that half of 18 was 8. Perimeter problems could wait. The quick, cute iPad lessons were luring these third-graders out to sea in little rowboats and leaving them there to sink.