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

“How about we have a Y for yes, and an N for no, since we have such tiny boxes?” said Rianna. She wrote an abbreviation key. “Y equals Y-E-S. N equals N-O.”

They ate for a while.

“I’d say we worked everything out pretty good,” said Rianna.

“For today, should we put yes or no?” asked Myra.

“It should be no, because we’re working it out.”

They wrote “N” in the today boxes, and “talk” in the boxes for how they’d resolved their disagreement.

Cecil came in. “What are you guys doing?”

“We’re talking about our privates,” said Myra.

Wild laughter. “Ew!”

I stood. “It’s after one o’clock. It is SILENT READING. SHHHH.” I turned the lights off.

“Can we keep going?” said Myra.

I whispered, “No, it’s absolutely silent reading. You’re going to have to continue this meeting tomorrow. I like what you’re doing, but you’ve got to table it now.”

A specials teacher came to take away several students.

I turned off the fan. Merciful joy of no fan. “Marshall, sit down!” I hiss-whispered.

“WHOO-HOO, WELCOME BACK!” said someone’s iPad reading app.

“Turn all the sounds off, and just use your eyeballs to read the words,” I said. “Eyes, words — no sounds.”

“Use your eyeballs,” said Demi.

The room became hot. I inspected the fan, which turned out to have a low setting. It had been on high the whole time. I moved it closer to the window and turned it on low. Marshall said that Mrs. Compton allowed some kids to listen to books with headphones. Fine.

“Oh, thank you, Your Majesty!” said an iPad.

Finally the parachute of silence spread over the class. All we could hear was the now tolerable fan and Mrs. Hulbert in the next room yelling to her class to line up.

Marshall continued to fidget. “Marshall!” said Ms. Lamarche. She coughed loudly and talked nonstop to the kids in the back of the class. She seemed to be physically incapable of whispering.

When the half hour was over, I said, “Okay, it’s Showbie time. Get your iPads out, get them warmed up, get them revved up. There should be worksheets for you to do.”

“God, there are three of them in there!” said Jonas.

“Ugh,” said Devin.

Marshall, meanwhile, had left for an alternate space-time continuum. “Flip around in your chair, Mr. Sir,” I said. “With your feet on the floor.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Marshall.

“And your mind in your head.”

I glanced at an iPad to see what the first worksheet was. It was about idioms. “Does anybody know what an idiom is?” They didn’t seem to know. “It’s a way of saying something without actually saying it. Be quiet, please. So if you say, ‘It is hot as a bee’s bananas outside,’ which I don’t think means all that much—”

“It just means that it’s really hot,” said Elijah.

“Right. So here it says, Casey is always on time. She is always…” Jonas was talking to Marshall. “Dudes? What is happening? Why don’t you stand up and read this one for us, please. Right now.”

“Okay,” said Jonas. “Casey is always on time. She is always on the dot.”

“What does ‘on the dot’ mean?” I said.

“Um, they’re early?”

“Right on time. It’s an example of something called an idiom. I liked the way you read it in a loud voice. Why don’t you try another? Jonas’s going to read this one in an even louder, ringinger voice.”

“The pizza was selling like hotcakes!”

Another ed tech arrived. She began having a chat with Ms. Lamarche, while I tried to explain the meaning of “chip on your shoulder.” I asked whether “Who let the dogs out?” was an idiom, not knowing the answer myself. The class ignored me.

“Can I tell you a joke?” said Clayton. “What do bananas always say when they’re having fun?”

“What?”

“Go bananas!”

“Good one,” I said. “What about ‘shake a leg’?”

“What about ‘break a leg’?” asked Myra.

“‘Break a leg’ means do really well, ‘shake a leg’ means get going.”

The second Showbie worksheet was about a dentist. I turned off the fan and read it to them, with the two ed techs chatting in the back. The heck with them, I thought, I’ll just be like the robotics teacher and roar over them. “DAVE WAS A DENTIST,” I read. “However, he was a very special dentist. He was very, very tiny. In fact, he was smaller than a toothbrush.” Dave has a new patient, a lion, who is in terrible pain and can’t eat. Dave goes into the lion’s mouth, which smells very bad, and, taking stock of the situation while standing on the lion’s tongue, he spots a bad cavity in one of the lion’s back teeth. He fixes the cavity and the lion is happy. “ However, the next time Dave saw the zookeeper coming, he hid in his closet. The end.” They had to answer detailed reading comprehension questions about the story: What was so special about Dave? What was the first thing he noticed when he stepped into the lion’s mouth? Etc. The worksheet seemed to be loosely based on William Steig’s Doctor De Soto , but without charm.

“What was the smell like?” I said.

“Smelled like raw poop,” said Cecil.

“Lions eat a lot of meat, so it probably smelled like bad meat,” I said.

Imogen coughed horribly. Elijah sneezed. “Bless you,” I said.

Ms. Lamarche turned the fan on high.

“How do you spell roar ?” said Devin.

Their last Showbie assignment was to write an alternative ending to Judith Viorst’s Lulu and the Brontosaurus , about a spoiled girl who wants a pet brontosaurus. It was an unusual book because it already had three endings, one sad, one happy, one mixed. “Write your own ending, and make it good,” I said. “Make the sentences rich. Lots of description. MY FRIENDS, IT’S TOO LOUD. Marshall, sit down. SIT DOWN. When you’ve written your end, bring it up to me, I’ll look it over, and then you can type it.”

Kirsten brought her alternative ending up: every week, Lulu and the brontosaurus went ice-skating together. Good. I pointed to where she needed to capitalize and punctuate and she was off to type it on her iPad. In Caroline’s ending Lulu tricked the brontosaurus by inviting him over for cake and asking him to close his eyes; while the dinosaur’s eyes were trustingly closed, Lulu quickly built a wall around her house so he could never escape. Jonas’s ending was not a happy one: Lulu called the brontosaurus a hag and the brontosaurus farted in Lulu’s face and said he hated her. Cormac had Lulu inviting the brontosaurus to Thanksgiving dinner, whereupon she dressed him as a clown and played football with him — and the brontosaurus dropped all the passes. In Wayne’s wrap-up, Lulu invited the brontosaurus over to play on a pogo stick; while bouncing on the pogo, the brontosaurus went to the bathroom and fell into his own poop.

“Right,” I said. “I want to hear more about how a brontosaurus can go on a pogo stick.”

“He has really tiny feet?” said Wayne.

“That’s quite an achievement. If you want to write about poop, that’s up to you, man. I think it would be better if you wrote about not-poop, but who am I to say?”

“Sorry,” he said, chortling. “I already typed mine in. What do I do now?”

I referred to the sub plans, and made an announcement. “IF YOU’VE FINISHED YOUR LULU ENDING, YOU CAN DO PICTURE OF THE DAY, FLUENCY CENTER, OR SHUFFLE CENTER, whatever that is.”

“I’ll do Picture of the Day,” said Wayne.

Sabrina said that Lulu and the brontosaurus didn’t end up living together, but they did schedule a playdate. Colleen, the selectively mute girl, wrote: Lulu asked the brontosaurus to be her pet, and she would give him leaves all the time, and would let him stay in the back yard. The end.