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

I put on Lennon’s “Imagine.”

“That’s so beautiful,” said Rianna.

“MAKE SURE YOUR ROW IS STRAIGHT,” said Ms. Lamarche. “CHARLIE! STUFF OFF THE FLOOR, PLEASE.”

I stopped the song.

“The day’s almost over,” I said to Imogen, who was looking sicker than ever.

“Good,” said Imogen.

“You’ll feel better tomorrow,” I said.

Ms. Lamarche was in motion. “HOW’S THE LIBRARY LOOK OVER THERE? CLAYTON!”

I went around with Clayton picking things up off the floor. “Who straightens up the rows, guys, let’s straighten up the rows,” I said.

Ms. Lamarche said, “IMOGEN, YOUR SEAT IS OVER THERE. WHY ARE YOU BACK HERE?”

Colleen brought up her Picture of the Day, a drawing of a happy swimmer. Her description said, She’s swimming. The girl is wet. There’s waves. There’s splashes. Brown hair. Mouth open. Blue bathing suit. Red cheeks. Blue water. Daytime.

“That’s a really beautiful thing,” I said.

“Can I use the bathroom?” said Colleen. She could speak!

“Of course you can use the bathroom,” I said.

Clayton showed me the ideal way to straighten a desk. “Keep them a little separate, but not too separate,” he said.

“You’ve done good work today,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “I want to tell you a fantasy joke. What does the iPad say to the other iPad?”

“What?”

“Go to the app store and you’ll get some more iPads!”

I laughed. “Do you make these up?”

Clayton nodded.

“What kind of music do you like?” I asked him.

“WHO IS IPAD FOUR?” said Ms. Lamarche. “ALL RIGHT, EVERYBODY, VOICES ARE OFF, PLEASE. IF I SEE YOU TALKING, YOUR NAME GOES ON THE BOARD, AND WE’LL START WITH RECESS TOMORROW. Marshall, you want to be the first one?”

“No.”

“THEN GO SIT DOWN. Whose iPad is number four?”

“Myra,” said the class.

“And she’s not here, right?”

I put on Lennon again and sang along.

“LET’S PACK AND STACK, PLEASE!” said Ms. Lamarche. “Elijah, can you stack Colleen’s chair, please. Philip, can you stack your chair, please? Devin, come clean off your desk! Devin! VOICES ARE OFF AND LISTENING, PLEASE. WHO’S TALKING?”

The secretary came on the PA system to read off an endless list of dismissals.

“All right, guys,” I said. “WHAT’S NINE TIMES SEVEN?”

“SIXTY-THREE?”

“I love it,” I said. They lined up. “Thank you very much for being in this class.”

“Are you going to be here tomorrow?” Porter asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Take it easy, guys.”

“You have to go with them to the bus,” said Ms. Lamarche.

“No, he doesn’t,” said Cecil.

“Yeah, he does,” said Ms. Lamarche.

I walked down the hallways, humming “God Bless America” for some reason, and I watched the children leap onto the buses like reverse paratroopers. I waved at the faces in the bus windows and went inside, drank greedily at the water fountain, and said, to the empty classroom, “That just about does it.” I put on “Imagine” and picked up stray scraps from the floor.

Day Twenty-seven was a wrap.

LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, NINTH-GRADE ENGLISH

PLUTONIC LOVE

ON WEDNESDAY, Beth said she needed a ninth-grade English teacher at Lasswell High. At seven-fifteen a.m. I parked at the far end of the cemetery, where there were no headstones yet, and no flags, and plenty of room for new graves, and waited for it to be time to go to school. It was a perfect, windless, cloudless morning. I thought about life and death. The day before, in Oregon, about the time my third-graders were writing their madcap endings to Lulu and the Brontosaurus , an angry ninth-grade student had brought two of his father’s guns to school. He shot one boy in a locker room, wounded a coach, and then killed himself in the bathroom. Pills? Rage? Why?

In the office, while I waited for Paulette to make copies of my schedule, one of the other secretaries told me what was happening at the high school. “We’re about to have graduation,” she said. “Getting those seniors through. Marching practice yesterday. Then, tomorrow night, graduation.”

I set off for the North Building. In the hall, a male teacher looked suspiciously at me. “Can I just ask who you are? Are you a sub? It’s just that you’re not wearing a tag.”

I told him I was supposed to get my tag in the North Building.

“All right, cool,” he said. Everyone was watchful the day after a school shooting.

Mrs. Marsh’s room was pale blue and still and the walls held many words and their definitions, some from the dark science of rhetorical analysis: ethos, logos , and pathos . A poster offered a quote from C. S. Lewis: “WE READ TO KNOW THAT WE ARE NOT ALONE.”

A kid named Cobie came in with a dead iPhone and a cord. He’d forgotten his wall charger. “Just put it in my computer,” I said. He hooked his phone up to my computer and left. I read more vocabulary words posted by Mrs. Marsh’s desk: placid, nuance, noxious, covert, abhor, allege , and appalled . Minutes passed.

Six bongs. Nobody was in the room with me for block one. The secretary came on the PA system. “Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance,” she said. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Please pause for a moment of silence. Thank you, and have a great day.” Since I had no students, I sat at Mrs. Marsh’s desk and read some of the papers she’d been grading. They had errors of tense and number, but they were honest and thoughtful, and they were not about dinosaur poop. One was a study of Pentatonix, a formidable music group that makes interesting arrangements . One was about the history of hairstyles. Once originality runs out, what do you have left? Old ideas. Stylists are usually just bringing back old trends. For example, the 1950s simple curled ponytail is coming back, but people are adding color and accessories to it. Rockabilly bangs had recently come back, too— not a very appealing design . One essay dealt with the effect of music on the brain. Music benefits the brain in mental, physical, and emotional ways , the writer said. x + y = 154 − 89x + 9x =? Do you know what it is? Are you doing this math problem with your headphones in? If you do, you’re more concentrated than you would be even if the room was silent. One was about video games: Grand Theft Auto is a series of games where you are a character that fights for what you want. For example if you wanted to be Vice City’s biggest criminal, you would be. You have to do different missions so you can get to be the biggest criminal, by violence, blood, sexual content, nudity, and never any good things. In an essay about social media, a boy had written, Young people’s social time is mostly shrinking. In the margin, Mrs. Marsh had corrected shrinking to dimishing —not much of an improvement, even if you added in the missing syllable. Cobie returned to get his phone.

The sub plans were brief. Block 2: “Take attendance. All students must work silently.” Block 3: “All students must work silently and independently on final project for Romeo and Juliet . Please check off that they have accomplished at least one page of work.” Activity block: “Take attendance. All students must work silently.” Block 4: “Take attendance. Same as Block 3.” Block 5: “Same as Block 3.” The instruction packet for the Romeo and Juliet project said that the students were supposed to determine the theme of the play, and then (a) come up with a music playlist that was redolent of the theme they’d identified, accompanied by 1,000 words of annotation, or (b) retell in 1,000 words the story of the play in a fresh setting while evoking their chosen theme, or (c) write a 750-word critical essay analyzing their chosen theme. To get students going in the right direction, there was a worksheet offering some possible themes they could pick from. These were Youth, Avoiding Fate/Destiny, and The Power of Love. The theme of love in Romeo and Juliet supposedly had five subtypes, listed on a separate worksheet page: Divine Love, Romantic Love, Familial Love, Superficial Love, and Plutonic Love. Mrs. Marsh, unsure of the difference between the god of the underworld and the Greek philosopher, had invented a new and wonderful form of love.