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

The students in blocks 2, 3, 4, and 5 did not work silently or independently, needless to say. Most were fractious and snarky and full of an extreme end-of-the-year impatience to be done with school. Very few produced anything close to a page of writing. Shakespeare was not a hit; they all disliked Romeo and Juliet to varying degrees. Jill said she absolutely hated it. Brendan said, “I thought that it was the stupidest play I’ve ever read. You’re fighting for no reason. You’re falling in love with a thirteen-year-old. You’re gay.” He flat-out refused to work on the project. Marcia, although she hadn’t liked the play, had finished the assignment. She’d chosen love and violence as her themes. “Basically I said that Verona’s in Italy, and Italy is known for romance,” she said. “But Italians are also stereotypically known as being hotheaded. That explains why the Capulets and the Montagues have the rivalry.” A kid named Myles wrote a good first sentence: Shakespeare wrote a suspenseful tragedy about a forbidden love. Another student, Malcolm, wrote two sentences: Italy, the country of love and violence. Verona is full of hot-headed people with funky outfits. Joel’s dramatic retelling began: This baffling story of a cannibal and a sadistic, crazed butt-stabber starts in a German slave dungeon on a cold, stormy, normal German day. Lionel’s version replaced the people with animals, and it began: “You slimy muck, you. You filthy scumbucket,” yelled Tibalt. “Be parted, tools,” commanded Denvolio. As the fray continued, the many animals involved were scratching, clawing, and biting each other, until through the streets gallops a donkey, and on its back lies a wee man, with a regal oversized hat in uniform. Stefan had come up with an excellent title and nothing more: “A Heartwarming Cold Steel Love.”

But the big and little things that happened that day had nothing to do with Shakespeare. Myles was yelled at for dumping a water bottle onto the pavement outside. Vince got suspended for harassing somebody. A kid named Titus Brown, in a Harley-Davidson sweatshirt and a Foreign Legion hat, had the idea of starting a fishing team at Lasswell, and Mr. Bartlett, Lasswell’s director of athletics, approved of the plan — it was going to be called the Lasswell Bass Masters.

And everyone had to turn in their iPads. Mrs. Moran, the science teacher who’d assigned the project on the layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, came into my classroom and said, “What we’re going to do is you need to get your iPad, gray case, black case, little wall pluggy-in thingy, and the long cord. So that’s five things. You need to get them out right now. I’m going to get my kids, they’re going to stand at the door, and you’re going to get all your crap together. You’re going to go with me.”

“What if we lost our iPad?” said Bernard.

“Then you’re going to get a six-hundred-and-fifty-dollar bill,” said Mrs. Moran. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. SHUT YOUR MOUTH. There’s going to be three lines. One line for people that have everything that they need. One line for people that are missing things. And one line for people with broken iPads. Say you have a restricted iPad. Obviously if you have a restricted iPad, you’ve not been able to delete anything. Tell them that when you hand it over to them. So you’re all going to wait here, with our wonderful substitute—”

“Mr. Baker!” said Tucker.

“Our wonderful substitute. And I’m going to bring my kids up here, and then we’re all going to go together to the east gym.”

They went off to the east gym, handed in their iPads, and returned, talking wistfully about lost apps and lost personal information. “I deleted everything,” said Daisy. “I deleted my contacts, everything.”

“No more iPad, no more iPad!” wailed Diana.

Soon Mrs. Moran came back in to say we had to attend freshman class elections. Two hundred ninth-graders and their teachers packed themselves into the cafeteria. There was no need for voting, though, because all the candidates were running unopposed. “Are you guys excited for your sophomore year?” said the current class president.

Cheering happened, followed by four echoing speeches from four girls — candidates for treasurer, secretary, vice president, and president — in which fund-raising successes and the word awesome figured prominently. The president-to-be closed by singing “We’re All in This Together.” Then she said, “What time is it? SOPHOMORE TIME!”

Yay! said the soon-to-be sophomores.

Back in class, April showed me the notes she’d made in the library for her Shakespeare paper. Her theme was love. “I just don’t want to be behind anymore,” said April, piling up overdue papers. “I’m trying to get ahead.”

At the end of the day, Lionel held out his fist for me to bump it. “I’m sorry, man, I love you,” he said.

“Knuckle it up,” I said. I also bumped knuckles with Dixon and Stefan and Joel. “Take care, guys. Good times.”

“Can I go to the band room?” asked Mira.

“Are you in tomorrow?” asked a silver-haired ed tech named Mrs. Ball.

“No, I’m not in tomorrow.”

“See you later!” said Daisy. Bye! Bye!

The room was empty, but I didn’t want to leave. I read some student poems that Mrs. Marsh had pinned to a corkboard. They all began with “I’m from.” A dirt-biker wrote: I’m from adrenaline rushes because of sports, snowmobiles and dirt bikes. / I’m from high land, mud bogs, and homegrown meat. A girl wrote: I’m from a town where we know each other’s names. / Where we don’t have to lock our doors at night. Another girl, from a family who made maple syrup, said: I’m from the trees that produce the sap / To the buckets that collect it all.

I loved these poems, these children, these six brick schools that made up Regional School Unit 66—I loved them with a Plutonic love. I loved the element cubes, and the rhombuses, and the glue guns, and the Mother’s Day bags, and the playgrounds, and the three-hole punchers, and the Tennsmith metal benders, and the hairy elbows, and the Pajama Days, and the Superhero Days, and the taxonomy-of-learning posters, and the antonym eggs, and the whining robots, and the stink bugs, and the Sharpies, and the SMILE folders, and the book buckets, and the lunch counts, and the whole broken, beautiful, wasteful, totally crazy educational system I’d been a part of. I hadn’t been a good teacher, but I’d passed out a lot of worksheets, and I’d learned a universe of things I hadn’t known. I packed away my computer, squirted a last squirt of hand sanitizer on my hands, and wrote a note for Mrs. Marsh, saying that the students were alert, funny, and good-natured, as always.

Boop. “Please excuse this interruption. Field hockey camp paperwork needs to be turned in to Mrs. Murphy ASAP. Thank you.”

I took a drink at the drinking fountain. “Hi, Mr. Baker,” called Tucker, waving.

I stood in the hall, watching the last kids leave. I saw April at her locker. “How did it go today?” I asked her.

“Good,” she said. “I got a whole page done.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “Great job.”

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

Outside, a wind was coming up, and the second-wave buses were idling, waiting to begin their rural wanderings. My Scrabble mug clanked against something in my briefcase. I noticed that I still had the substitute badge hanging around my neck and went back to the office to return it. “Awesome,” said Paulette.

I got in the car and turned on the engine. I thought, There are no key terms. There are no themes, no thesis sentences. There are no main ideas. Life’s curriculum is infinite. Most of the interesting things we know we can’t explain. Most of what we need to know we were not taught. Stay classy, Lasswell. I drove home. Day Twenty-eight was over.