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

It was warm and brightly fluorescent inside — not loud. Students with expressionless early-morning faces were leaning against lockers or kneeling on the floor going through their backpacks or hugging in corners. One of the secretaries, a small, pleasant, quick-moving woman in a gray cocktail dress, gave me a folder full of papers and a lanyard with a tag on it that said SUBSTITUTE, and she took me to room 18 and unlocked the door. It was a small hot space, with about ten desks, some bookshelves, some cabinets, and a whiteboard. Taped to the wall was an information sheet on attention deficit disorder. The walls were cinderblock, painted a cream color.

“Here are your attendance sheets,” the secretary said. “I’ve highlighted the different blocks that you have. All you need to do is mark them absent or tardy and then have a student bring them down to the office.” There were two lunches, she explained, and I had Lunch B, which began in the middle of block 4, at 11:49 a.m.

I thanked her and she went away. I sat down at the desk. There was a SpongeBob jar on it filled with pencils and dry-erase markers, and piles of student papers and worksheets and abandoned notebooks. A teacher — plump and capable looking — stopped by to introduce herself.

“Anything I should know?” I said.

“There are some challenging kids, because this is all special ed,” she said. “But Helen’s had subs before and it goes pretty well. I’m close and happy to help if I can.” She went away. I opened the folder and read Mrs. Prideaux’s sub plans.

Six electric bongs came over the PA system, followed by a longer boop, and then a secretary’s voice came on. “Good morning, please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.” I stood in the empty room, but I didn’t speak, because there was nobody in the room with me yet. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,” said the secretary over the loudspeaker, “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.” There was a moment of silence, another electric boop, and then she said, “Thank you, and have a great day.” School was in session. It got very quiet. I had no students.

After a long time, the electric bongs bonged again, and it was the beginning of block 1. A girl walked in. “Hello,” I said. “Hello,” she said. She dropped her backpack by a desk. I asked her her name and checked it off on a list. She left. A boy came in and sat down and opened a container of diced fruit. I checked his name off on the attendance sheet. Another kid came in and began looking through the cupboards, opening them and closing them rapidly.

“How are you doing?” I said.

“Good,” he said. In one of the cupboards he found a bag of cheese-flavored popcorn. He sat down.

“What’s your name?”

“Jack.”

“Hi, Jack, good to meet you. I’m Nick. Are you in this class?”

“No, but I usually come over here from across the hall and do work.” He sat and ate popcorn, blinking sleepily.

I asked him what kind of math he was supposed to be working on.

“I’m doing something else, I’m working on history.” He said he was researching the Vietnam War.

“Interesting,” I said. “So who started it?”

He didn’t answer.

“Hard to say, right?” I said. “Goes way back into the mists of time. People say Kennedy wanted to get us out of Vietnam. Do you think he did?”

“I think so,” said Jack.

I read a supplemental part of the sub plans, which was in capitals. “ALGEBRA 2 STUDENTS WILL COME IN WITH BREAKFAST AND MAY BE A LITTLE LATE. I’VE BEEN SOMEWHAT EASY ON THEM BECAUSE THEY’RE GOOD WORKERS.”

“People seem to wander in and out of this room,” I said to Jack.

“Yeah, they do.”

“So what do you like better, math or history?”

“Probably history.”

More students stopped by the door, saw that I was a substitute, and left to prowl the halls in search of friends. A girl wrote something on a Post-it note and asked me to sign it. It was permission for her to go to the library.

“Should I have signed that?” I asked Jack.

“Probably not,” he said.

I checked off some more names. They were juniors, it turned out. Some, who were taking Algebra II, were supposed to log on to a piece of software called MobyMax and take a test on their “core curriculum standards.” Some took it, some didn’t.

The bonger bonged again and some new students showed up. These were chattier. People were waking up now. I met a kid named Clyde who was interested in trucks and wore a plaid shirt and a baseball hat. He said he made good money by plowing people’s driveways. His grandfather had gotten him a truck which was completely rusted out — you could see the road through the floor, he said, and it wouldn’t pass inspection — so his father found him another truck on Craigslist for fifteen hundred dollars that he was happy with. Clyde told me that it was tricky to plow driveways right now, because the ground was starting to thaw. If it’s a paved driveway, then you can just drop the plow down on the asphalt, but if it’s a dirt driveway, you don’t want to rip up the surface by plowing too deep. “You get a feel for it after a while,” he said.

Another kid named Shamus came in, a quietly amused young man, also wearing a baseball hat, who turned out to have a girlfriend named Rianne. Rianne was round-faced and pale and wore very tight black pants and a black-and-pink-striped shirt and she worked at McDonald’s. She’d worked until three in the morning the night before, closing the store. “I don’t sleep,” she said. That was how she got through high school, she said, by not sleeping. She leaned against Shamus with her eyes closed, while Shamus looked at videos on his iPad.

Shamus’s friend Artie appeared — a loud, jokey storyteller, who liked to get as close as he could to dropping the f-bomb without actually dropping it: “I was like ‘What the fffffff… udge?’” He was stocky and handsome, and he spent his time trying to find good-looking bathing beauties on his iPad from websites that weren’t blocked. He was supposed to be doing a geometry worksheet.

Ms. Laronde, a young “ed tech”—a teaching assistant — came in to help Artie. She reminded him of the difference between complementary and supplementary angles. In a soft, faintly ironic voice, Ms. Laronde questioned and coaxed and prodded and finally got him to write his name at the top of the worksheet. That was all the geometry he did — he wrote his name. Besides that he told stories and said unexpected things. “My horrible fear is when you wake up and one of your eyes is swollen shut,” he suddenly announced. “I’m probably going to die at the age of forty-five.”

Ms. Laronde left to coach other students with Individualized Education Plans and Artie and Shamus began talking about milk. Artie said, “Boobies, cow boobies, that’s where the milk comes from.” He told a story about his little brother, who was seven. They were listening to Eminem and his little brother said, “Shut off those nigga beats.” Artie said, “Those aren’t nigga beats, those are cracker beats.” Later Artie’s father came home and asked what they’d been doing. His little brother said, “We were listening to cracker beats.”

The sub plans said I was supposed to discourage a tall, wiry kid named Lucas from playing on his iPad. I tried. Lucas and his friend, who wasn’t on the attendance sheet but who was allowed to visit, according to Mrs. Prideaux, were interested in watching YouTube videos of pickup trucks driving around in fields of mud — a sport called mudding. Some of the mudding trucks were “duallies”—trucks with two pairs of tires in the back. One truck was notable in that it had dually tires in the front and the back. “How can you even steer with duallies in the front?” Lucas’s friend asked. They tipped their iPads in each other’s direction: “Whoa, that’s a nice truck!”