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

“That’s badass, I have to say,” said Artie, leaning over.

“Check this out,” said Lucas.

A huge wave of mud spewed out from monster tires. “Oooh, nice,” they said.

Adam, who had chewed-up fingernails, showed me a picture on his iPad of his four-wheeler. It had two speeds. You’re supposed to drive up a hill in first, he said, but he’d had to shift to second to make progress. “It isn’t dangerous unless you’re stupid,” he added.

The electric bongs happened again, and it was a new block. A sad girl showed up. She’d been crying because her boyfriend had broken up with her. Rianne hugged her and stroked her cheek. Shamus said, “I could put up my kickstand for you.” Then, imitating a teacher, he said, in a low voice, “That is not acceptable!”

“I’ll tell you what’s not acceptable,” said Artie. “What if I whipped down my pants and took a shit on your grave?”

Shamus and Rianne laughed. Later Rianne tried to take a nap lying on Shamus’s lap.

Another teaching assistant showed up for a little while — very young, a recent graduate of the high school. He’d grown a goatee to look older than the students. He joshed with the young men about trucks, about jobs, about snowplowing, and about somebody’s older brother. His name was Mr. C.

When the mudding videos got too loud, I told the trucker boys to turn them down — and they did. They were, in a way, polite. Every so often I would prod a student to work on math. “Math is like my worst subject,” one of them said. “It’s just stupid. I don’t understand it. I hate it. It’s a total waste.”

But one kid, Colin, with a wavy shock of hair, sat silently the whole time, earbuds in, listening to music, crouched over, doing homework, erasing and rewriting answers.

When I stood up, several people said, “You’re tall! How tall are you?”

The morning went by slowly. My head felt stuffed with cotton balls and I had trouble sitting up and looking authoritative. There was no coffee machine, so I sipped a Coke to stay alert. I sighed loudly at one point, and Clyde gave me a sympathetic look. “I hear you,” he said. “I feel your pain.”

The clock was an hour off because of daylight savings, which had just happened. “You’re lucky you weren’t here yesterday,” said Clyde. “Everybody was grumpy. People were standing in the hallway yelling — it was bad.”

Suddenly the bonger bonged for lunch. By the time I got out to the car I realized I didn’t have time to drive somewhere and buy a sandwich, so I ate three Blue Diamond almonds I found in my car and drank the rest of my Coke.

Back at my desk, I studied the sub plans for what was supposed to happen after lunch. A girl, Charlee, had written a paper, and I was supposed to help her finish her bibliography, which needed to have at least three sources in it. She was sitting, staring into space, listening to music, looking goth but neat. And bored.

“So, you’re working on a paper,” I said.

Charlee nodded.

“What about the bibliography?”

She sighed.

“What are you writing about?”

“Oh, we had to write about an animal.”

“An animal! That’s pretty gripping, pretty interesting.”

“Isn’t it?” she said sarcastically.

“Of course, it depends on the animal,” I said. “What did you choose?”

“The wolverine.”

“I thought that was a shoe,” I said.

“It could be a brand of shoe, but it’s a damn wolverine,” Charlee said. “I’ll show you.” She tipped her iPad toward me.

“Oh, it’s a small, friendly, furry creature,” I said.

“It’s like me,” said Charlee. “Small but hostile.”

Artie called out, “Girl, get your ass to work!”

She began talking to her friend about what they were doing after school: they both had orientation and training at a Hannaford supermarket, where they’d just gotten jobs.

I was also supposed to encourage a certain boy, Logan, to finish a “health assessment” on suicide. “He only has one section left!” said the sub plans.

I went over to him. “So you’re working on something about suicide?”

“Yeah.” Logan was a serious kid, in a gray, zipped-up hoodie, with short hair and black eyebrows.

“And you’ve got one section left?”

“Yeah, I’m not going to do that, that’s for extra credit.” He showed me what he’d done. He’d been given a transcript of an actual call to a suicide prevention unit in which a despairing man talked ramblingly about how he had no reason to live, and about how much he wanted to die. Logan had, as asked, highlighted the “warning phrases” of suicidality with a yellow highlighter.

“That’s quite an assignment,” I said.

Logan said, “Yeah, I know.”

“Well, you’re almost there, you’re on the home stretch, finish it up if you can.”

He began playing a video game on the iPad, in which two hoppy animated creatures leapt up and down on a mountain range. Then his iPad froze. “My iPad froze!” he said indignantly.

And so the day ticked by. Nobody wreaked havoc or did anything too horrible. On the other hand, only a few students did anything that Lasswell High School would define as actual work. At a guess, I’d say that 1 percent of total class time — no, less than that — was taken up with algebra, geometry, health, history, language arts, or any other subject that the school was supposedly in the business of teaching. And yet, so what? I liked the kids and felt that given their forced idleness and the futility of their academic days, they were doing an impressive job of staying sane and keeping their senses of humor.

The means they had available to pass time productively had improved dramatically because of the iPad. In the old days, they would have made spitballs, or poked their neighbors — now they could watch mudding videos, which actually interested them, or take pictures of each other, or play chirpy video games. The iPad had improved their lives.

Nobody expected most of them to do academic work, it seemed, because long ago they’d been labeled as kids with “special needs”—even though in fact they were, judging by their vocabulary, their temperament, and their fluent way with irony, normal American high schoolers. They weren’t masterminds, but that wasn’t why they were in this room — they were here because they quietly refused to do work that they hated.

At the very end of the day, just before the bell rang, everybody gathered by the door. I began putting the computers away. (There were, in addition to the ubiquitous iPads, carts full of old Apple laptops.) Lydia, a girl with braces, in a pink sweatshirt, came in, very keyed-up and wild. She began throwing a pen around. I said, “Hey, hey, hey.”

“Stop it, or the substitute won’t come back,” said her friend Shelby.

“I’ll be back,” I said. “I enjoyed it.”

“See, he enjoyed it,” said Lydia.

I felt like a figure of fun, but not so like a figure of fun that I didn’t want to do it again. I hadn’t helped anybody learn anything, I’d just allowed them to be themselves; I was there for a day to ensure that room 18 didn’t descend into utter chaos. My role was to function as straight man, to give these kids the pleasure of avoiding meaningless schoolwork. And that was maybe a useful role.

The final six bells bonged and everybody surged out and the room was empty again. I wrote a note to Mrs. Prideaux saying that the kids had been good-natured and funny, and that I was grateful to have had a chance to fill in. As I was driving home, I remembered something Clyde, the snowplower, had said. “You’ve got your good kids and you’ve got your bad kids. And sometimes your bad kids can be your good kids.”

And that was the end of Day One.