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

“Now close your eyes and put your hands on your head,” said the reading enrichment person. “Think of the characters. Think about the setting. Think about the beginning, the middle, the end. Think about the problem. Think about the solution.” We thought about all these things. She asked who the characters were, what the setting was, what the problem was. Hands went up, the right answers came back. “You guys did it all,” the reading enrichment teacher said. “You retold the whole story, problems, solutions — wow!”

We walked silently back to the room. “Can I have a drink, because my throat hurts?” asked a sniffly girl named Jessamyn. I said she could — there was a sink with a drinking fountain by the bookcases. According to the sub plans, I had to get through the four-leaf-clover poem quickly, because we had to have a spelling test and then snack time and then a reading of a Tacky the Penguin book before writing a story about a leprechaun. “Okay, guys, listen up,” I said. “Everybody got three holes in their poem? Good. Everybody take a seat. Guys! So this poem is a— GUYS! Chip chip aroo! Hop! Hip! This poem is kind of weird and I need your help with it.”

They quieted down and we read the poem together. It was supposed to be funny — it’s by a light-versist named Jack Prelutsky and it’s about a kid who finds a four-leaf clover that brings only bad luck — but the kids didn’t go for it. Perhaps it wasn’t the right note to strike on St. Patrick’s Day, especially coming immediately after the poem about the trickster leprechaun. I read:

I barked my shin, I missed my train,

I sat on my dessert.

“Ew,” said Ellie. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

When we got to the end, Anastasia said, very simply, “I have a lot of four-leaf clovers in my garden.”

“I have grass in my yard,” said Benjamin.

It was time for the unit 17 spelling test. Several kids suddenly discovered that they needed to sharpen their pencils: there was a lot of earnest grinding away at the fancy electric pencil sharpener hidden behind the teacher’s desk. They all knew where it was.

“All right, let’s do this! Parker! Have a seat. Has everybody written their name at the top of the page? GUYS!”

“Do you want me to clap them out?” said Tessa, with an eager expression.

“Sure, clap them out,” I said.

She frowned importantly and held her hands over her head and went clap, clap, clap-clap-clap .

Immediately the whole class went clap, clap, clap-clap-clap .

About the spelling test, the sub plans said: “You read the words on the pink sticky note, giving sample sentences for each word.” I could do that. “Were,” I said. I made up a sentence: “We were going to Kohl’s to buy a pair of flip-flops. Were. ”

“Kohl’s?” said several voices.

“Macy’s?” I said. “Walmart? Somewhere.”

“I’ve been to Macy’s,” said Jessamyn, who was wearing a yellow shirt that matched her barrette.

I went on to the next word. “ Look. Look before you leap, then leap like a madman and then look again. Look. ”

They wrote.

“Number three,” I said. “ Down. Down we go, deeper into the ocean than we’ve ever gone before. Down. ”

“Where there are some strange fishes,” said Bryce, the boy who’d read The Lightning Thief .

“Leopard fishes,” said Anastasia. “Glowing leopard fishes that have glowing eyes!”

There were twelve words altogether. The toughest one was through . I remembered learning how to spell it for the first time. After the test was over I wrote through on the board. “The beginning is pretty simple,” I said. “T-H, th , and R, thr . But then you think, Hmm, there are all kinds of strange letters in there. It looks like it should be ‘throg-hah.’”

“Throg-hah!” said Carter.

“But no, it’s through . You have to journey all the way through those U-G-H letters to get to the end. Okay, and now it’s snack time, folks.”

Everyone pulled out their snacks. Some lined up at the sink to wash their hands. Cerise showed me where the Tacky the Penguin picture books were — propped on the ledge against the blackboard. People sucked on juice pouches and ate Goldfish crackers while I read the story of Tacky the Penguin’s trip on an ice floe to a tropical island, where he meets a strange soft, hairy, gray rock that turns out to be an elephant. I secretly skipped some pages to get to the end. Must keep to the schedule.

Ms. Keeler, an amiable, gentle-voiced ed tech, came in to help while the kids wrote and illustrated a story about what they would do if they met a leprechaun. We spent almost an hour on this activity. I wrote leprechaun on the blackboard, and surprise and favorite . The class had, it seemed, developed a certain animus toward leprechauns. “I would hide in my room till it was morning time,” said a girl named Evelyn. “I’d catch it in a jar and flush it down the toilet,” said Ellie. “I’d dissect it,” said Spencer, and he drew a black cage with a leprechaun trapped inside. “I would give it a piece of cake with poop inside,” said Tessa — Ms. Keeler helped her spell poop . “I would steal his gold cake,” wrote Dominic. “I would feed it cheese,” said Marina. “I would feed it an elephant,” said Jordan. Cerise was more affectionate; she said she’d keep her leprechaun with her forever. After the ed tech went to lunch, Tessa asked if they could use sparkly stickers to decorate their drawings, and I said sure — which was not the right answer. The sparkly stickers came from a sacred upper cupboard, and several indignant girls told me that the class was forbidden to use anything in the upper cupboard. “Yes we can, if the teacher says!” said Tessa. It took several minutes to sort that disagreement out — and then it was 11:10 and time for the forty-minute gym class.

I raised two fingers to signal for them all to be quiet. Again we traipsed wordlessly through the hallways. In gym they lined up along a line on the floor and the teacher put on Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” at high volume. They started running around the gym in circles. “I’ll see you at eleven-fifty,” the gym teacher said.

Out in my car, I drank the second cup of coffee, staring at a dead oak leaf, resting. My knees hurt.

Back in gym, my class was finishing something called NASCAR, in teams of two. One child sat on a blue stool perched on a wooden square with rolling wheels, and the other pushed his teammate around the gym. Jayson and Parker won, they informed me, having pushed each other around the gym fifty-two times. Everyone was sweaty and completely wiped out. Tessa, whining, said she wanted to go to the nurse because her stomach hurt badly. I told her to try a drink of cold water. They all went into the bathrooms near the cafeteria and then they lined up in the cafeteria’s lunch line. “This is your lunch break,” said the sub plans.

I ate a sandwich at my desk and wondered if I’d taught anything at all that morning of use to anybody. It didn’t seem as if I had. Did it matter? Yes, I think it did matter, more so in elementary school than in high school, because being able to read is a universally useful skill. The basic problem was that we live in a jokey, chatty world — which is a good thing — but a room full of eighteen jokey, chatty children is an inefficient place to learn.

I thought of my own second-grade teacher, Mrs. Richards — a dark-haired woman with a sly smile. She liked a report I did, “Workers Who Keep Us Well”—I drew a dentist’s office, with a patch of cracked plaster on the wall, and a garbage truck with two men behind it holding garbage cans. The garbagemen kept us well, I wrote, because they took away all the garbage. Once I went up to Mrs. Richards’s desk to ask her a question and unintentionally caught sight of her black, spiral-bound gradebook, where she’d written everyone’s name in beautiful cursive. “Nosy!” she said, which hurt my feelings. She was a really good teacher. She taught us how to spell elephant and umbrella , and how to carry the one in addition. And she taught us the golden rule.