Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY EIGHT. Friday, March 28, 2014

LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, ED TECH

HE’S JUST A HAIRY PERSON

FRIDAY WAS A DIM, RAINY, SLUSHY DAY, and Beth again had me working as an ed tech at the high school. US History was my first class, taught by a Mr. Boxer, a confident, goateed man of fifty with an iron throat — he had the loudest, carrying-est teaching voice of anyone I’d heard so far. Mr. Boxer’s students were working in groups on the same project that Mr. Domus’s students were working on: antebellum reform movements. They’d been given a choice of five topics to investigate — temperance, abolition, women’s rights, education, or religious reform — and they had to use three primary-source documents in their presentation. “A question came up in the other class in terms of what do I mean by documents,” Mr. Boxer said. “So I want to take a look real quick — I figured by this point in time you guys knew what primary-source documents were, because somewhere along the way somebody should have showed you those, like in third grade.” He chuckled. “Apparently that hasn’t happened yet.”

He stopped to take attendance, and then continued. Wow, his voice was loud — maybe that was really the secret. “MKAY,” he said, putting some text from the Yale library website up on the overhead projector. “Let’s take a quick look at this, just to make sure that you can find three documents that pertain to what you’re talking about. Things like books that somebody would have written at the time.” He began reading from the screen. “Determining what is a primary source can be tricky, and in no case is this more apparent than with books and pamphlets. From one vantage point, books are the quintessential secondary sources. But sometimes, because they’re written by people who lived at the time, they can be primary sources. NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS — if you can find something from a newspaper at that time. Government documents would count as a primary source. Manuscripts. Diaries, those sorts of things.”

Mr. Domus came in. He’d had a problem in his class with a movie: after six minutes, it just stopped playing. “Should I try The Story of Us—see if that plays? It’s good.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Boxer. “They can still answer a few questions with it.” He continued. “ARTIFACTS.” The class had begun to chat. “GUYS, I’M TRYING TO HELP YOU HERE. Visual materials. Pictures, political cartoons, art — those are primary documents. Music from the time period. Somebody’s recording. Oral history. Those sorts of things are primary sources. Does that help you, in terms of what you are looking for? Mkay? You have to get your presentations ready for MONDAY — whichever one of the five that you’re working on. If you need help, let me know, I can come around. Your presentation can be a Keynote, it can be a poster, it can be an iMovie trailer, whatever you think it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be long. You’re just giving a little bit more information on one of those five reform movements. Are we all set? GO! You’ve got the block. You will not have time Monday to work on this. You had all block yesterday.”

The class got down to work, talking in low voices.

I walked over to a cluster of three upscale slacker dudes in dark T-shirts, Louis, Dolan, and Seth, who’d been squirting each other from a tiny canister of something. Louis was wiping his eye and sniffing. “So, guys, good morning,” I said in an almost-whisper.

“Hello,” said Seth, with an ironic smile.

“I’m filling in for Mrs. Brunelle, the ed tech person,” I said. “Tell me what she does.”

“She just kind of sits there,” said Dolan. “I don’t see that there’s a point to being an ed tech. The job must suck.”

I said, “It’s an interesting job because you get to see people squirt each other in the eye with — whatever that was. What was that?”

“Listerine!” said Louis, scrubbing at his face.

“That must have hurt,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Dolan. “He thought it was funny, so I sprayed him back.”

“How’s my eye?” said Louis, looking up at me.

“Looks okay, looks good. So what’s the reform that you’re doing?”

“We’re doing education,” said Seth.

“Education! That is crucial.” I suggested that they check out some of the primary sources on the Library of Congress website.

Louis turned to Dolan. “Why are you mad at me? You sprayed me like ten times worse!”

I asked them what they thought were some good primary sources to find out about education.

“Newspapers?” said Seth.

“Yes,” I said, “and diaries — teachers’ diaries, saying this was my agonizing day, students’ diaries. Students saying the conditions are appalling, there are no chairs, whatever. You could search for ‘primary sources education reform.’”

They looked away; they wanted me gone, and I couldn’t blame them. I got up and looked around. Somebody in the front of the room dropped the f-bomb.

“Hey, LANGUAGE,” said Mr. Boxer. “I don’t care about much, but I care about that one.”

I went over to Vera and Denise, two tough-looking young women, and introduced myself. I asked them if the ed tech normally talked to people.

“Not really,” said Vera.

“Why is she here, then?” I asked.

They shrugged. “It’s a job,” said Denise.

“What reform movement are you doing?”

“Women’s rights,” said Vera.

I tried to steer them to some primary-source documents about suffrage.

Louis and Dolan were still arguing about the spraying incident. “You’re not supposed to spray it all over the place!” said Louis. “You’re supposed to spray a little.”

“That’s exactly what I did,” said Dolan.

“No fucking way!”

“I sprayed from here, dude. From here.”

Mr. Boxer put his pen down. “Guys, language! Stop! Jeez! Little bit unnecessary.” He went back to grading papers.

I overheard Michelle, the girl from biology, say, “Should we add that it took almost ninety years for them to get the rights that they wanted?”

Three-quarters of the class was discussing their chosen reform. They’d found some Internet sources and they were dutifully pasting political cartoons into Keynote slides. Mr. Boxer, doing the rounds, cautioned a student. “Be careful with education,” he said. “Make sure you go antebellum. Don’t do education reform today. We’ve seen what education reform looks like today — you’re the living, breathing experience of that. It’s gone well!” He laughed a fatalistic laugh. “Education didn’t need reforming, at all. It was pretty good. It was okay!”

Vera suppressed three sneezes.

Mr. Boxer glanced at the clock. “You’ve got twenty minutes, basically, to make sure you’ve got a Keynote ready for Monday.”

Louis was still sniffing and hawking from the retributive Listerine squirt. I sat and read the assignment sheet. The students needed to spell out the breakdown/details of the particular reform. What initial steps were taken to implement this reform? What did the initial reform call for (nuts and bolts of this reform)? Why COULD this reform be effective? In addition to finding three primary sources, they had to come up with a bibliography. This presentation will be scored based on the Antebellum Reform Presentation and Project Rubric, the sheet said. I tried to look up some primary sources myself and got an error message from the school’s Wi-Fi network: “The website you have requested may contain content that is inappropriate and has been blocked by this system.”

The noise level began to rise. “REMEMBER, Monday these need to be done,” Mr. Boxer warned. “You’ll present then.”

He turned to me. “The next class would be more fun for you to sit in,” he said, in a normal conversational voice. “My AP US History class. We get to watch a little Cold War stuff today — a little duck and cover. My favorite video ever, with Bert the Turtle. It’s awesome. It’s the most unintentionally funny thing ever, the way they talk about how you can survive an attack.”

The class gathered at the door. “ENJOY YOUR WEEKEND, STAY OUT OF PRISON,” boomed Mr. Boxer.

I smiled. “You’ve got it down,” I said to him.

“Thanks. It’s a pretty good gig. Or at least it used to be a pretty good gig. Beats a real job, I guess.”

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Why six bongs? We got the message at two.

Ms. Accardo, the high-energy health teacher, was back teaching in her modular classroom after some training days. She passed out a packet on suicide prevention. I read a few of the warning signs on the first page. Hopelessness was a warning sign, the packet said, along with statements such as: Things will never get any better. There’s nothing anyone can do. I’ll always feel this way. How long does it take to bleed to death?

“All righty, then!” said Ms. Accardo. She took attendance. “You’re Jacob. You’re Wesley. And you’re — Maria? I’m not doing too bad when it comes to names. Okay, then. In this accordion pocket folder, if you have not yet passed in your anger management assessment, please do so. It’s going to come around the room. If you did, awesome! If you did it electronically and you want to submit it on Edmodo, do it! Via email, you may do that, too. Whichever one it is that you want to do, whether it’s electronically, a piece of paper, I don’t care. If you have a piece of paper, put it in the second slot. Cool beans? All right, then! Anyone have a pink highlighter?”

Maria handed Ms. Accardo a marker and she tried it out on the whiteboard.

“It looks more purple than pink,” she said, “so it’s not going to work for our purposes. And I’m UNPLUGGING the pencil sharpener. You’ll have to plug it in elsewhere if you need to sharpen a pencil in the meantime. Does anyone else need a folder, because your backpack is eating your things? There you go. You, too? Okay, anyone else need a packet, because your backpack’s hungry? You’re all good. All righty, then.”

She looked down at her notes and got very serious. “Everyone comes from different backgrounds, different experiences,” she said. “So it’s really important to be respectful to everyone that’s in the room. I personally lost a friend to suicide two years ago now. She had a lot of life events that were going on. She was suffering from depression. You know those commercials for medications that say, ‘If you experience suicidal thoughts, contact your doctor right away’? They’d JUST changed her meds! She had a migraine for three days. So: the migraine, the depression with the new meds, and she was a breast cancer survivor. She didn’t say anything to anybody. Her posts on Facebook were, ‘My head is killing me,’ but she was pretty positive. So — people may have friends or family, or maybe some symptoms within themselves. It’s important to be respectful of everyone. You especially are going to see it, and hear it, first, before us.”

Ms. Accardo said she was a mandatory reporter, meaning that she was required by law to report suicidal speech or behaviors. “If I suspect or know that someone is harming themselves, being harmed by someone else, or is going to harm someone else, I have to report any of those situations. It’s required. Have to. That said, if you find that someone is in need of assistance, you can still come to me and talk to me, if you’re comfortable with me. If you’re not comfortable with me, I would hope that you would find somebody who you are comfortable with.” Sometimes a student from an earlier year talked to her, she said. “Maybe you’re concerned ‘My friend will be so mad if I talk to you.’ In this case, it’s better to have an angry friend than a dead friend.”

She put on a movie, made with the help of student actors, meant to illustrate various warning signs of suicide, one of which was the giving away of prized possessions. To someone who is seriously depressed, you’re not supposed to say, “Come on, it’s really not that bad.” Never say that everything will be all right. Don’t lie to cheer a person up. Avoid saying, “You’ll get through this, you always do.” Don’t try to guilt the suicidal person out of feeling suicidal by saying, “Just think how everyone would feel if you killed yourself.” Sometimes there’s nothing you can do or say that will help. “Remember, if somebody you know does take his own life, it was his choice, and his own responsibility. As much as you may have liked to help, as much as you may have tried to help, you’re definitely not the one to blame.” The movie ended.

“This is way bigger than yourself,” Ms. Accardo said. “People who are trained to respond can maybe more efficiently help. Give the support that you can to your friend, but get people in who can really do as they’ve been professionally trained to do.” Don’t minimize somebody’s feelings. Don’t have a huge party and invite all the depressed person’s friends. “‘Keg on me! Whooo!’ Yeah, how about we don’t? Because what happens to the decision-making process when you add drugs and alcohol? Poom, right out the window!”

Suicidal people can be agitated, restless, or irritated, she said. Their behavior may go through changes. She asked Jacob to read from the warning-signs sheet. He gave it his best shot. “Personality more withdrawn, tired, ape—”

“Apathetic.”

“Indecisive or boi—”

“Boisterous,” said Mrs. Accardo.

“Yes, boisterous. Talkative, outgoing. Behavior: can’t concentrate on school, work, routine tasks. Sleep pattern: oversleeping or insum—”

“Insomnia.”

“Insomnia, sometimes with early walking.”

“Waking,” Ms. Accardo corrected.

“No, that’s walking,” said Jacob.

“That’s waking,” said Ms. Accardo.

“Oh, that’s my bad!” Jacob continued to struggle through the long list, which even included Sudden improvement after a period of being down or withdrawn. Everything seemed to be a warning sign for suicide. The last one was Getting into trouble with school, or with the law.

Haley, who had green bangs, told the class about prison inmates who made weapons out of toothbrushes by sharpening the handles, and Ms. Accardo said some prisoners were given “little silicone doodahs” with bristles that fit over a fingertip to keep them from making shanks. “Now you can brush your teeth all you want — there’s no stabbing with silicone!”

The class began chatting away about prison violence. Ms. Accardo cut it short. “Anyhoo,” she said. “Where it says more boisterous, talkative, and outgoing. Someone who epitomizes boisterous is Mr. Poulin. Hello! He’s right up there and cheery! You know Mr. Poulin. Now, if someone was suddenly boisterous! And talkative! And outgoing! And yay, I’m fine! Why would that be a bad thing? Why would this be a suicidal warning sign?”

“They’re trying to make people think everything’s okay,” said Ryan.

“Yes, sort of. It’s related. Sudden improvement after a period of being down and withdrawn. This is a HUGE DANGEROUS THING. They have made the decision that they are going to make a suicide attempt. Everything that has been weighing them down emotionally is now — ah! ‘You know what, Monday afternoon. It’s all over.’ They have a plan. They have a time. They have a date. Yay! This is a very bad thing. Because they know exactly when all of this depression and everything? Is ending for them. And it’s lifting. Do you see how really alarming this can be? So just being a boisterous yoo-hoo person is not a warning. But the flip of a switch is. Sometimes families go, Oh thank goodness, they’re back to their normal self!”

“No,” said the class.

“You really need to get on it, if that’s the case.” She told us about a Lifetime movie she’d seen about a suicidal person who had quit the soccer team. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” she said. “Have you heard that?”

“No.”

She explained what it meant.

Maria said, “It’s a puzzle until someone does it, and then — oh.”

Ms. Accardo said, “My friend never left a note. So we can only assume what her reasons are.”

She talked about some other figures of speech: “I could kill myself!” and “My mom’s going to kill me!” She asked, “Is your mother really going to kill you?”

“It depends on what you do,” said Haley. “I mean, not all mothers are the same. I ruined my sister’s new white jeans, and I said, ‘My sister’s going to kill me,’ and she put a knife to me, literally. That was like seven years ago. Brand-new white jeans. She doesn’t live at home anymore, so I’m good.”

A sleepy boy, Wesley, lifted his head. “What just happened? I totally missed that.”

Ms. Accardo summarized. “She ruined her sister’s jeans, and said, Oh, no, my sister’s going to kill me, and then her sister held a knife to her.”

“Literally,” said Haley.

“Man,” said Wesley.

“I’m glad you are now safe,” said Ms. Accardo. We moved on to what things you should and shouldn’t do. Show you care. Do not argue. Do not offer simple solutions. Do not promise secrecy. Do not try to forcibly remove a gun from somebody. “There’s a guy that doesn’t have a jaw on this whole side of his face because of that particular situation,” said Ms. Accardo. “He grabbed a shotgun.”

“Ooh,” said the class.

“He’s alive — but.”

“That’s what happened to my next-door neighbor,” said Jacob. “He tried flipping his truck. He drank constantly. He tried six or seven times. We could hear him every morning puking.”

Maria asked Haley where she lived.

“Geary Hill,” said Haley. “Middle of nowhere.”

“Seems like all the towns here are in the middle of nowhere,” said Maria.

“All right!” said Ms. Accardo. “Go to role-play three.” Everyone looked through the suicide packet till they found role-play three. It was about Christopher and Alexa. Christopher is a straight-A student and a varsity athlete. His parents are strict and want him to be perfect. But he got an F on a research paper, bringing his grade down to a C. Alexa finds Christopher in the library staring at his homework. Alexa asks Christopher if he’s been crying. He says he’s fine. “Are you sure you’re okay?” says Alexa. Christopher says, “Actually I feel a lot better! Now that I’ve decided not to do this test, I feel great! In fact, I’m not going to do homework anymore. I’m tired of being perfect. Tired of doing what other people want me to do. And tired of my life.” Alexa says, But you’ll go to a good school and get a good job and make a lot of money. Christopher says he doesn’t care. Alexa says that she’s here for him. “I admire all the work and effort you’ve put into school and sports. You can always talk to me.” Christopher says that Alexa is just saying that because she feels bad for him. “I’m done,” he says. “The only way I can make my life my own again, is to take it from my parents.”

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

“We’ll do scene two, role-play three next class,” said Ms. Accardo. “Remember you can always come talk to me if you need to or want to.”

I walked slowly back to the main building. A girl was laughing. “There’s a button on that guy’s butt!” she said.

A boy said, “I don’t flip out on people!”

“Do you know what passive-aggressive is?” asked a girl.

Ms. Day, the history teacher, was giving her class a multiple-choice quiz to do on their iPads. She got everyone logged in. “So at this point, nobody should be talking,” she said. I was supposed to keep an eye on Sebastian. He quickly tapped the answers to a set of vocabulary questions about isolationism, fascism, and militarism. “Wow, you’re good,” I whispered. I sat back and let him work. The class was silent. Ten minutes went by. “So, everybody’s done?” said Ms. Day. “Awesome. Today we’re going to watch a movie. We’ve been talking a lot about how it’s hard for us to imagine now how a group of people followed Hitler. This movie is a true story of a similar thing happening. Keep in mind it is a true story.”

The movie was called The Wave. “The people selected for extermination by the Nazis were herded into concentration camps all over Europe,” says the history teacher in the movie. “The life expectancy of prisoners in the camps was only two hundred seventy days. They were worked, starved, tortured, and when they couldn’t work anymore they were exterminated in gas chambers, and their remains were disposed of in ovens. In all, the Nazis exterminated over ten million men, women, and children in these concentration camps.”

A girl in the movie asks, “How could the Germans sit back while the Nazis slaughtered people all around them, and say that they didn’t know anything about it? How could they do that?”

Good question, says the teacher. He begins, in succeeding classes, to act like an SS officer, barking orders at students and haranguing them. They chant the motto “Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action.” Louder and louder they chant it, as the ominous music swells. Gradually they’re brainwashed and turned into modern-day Hitler Youths, members of a movement called “the Wave.” The teacher starts to get caught up in his own experiment. “You wouldn’t believe the homework assignments,” he says to his wife. “They do what I give them, and then they do more.”

His wife is unhappy. “You’re becoming a guinea pig in your own experiment,” she says.

A female student resists the Wave; her boyfriend throws her down on the grass. The Wave members gather in the auditorium for a rally and chant their motto. “In a moment, our national leader will address us,” says the teacher.

Ms. Day stopped the movie. “All right, guys. We’re going to call it quits there. There’s like five minutes left, we’ll finish it on Monday. What did you guys think, so far?”

“Are you going to become that guy?” asked Mark.

“No,” said Ms. Day. “Last class I said, ‘Please don’t ever chant at me, that looks terrifying.’”

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

I walked back to the modulars, but one of the ed techs said I should be on break, so I went to the teachers’ lunchroom to make some instant coffee. The PA system came on. “The annual Swanson Academy college fair will be held on Thursday, April seventeenth. The LHS guidance office will be providing a bus for any junior interested in going. The field trip runs from nine-thirty to eleven-thirty and is a great way to start your college search. Permission slips are in the guidance office. Permission slips are due back by April tenth.” I ate a sandwich and sighed, then I splashed cold water on my face to wake up.

In the hall, a girl said that a boy had sent her a picture of him wearing a hippie shirt and a bandanna. “He was like, Should I wear this?”

Her friend said, “He asked me, too. He always sends me pictures of outfits and asks me if they’re gay.”

The first girl laughed. “Bye, Molly.”

“Bye.”

Mr. Domus appeared and unlocked his classroom. We trouped in. Gerald, who was a sharp-eyed kid with crazy red hair, said, “I’m tired. I went to a dubstep concert in Boston last night.”

Lauren, a popular girl, said, “You just randomly went to Boston for a concert?”

“No, my mom—”

“Had you been planning on going? Why didn’t you tell me? Wait, your mom went? She likes dubstep?”

“No,” said Gerald.

“I was going to say that’s pretty cool.”

“My uncle works there, so we got free tickets,” said Gerald. “They put Xs on our hands, if you’re younger than eighteen, for drinking and stuff like that.”

“How long was it?” asked Lauren.

“From eight till twelve o’clock.”

“When did you get home?”

“Two.”

“And you came to school?”

“I slept for two hours in the car driving back,” said Gerald. “My ears were ringing.”

“Dubstep messes with the head,” said Lauren.

Gerald said there were over a hundred subwoofers on the stage.

“You must have been feeling it in your chest.” She looked up — her flirty acquaintance Garth had arrived. “Hey, Garth!”

Mr. Domus said, “Guys, look at me. How many groups are not done?” Hands went up. “Monday’s your presentation, so you have to be done. Don’t leave it for the weekend, because we know that’s not going to happen. Right, Gavin, old boy?”

“Last time I did it,” said Gavin.

“I was just saying hi,” said Mr. Domus.

“No you weren’t,” said Gavin.

“Yes I was!”

“No!”

“If you’re a good boy, after lunch, I’ll give you a mint,” said Mr. Domus. “Spence, you can come get yours now.” Spence had finished his presentation. “All right, make this happen. You guys don’t want to have to do work over the weekend, I can guarantee that.”

Kevin was clapping his hands near his friend Wyatt’s ear. Mr. Domus pointed. “Hey, I’m going to slap both of you in a second.”

“Do it!” said Artie, the kid from remedial math.

“And then I’m going to email Mom and Dad and let them know, because they’ll be fine with it.” He leaned toward me and whispered, “The kids over there are the low-performing kids. So it’s not necessarily a bad thing to go over there every once in a while and see how they’re doing.” The antebellum reform project had changed slightly, he said. “We’re not making them find the three primary documents. That really threw the kids. Last trimester they struggled with that, and it was to the point where they weren’t getting the other things done. So we’ll tackle that in later projects.”

I went over to Gerald and asked him what he was up to. “I’m doing the temperance movement,” he said. He pointed to a picture of Carrie Nation. “I’m just looking up who she is.” Artie and George, both wearing baseball hats, were supposed to be working with Gerald on temperance, but George was deep into a video game and Artie was quietly surfing for bikini women.

“Let me know if you need help,” I said.

I read up on the temperance movement so that I could help Gerald.

“Mr. Domus, I have a really stupid question,” said Allison. “When does the Civil War start?”

“Sixty-one. Eighteen sixty-one. No, that’s not a stupid question.”

“There are never stupid questions,” said Brody.

“Yeah, there are stupid questions,” Mr. Domus said. “I disagree. There are. Garth asks them all the time.”

Allison said, “You’ll probably realize that I ask a lot of them.”

“No, dates are hard to remember,” said Mr. Domus. “I can’t remember a lot of dates, believe me.”

There was another computer problem: Chris had sent a bunch of pictures to himself for his project and now his email wasn’t working.

I went back over to Gerald, Artie, and George, and told them about the American Temperance Union and Lyman Beecher. “The state of Maine was the first state to go dry.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Artie.

“Terrible mistake,” I said. “They thought if they made it illegal, people would stop drinking.”

Artie didn’t agree that prohibition had been a mistake. “Why is there a seatbelt law?” he said. “Why did they think people were going to wear their seatbelts?”

“People will actually do something as simple as wearing a seatbelt,” I said. “But stopping drinking? People have been drinking for ten thousand years. In fact, they used to feed kids beer, because the beer was more sterile than well water. Prohibiting alcohol is totally unnatural. But they thought that if they could eliminate drink, they’d have a beautiful society.”

“It wasn’t a success,” said Gerald.

“Right,” I said, feeling myself getting carried away. “If everyone is forbidden to have liquor, only criminals will have it to sell. So the Mafia comes to power. That’s why we had the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre — they were fighting over turf, over the right to sell liquor.”

Gerald showed me his first Keynote slide. “Should I put ‘American Temperance Movement’ or just ‘Temperance Movement’?” he asked.

“It’s up to you,” I said. “I don’t think there’s ever been any other country that’s gone so whole hog into temperance, has there?”

“I don’t know,” said Gerald.

Garth was passing out Pringles. “I stole them from my stepsister this morning. She was like, I got Pringles. Nope, now you don’t.”

I got Gerald to look up “antebellum temperance facts” on Google and we found a good encyclopedia article with some primary sources. Together we read a quote about suppressing “the too free use of ardent spirits and its kindred vices.” Gerald began cutting and pasting.

Allison said that she’d gotten a bunch of irrelevant Google results for Lady Antebellum, a country music group.

I went back to my chair. Mr. Domus circulated. “I’m so tired,” Gerald said to him.

“You look tired,” said Mr. Domus.

“I went to a concert last night,” said Gerald.

“Oh, did you?” said Mr. Domus. “Who’d you go see?”

“Xcision, in Boston.”

“It’s dubstep,” said Lauren.

Garth said, “All dubstep is is robots getting it on.” He asked Lauren for her phone number.

“You’ve been asking for my number since Wednesday!” said Lauren.

“I don’t feel good,” said Piper.

“I have a little headache,” said Gerald.

“I always have headaches,” said Garth.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Lunch break. After the kids were out, Mr. Domus told me that George was diagnosed as autistic. He played video games a lot, and sometimes he got so deep into them that he took on the behaviors of the characters in the game. “Just so you know,” he said.

I raced to Dunkin’ Donuts to buy a coffee and got back just in time for the resumption of history class. Mr. Domus said, “Okay, guys, you’ve got, oh, twenty-three minutes. You want to wrap this up before you go. You don’t want this over the weekend, kind of dangling over your shoulders.”

“This week went by slow,” said Gavin.

“I think the week went by fast,” said Mr. Domus. “Last week was dreadfully, dreadfully slow.”

“The week went by slow but today went by well,” said Gavin. “Today’s been good.”

Mr. Domus was pleased. “The pace has been good?”

“Yeah. That’s how I feel,” said Gavin.

When the bell bonged, Mr. Domus put on Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and blasted it. The whole class sang along. “We’re halfway there! We’re living on a prayer!”

—

BACK TO BIOLOGY. Ms. Bell was out that day, replaced by a slow-moving, slow-thinking sub named Mr. Nelson, whose red plaid shirt was neatly tucked into his pants under his pumpkin belly. “Oh my god,” said Cayley when she saw him.

“See, I told you you’d say that,” said Cole.

Drew showed up, carrying a plant that he’d grown in a little pot: a four-leafed clover.

Two kids, Ralph and Nicholas, had drumsticks out and were tapping out rhythms on the tables.

“All right, guys,” said the sub. “LISTEN UP. I got like five different packets to hand out. Let me pass them back. Can I get somebody to help?” Nobody volunteered, so I substituted as the paper passer.

“Are you guys drummers?” I asked.

“I’m in band, he’s in percussion,” said Nicholas.

“Worksheets are flying everywhere,” I said.

“We already did this,” said Paige, who had big arms and big cheekbones.

“Screw that, we ain’t doing that again,” said Cameron, sliding one of the worksheets away from him on the lab table.

Riley began a thorough pencil-sharpening session; I gestured to the drummers to put away their sticks.

“Do we just work?” asked Brooke. She had a ponytail and a scarf with horses on it that went with her pale blue pants.

“Hang on!” said Mr. Nelson.

More aggressive pencil sharpening, more drumming.

Mr. Nelson was a very deliberate man, and it took him a long time to take attendance. He handed me a folder with IEP plans for Drew and the two other special ed students whom I was supposed to be helping. “I think that’s your crew,” he said.

Cameron balled up a piece of paper into the smallest ball he could make, squeezing it and squeezing it.

“OKAY, WE’RE GOING TO GET STARTED,” said Mr. Nelson. “This first packet, ‘Phenotypes and Genotypes.’ What’s an organism?”

“A living thing,” said Paige.

“Right, okay. An organism is a large collection of phenotypes.” He turned to the drummers. “Guys, stop. Who can tell me the difference between a genotype and a phenotype? Anybody.”

A blond kid named Aiden answered, “Phenotype is characteristics, and genotype is the genes, pretty much.”

“Yep. Did you all hear that? Do you all know what DNA is? It’s up on the ceiling right there. DNA is made up of codes, or nucleotides, which code for proteins. We call those genes. When we talk about simple genes, we have a dominant and a recessive on each one. Two different genotypes can have the same phenotype. Phenotype is what you can see. Like big nose, blue eyes, big feet, whatever. It’s what’s expressed. So that’s the difference. So we’re going to take a poll, basically, of all these different traits, and see what’s in this population here, which ones are dominant. Who wants to be my tally person?”

Brooke raised her hand and took a position at the chalkboard. She was a take-charge girl; she wanted to stand in front of the class.

“You’ll be my scorekeeper,” said Mr. Nelson.

Drew yawned hugely.

“All right, guys, listen up. Who can roll their tongue?”

“Caleb can roll his tongue,” said Brooke. Others could, too. Brooke counted eleven tongue rollers. She wrote the number on the board.

“Widow’s peak!” said Mr. Nelson. “Who knows what a widow’s peak is? If you pull your hair back, if you have a point, that’s a widow’s peak.” Slowly he verified three widow’s peaks. Brooke wrote a three on the board.

“Long eyelashes!” said Mr. Nelson. He counted; Brooke recorded. Three.

“Dimples!” said Mr. Nelson.

Brooke said, “Everybody smile right now! One, two, three, you’ve got one. Dylan, smile at me! No dimples.” Dylan was, of course, devastatingly handsome.

Ginny, in braids, appeared in the door, apologizing for being late.

“Can you roll your tongue?” asked Brooke. “Are your knuckles hairy?”

The girl looked at her knuckles. “A little hairy, yes,” she said.

Did she have long eyelashes?

“Yes, I do!” said Ginny. “I think I do.”

Mr. Nelson inhaled and, glancing at the worksheet, said, “CLEFT CHIN.”

“What the heck is that?” said Cole.

“Some people call it ‘butt chin,’” Mr. Nelson explained.

We counted earlobes, whether attached or pendulous, and lips, thick or thin. Brooke pointed toward Drew. “You’ve got thick lips.” She pointed toward Mason, who was one of perhaps four black or mixed-race kids in the high school. “You have thick lips,” she said. Then she looked at her friend Polly. “You’ve definitely got big lips — I think we know why.”

“Who’s got regular lips?” Mr. Nelson said. “I see one, maybe two thick lips.”

“What are we doing?” asked Riley suddenly. He’d been doing sneaky things on his iPad.

“I see seven,” said Brooke.

“I don’t think it’s as common as you think it is,” said Mr. Nelson.

“Fine,” said Brooke. “I’ll put two.”

How many people had hitchhiker’s thumb? How many had color-blindness? How many could wiggle their ears?

Jasmine could wiggle her ears, said Brooke. Jasmine, who was shy, held up her palm: No, thank you.

“I’ve seen her do it,” said Cayley.

“We can vouch,” said Brooke.

“Okay, GEOGRAPHIC TONGUE,” said Mr. Nelson. Here the class took a wrong turn. The worksheet defined geographic tongue as “the ability to flip over the end of your tongue.” In fact, geographic tongue is a state of affairs in which one’s tongue develops darker rounded patches on its surface; it has nothing to do with tongue movements. Mr. Nelson, having done some misguided Internet research, projected a screenload of Google images of severe and shocking cases of geographic tongue, intermingled with half a dozen other horrendous oral conditions. He tapped one of the images on the screen. “Kind of looks like thrush, almost,” he said, as the class gagged and gasped.

“That’s hot,” said Paige.

Mr. Nelson asked the students to stick out their tongues to see if anyone had mottled red patches.

“This is gross,” said Cole.

“It is gross,” Mr. Nelson agreed. “Anybody that has that, or even thinks they have it?”

Cole stuck out his tongue.

“That’s hotter,” said Paige.

“So no one has one of those gross tongues?” Brooke asked.

“There was more than one like that in the last class,” Mr. Nelson said.

“Ew,” said Cayley. “There are people like that walking around?”

Brooke, who had teacherly instincts, wanted to move things along. She got us through “claw toe,” which included a discussion of foot binding. “All righty, then!” she said, imitating Ms. Accardo. “We didn’t do hairy elbows.”

“Who’s got hairy elbows?” said Mr. Nelson. “Anybody?”

“What the heck?” said Cole.

Ginny inspected her elbow. “I’ve got this one hair,” she said. “Does that count?”

Mr. Nelson felt that one hair did count. “I don’t think it has to be a lot,” he said. “We probably don’t have any bushy elbows.” He giggled to himself.

“How about you, Dylan?” asked Brooke, with a playful smile.

Dylan shook his head.

“Are you sure?” said Brooke.

Paige leaned toward Dylan’s elbow and studied it. “There’s like three hairs.”

“That counts,” said Mr. Nelson.

“I knew it,” said Brooke. “He’s just a hairy person.”

Mr. Nelson began laboriously finding percentages.

“WHO is making noises?” said Paige. She held her hands over her ears. “Fricking Riley, he does this thing on his iPad where it vibrates at a frequency that only certain people can hear, and it gives you like the worst headache EVER. He’s been doing it for the past three blocks of class, because he thinks it’s hilarious. Everybody’s like, Ow.”

Mr. Nelson was lost in his arithmetic at the chalkboard. I read Drew’s IEP sheet, which claimed that he had “emotional disturbances.” I hadn’t noticed any. Drew was an easygoing, likeable kid with dyslexia, who sometimes got fed up with his schoolwork.

Finally Mr. Nelson stood back from the board. “All right, so there’s your result. It goes on the back page, guys.”

Riley played the high-pitched iPad sound again, using an app called Sound Grenade. “Ow, stop!” said Paige.

“I’m not doing it!” said Riley.

“Yes you are.”

Cayley said, “So, Riley, I told everyone in this class that you are a transgender cross-dresser. You’re welcome.”

Mr. Nelson said, “It looks like tongue-rolling is the majority.”

A louder, lower-frequency squeak came from Riley’s iPad.

“I’m going to have to fight someone,” said Paige, getting up.

Cayley, Cole, and Paige began wrestling with Riley over his iPad.

“Ow — bitch!” said Riley. Lots of laughter from the girls.

“GUYS,” said Mr. Nelson. “Guys, can you listen up, please.”

The scuffling subsided.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Nelson.

“Go away!” said Riley to Cole. “Stop posting your problems on Facebook! He’s posting his ex-girlfriends. He’s got a lot of them.”

That reminded Paige of something a boy named Zane had done. “He was like, I don’t have any ex-girlfriends. I was like, How is that possible? He’s like, I kill them off after I’m done. I was FREAKED OUT. I was like, Get away from me. I don’t want you near me.” She looked across the room. “Ralph, stop hitting yourself.”

More laughter. “You’re such a dick.”

“Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

“Guys? ALL RIGHT, GUYS, LISTEN UP. The typical Mainer is going to be a tongue-rolling, short-eyebrowed, bald-elbowed, hairy-knuckled, straight-chinned, dimpled person. Lobe-eared, thin-lipped, non-hitchhiker’s-thumb, right-handed, non-ear-wiggling, smooth-tongued, and — uh — normal-toed.”

“So we just write all of that for number one?” asked Brooke.

“Look at your data,” Mr. Nelson said. “If the whole population breeded, and if you did a sample of the children, most of the population would have or not have the traits on here, statistically. Does that make sense?”

I showed Drew where to copy Mr. Nelson’s statistical chart on the worksheet, so he could get credit.

“Bald eyebrows,” murmured Ginny.

“What?” said Dylan.

“BARE-HAIRED KNUCKLES,” sang Ralph, in a Bon Jovi falsetto.

The drumsticks came out again and began tapping out triplets.

Mr. Nelson read the last question on the worksheet: “Do you think that if you moved to, let’s say Mongolia, the same percentage of people would be tongue rollers? Explain why/why not.”

“Yes — or — no,” said Ginny.

“We don’t know anything about Mongolia,” said Mr. Nelson.

“I was going to say because they speak a different language,” said Ginny.

“It’s a different gene pool,” said Brooke.

“I think this is somehow related to languages where people roll their r’s a lot,” said Mr. Nelson. “Like the French, maybe. I think it’s a French trait.”

“I am French, hundred percent, both sides,” said Cayley.

“We don’t really know anything about Mongolians,” said Mr. Nelson.

“Hairy-knuckle syndrome!” shouted Ginny, and laughed.

“That’s hot,” said Paige.

“The Eastern cultures, they tend to have hair in the ears,” said Mr. Nelson.

Peals of melodious laughter from the girls. “Oh my goodness,” said Cayley. “My whole day was like this. Riley, is it raining?”

“It’s melting out,” said Riley.

“It better be.”

Aiden got up and walked toward the door. He’d had it.

“Aiden, you’re not done!” said Brooke.

“I am, actually,” said Aiden.

“Are you guys writing the numbers down?” said Mr. Nelson.

I went over to the two drummers. “That’s driving me insane,” I said. “Is it driving you insane?”

“Not at all,” said Ralph.

“Guys, back to your seats!” said Mr. Nelson. “You’re not done yet. Listen up! I’m trying to give you the information you need. BACK TO YOUR SEATS.”

The PA system came on. “Excuse the interruption! Nina Deloitte to the main office, please. Nina Deloitte to the main office.”

Paige started putting up the chairs. “I’m done,” she said with finality.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. First wave.

“THIS IS YOUR DATA,” called out Mr. Nelson.

Half the students trundled out. I said goodbye to Drew.

“You were talking mad shit and she just like punched me in the face!” said Riley, as he left.

Mr. Nelson erased the board. He sat at his desk with his hands folded, waiting for the second wave to leave.

“Do you only do science?” I asked him.

“No, I’m all over,” said Mr. Nelson. “Yesterday I was doing testing. Tuesday and Wednesday was the middle school, in the resource room. And then Monday, Freshman English.” At night he was on call as an ambulance driver.

The bell bonged and the second-wave students trouped out. Jasmine said, “Bye, thank you,” to Mr. Nelson. He and I walked to the office together and turned in our badges and said good night.

I walked to the car and turned the key. Antebellum reform, suicide, Hitler Youth, more antebellum reform, and amateur genetics, all in six and a half hours. “What the fuck,” I said.

Day Eight, finito.