Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY TEN. Thursday, April 3, 2014

LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, SEVENTH GRADE

DON’T KILL PENGUINS CAUSE OTHER FRIENDS GET SAD

I WAS TRAPPED BEHIND a garbage truck on the way to the middle school, but I made it on time, almost. It was Pajama Day, and I was Mrs. Painter, a seventh-grade science teacher in Team Orinoco. In homeroom Brock, wearing baggy red pajama pants with hockey sticks on them, sang “Turn Down for What.” I was determined not to screw up and forget to take attendance. I started shouting names and checking them off: CALEB. JASON. BRITTANY. REGAN. EVAN.

“Do you want me to bring that down for you?” said Brittany.

I nodded.

“Yesss!” said Brittany.

Outside a teacher said, “Guys, that was the seven-thirty bell. YOU NEED TO BE IN YOUR HOMEROOM.”

“Can I go get a pencil?” Caleb asked.

“Why is everyone out in the hall?” I asked.

“Homeroom’s boring,” said Cayden.

“LUKE. TRINITY. GEORGIA. RUSSELL.”

“He’s not here,” said Cayden.

“ARLENE.”

“She’s not here,” said Cayden.

“As sickness ravages the school,” I said. “BROCK. MANDY. ALEC.”

“He’s right there.”

“Not even listening. Isn’t that shocking? They just don’t care.”

A girl said, “GUYS, LISTEN!” There was no reaction. “Nah, they won’t listen,” she said.

“DANA. OWEN.”

Owen said, “Oh, you’re the awesome teacher!”

Ms. Nolton, the Team Orinoco math teacher — in whose room I had lately bled — opened the door that connected her classroom with ours. “Boys and girls, can I have your attention for just a moment? A reminder. Your field trip money and permission slips — many of you have not brought those in yet. Keep that in mind, for our field trip. Thank you.” She disappeared.

I asked where they were going to go.

“Boston,” said Georgia. “We’re going to Quincy Market.”

The PA lady told us to stand and say the pledge. Liberty and justice for all. The lunch menu was Mexican taco salad made with seasoned taco filling and corn tortilla chips, shredded cheese, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, onions, salsa, and hot pinto beans. Plus a warm cinnamon puff, and pineapple, and milk choices. “The Lasswell boys’ swim team ended their season with a stellar performance yesterday, beating Portland, Massabesic, and Saco at the Boys Swim Festival.” She read off the first-place finishers. “If you see a swimmer today, give them a high five, because they swam swimmingly last night.” There followed announcements about Spirit Week, drama rehearsal, band tryouts, chorus tryouts, and softball tryouts, all delivered in a cheerful singsong.

“This is the longest announcement I’ve ever heard,” I said to Alec, who was staring into the middle distance.

The movie Frozen was going to be shown at two p.m. in the auditorium. “Students who are attending the movie, be sure you have all your stuff ready to go. And that will conclude our announcements for today. Thank you and have a wonderful day, everyone!”

I asked Alec if he was having fun.

“I’ll have fun in seven hours,” he said.

“There are cinnamon puffs for lunch,” I said, trying to joke him out of his dejection.

“The food they have here isn’t good food,” Alec said. “They don’t cook it good, so it doesn’t taste good. It’s all frozen stuff from Walmart.”

Brock corrected him. “It’s not from Walmart, dude, it’s from the USDA.”

I asked why some of the chairs had green tennis balls over their casters and some didn’t.

“Cause kids are bad,” Brock said. “Kids throw them.”

Then it was STAR class and we talked about what people were supposed to be reading. “We have these huge packets every day to read,” said Sage.

“I read what the teacher assigns me when I’m trying to fall asleep,” said Darryl. “The other day I was reading for homework, and I fell asleep on the couch.”

“I think you should expand the notion of reading,” I said.

“You are awesome!” said Mackenzie.

“I’m not awesome,” I said. “I just don’t know what I’m doing.”

“The last class with you all we talked about is One Direction, and we threw the socks,” said Mackenzie.

“Oh, right, the socks,” I said. “Good times.”

Everyone went mum for silent reading. Mandy whisper-asked me if she could please just draw. I said she could draw a sentence and then read it — that amounted to silent reading. She seemed to like that idea and went off to get some markers.

I glanced at the sub plans, which were about some kind of math project, plus the five, no, six kingdoms of living things on planet Earth and something called a “dichotomous key.” There was a picture of Linnaeus tacked to a corkboard on the wall, so I read up on him and on the history of classification, trying to dredge up what I remembered from junior high, which was outmoded anyway. The class’s code of conduct was taped to the cinderblock near my desk, above the ever-present learning taxonomy poster, near a flowchart of learning targets. One target read: “Understands how changes in an organism’s habitat and population size can influence the survival of a population.” A big yellow arrow pointed to the target: “You are here!” The code of conduct was long and detailed, written in five colors of marker and decorated with tulips and smiley bears. It said: I will not spread gossip. I will be honest and accountable for my own actions and behavior. I will pay attention to others when they talk and keep eye contact. I will look forward to learning. And: I will expect the unexpected.

When silent reading was over, Ms. Nolton came in from the adjoining room to supervise the class. She made an announcement. “There are three or four surveys! You need to take the survey RIGHT NOW! The rest of you are working on your fraction flip books!”

“Sage, take my survey!” said Mackenzie, waving her iPad, where the survey software resided on a “learning management system” called Educate. “We created the surveys,” she told me. “Once we get the results back, we’re supposed to make graphs. My survey’s about ‘Would you rather.’ Like, would your rather have to drink a stranger’s saliva, chicken juice, hot sauce, or ocean water? I think a lot of them will say ocean water.”

I asked her if by chicken juice she meant cooked or raw.

“Not cooked,” said Mackenzie.

“Oh.”

It was time to perambulate. Max was working on his fraction flip book, made of red construction paper. On each of the top flaps was a percentage, and when you flipped it up, it was supposed to show the equivalent fraction. “When you know how to do that, you are king of the world,” I said. Max began spinning one of the lopsided, sliced-open tennis balls that had once covered the bottom of a chair leg. I told him to stop. Darryl wrote my name on the whiteboard, because I’d forgotten to. She underlined it with a curvy scroll, decorated with a flower. Dabney and Richard were talking about Power Rangers. Regan was playing hip-hop from his iPad speakers. Jade shouted, “Stop, you’re going to rip it!” It was a relief to see that these seventh-graders were just as wiggy under Ms. Nolton’s credentialed eye as they were with me.

“Are you taking a survey?” I asked Sunrise.

“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t get on Educate.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Educate. I wondered for a moment about how much money RSU66 had spent to lease and customize and troubleshoot this fancy, colorful software, plus Edmodo, Infinite Campus, IXL, and others. Probably a fair amount. Educate, a company founded in Alaska by a group of homeschooling data analysts from the oil industry, had sold its “mass personalized learning” system to low-test-score districts all over the country. “On the oil field everything had a meter. Lights, engines, pipes, even people, all had some sort of meter,” said the company website. “The founders took a deep look at the needs and started to see that concepts behind finding and making optimizations with the oil industry were also applicable to education, with one major difference, the moral purpose behind enriching education versus enriching the wallets of the oil companies.” Educate believed in the “personalized mastery paradigm.” If you could log on to the website, great. If you couldn’t, you couldn’t.

Luke and Evan were reviewing the preliminary results of the poll they’d designed. “Six voted old age,” said the boy, “and one voted being impaled by a narwhal horn.” The other choices were drowning, having a heart attack, or getting shot.

“Why would I choose how I want to die?” asked Chase, who was still taking the survey.

I stopped near William. “I’ve taken all the surveys,” he said.

“Was it fun?”

He shrugged.

I tried to get William going on the percentages flip book. “Let’s say that it said I have twenty-five percent of all the stuff I need to graduate,” I said. “How do you get from that to a fraction? What does twenty-five percent mean?” He’d cut out and glued the method he was supposed to follow from a worksheet. The wording wasn’t terribly helpful: The place value of the last digit becomes the denominator. Then you were supposed to simplify the fraction.

William said, “It would be like twenty-five over a hundred?”

“Right! You just move the dot over two places and put it over a hundred.”

Mackenzie interrupted with her interim results. “Five for chicken juice, ten for salt water, and one for a stranger’s saliva,” she said, reading off her iPad. More results were streaming in.

“I like saliva,” said Chase.

Darryl said, “Oh? You would want to eat my saliva?” She was wearing a pair of huge Bigfoot slippers along with her pajamas.

Mackenzie said, “Now three for a stranger’s saliva, eleven for salt water, and six for chicken juice.”

Over the tumult, Ms. Nolton yelled from the doorway that one group from Team Orinoco still had not finished designing their survey.

“Jason, take Mackenzie’s survey!”

Thomas was a movie buff, with a picture of Tim Burton on his notebook; his survey was long and complicated. He wanted people to choose their favorite movie from a list, including The Little Mermaid, Wallace and Gromit, and Peterman, which was autocorrect for Peter Pan. If you could meet a movie director, who would you meet? was another of his questions. And Would you rather (a) go to a movie when you can meet the movie director, (b) go to a movie premiere, (c) have a private meeting with the movie director, (d) meet the director but never see his movies, (e) read his books rather than watch his movies, or (f) watch his movies and never meet the director. Thomas had also asked, What would you like to eat when you got to a movie? and How would you want to die inside a movie? and When would you like to die? Most kids wanted to eat candy at the movies, followed by popcorn, but there were write-ins, too: Nutella, hot wings, “a burger,” “everything,” and soda.

Mackenzie took Thomas’s survey. “When would you like to die?” she read. “Morning, afternoon, evening, or midnight. Hm. Midnight. I’d rather die at midnight.”

The survey project was a great success — at least for many. I could hear an eager note in kids’ voices as they compared results. Some were already graphing the incoming responses — circle graphs, bar graphs, line graphs — the software helped with that. “I’ve got to take my own survey!” said Thomas excitedly.

He asked me if I’d seen Blake on Superhero Day. “He was wearing his wrestling singlet, with tights.”

“He was looking pretty cool,” I said.

Thomas raised his eyebrows doubtfully.

Darryl looked up from doing something with a protractor. “I’d be like, Ah, put some clothes on.”

“He was wearing a cape,” said Thomas. “Well, towel.”

Mackenzie said, “Everybody, announcement please. If you haven’t taken our survey on Educate, we need you to take it now.”

There was a group of slumpy loud girls in the back of the class who hadn’t done anything. “They’re probably discussing feminine things,” said Thomas.

“They need to be separated,” said Darryl.

“I hate separating people,” I said.

“They’re women, they can deal with it,” said Thomas.

I went over. One of the girls, Marcy, was drawing a smoldering portrait of Ian Somerhalder, from The Vampire Diaries.

“Nice chin,” I said.

“Ian Somerhalder is the hottest guy I’ve ever known. Me and him are”—she clasped her hands—“married. Married forever.”

Nearby, Warren was swiping through pictures of pickup trucks, waiting for the results of his survey to come in. “My brother has a mudding truck,” he said.

I asked him what his survey was about.

“Best basketball player of all time,” Warren said. “Best NFL player of all time. Best soccer player. Best wide receiver. Favorite food.”

“What if they don’t know about sports?”

“They can just pick at random.”

He’d also asked what everyone’s favorite subject was. So far the results were: math, 22 percent; language arts, 0 percent; gym, 78 percent. Michael Jordan was winning the best-basketball-player question.

“We’re going to get married,” said Marcy to herself, as she sketched a lock of Ian Somerhalder’s studiously disheveled hair.

I sat in a random chair and watched it all happen, singing Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” too softly for anyone to hear.

Ms. Nolton appeared in the doorway. “Off to your lockers!” she said.

Within thirty seconds everyone was gone.

—

NOW IT WAS TIME TO PRETEND to be a science teacher. I found the chapter on biological classification in the Glencoe textbook, Life’s Structure and Function, and read some of it.

“Can we take the attendance down?” asked Cheyenne and Caitlin. I gave them the signed sheet.

“OKAY, GUYS,” I said. “HOOP! HIP! HOOP!” They went still. “So taxonomy. What’s that about?”

“That would be a way to classify animals,” said Jason. “Like if they had like the shape of a beak, we would be able to like choose different taxonomies.”

I nodded. “There are certain people in this crazy world who really want to know where everything fits. And the main guy is this man”—I pointed to the picture of Linnaeus that was tacked to a bulletin board—“Linnaeus. Did you talk about him?”

“Not yet,” said Lily.

“Linnaeus, about three hundred years ago, lived in Sweden — he was really smart, and he was interested in plants. He went around looking at plants. That’s the first thing you have to do as a scientist, is actually look at things. And he would think, What’s different about this plant? What’s similar about that plant? He looked at all the living creatures and came up with a system, a way of dividing up, or classifying, all living things. What do you think he came up with? If you were a scientist, what would be the first category you’d come up with?”

“Living creatures?” said Sage.

I nodded. “You’d say everything living, and everything nonliving, that’s good. And then you come down to the living things. Somebody says to you that it’s terribly important, you’re on a new planet, you have to classify all living things. What would you come up with?”

Long silence.

“Organisms?” said Jason.

“There are organisms. And you’re looking at them. Some are big and green. Some of them are moving. They make grunting noises. Some of them fly. Some of them just sit there. How do you divide them up?”

“By the five or six kingdoms?” said Lily.

“Yes — but maybe the first thing you would do is say, ‘These are plants, and these are animals.’ That’s the first thing that Linnaeus did, because he was a sensible guy. Very simple. And then microscopes came in. People started looking through microscopes and they realized that some things didn’t look like a plant, and they didn’t look like an animal. They were a blob of something that moved around under a microscope slide. So they thought for a long time. They thought, Hm, probably not a plant, probably not an animal. Probably something else. A protist.” I wrote it on the board. “A protist just means a really little simple thing. There are all these fancy words, but basically they’re just trying to figure out how life is organized.” I looked down at my notes. “So then some years went by, more scientists looked at the stuff, and realized that there were many kinds of these things,” I said, circling the word protist. “Some of them were really rare. They only found them because they went down to the bottom of the sea and found them living near the sulfur spouts at the bottom of the sea. So they came up with some rarer things.” Darn, I’d forgotten their name. Don’t panic. I held up the worksheet. “So you’ve got this worksheet, right? That says ‘Classification Guide to the Kingdoms’? Do you have it?”

“No,” said Jason.

“Yes, we have it,” said Lily.

“Why are they called kingdoms? It’s because it’s like Game of Thrones, isn’t it? Over here is the plant kingdom, and over here is the animal kingdom, and then there are these really bizarre kingdoms — there’s the eubacteria kingdom. They make their own food, they’re one of the oldest forms of life on Earth, they help you digest, they live in your intestine, they’re small, they’re disgusting. We move on. Another kingdom. The protists. The ones they saw when they looked down the tube of a microscope. And there was a controversy because of the kingdom fungi. What’s a fungus? Is it among us?”

Sage raised her hand. “It’s like something that feeds off dead or living plants and animals.”

“Right! So if you had a mushroom here, and a weed over here, and they both pop out of the ground and they grow and they die, why would you not call both of those things plants? Or plantae, as they say? The scientists got really subtle, and they said, Well, plants use the sun to make their own food — they have chlorophyll — whereas funguses just live off of rotting stuff.” I started writing on the board again, drawing lines. “They’ve got Animalia, just a Latin way of writing animals. Plants. Protists. And — what was it?”

“Eubacteria.”

“Eubacteria! How do you remember that? It’s hard to remember all these words.”

“We have a silly sentence!” said Sage.

“No, we don’t!” said Lily fiercely. “Not for those. That’s how we remember the eight levels.”

“Oh,” said Sage.

I asked, “Did every group make a new silly sentence?”

“Yep.”

“So what is the sentence that you use?”

“Donkey Kong Pays Charlie Only Five Giant Strawberries,” said Sage.

“Great,” I said. I looked down at my sheet. “Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Very useful to have that sentence. The domain is this giant umbrella term above everything. So that’s Donkey. And then Kong. Everything we’ve been talking about — plants, animals, fungi, eubacteria — all that is the kingdom level. That’s the Game of Thrones level.” I held up my finger. “There’s one other kingdom, and it’s kind of interesting.”

Studying the packet, Lily called out, “Archaebacteria!”

I pointed at her. “Archaebacteria! When you say that something is archaic, what do you mean? Old.”

“They’re the oldest type,” said Lily.

“Right. Archaeology is the study of old stuff — old rusting little bits of nothing that you dig up in the ground. Archaeology. So archaebacteria just means ‘old bacteria.’ In the earliest beginning of the world, when hot lava was spouting out everywhere, when the world’s atmospheres were toxic and strange, there were these animals. One lives in hot springs — a bacteria that’s able to live in really hot water, that’s kind of amazing — and one in salty environments, like the Dead Sea. For three hundred years we’ve been talking about the difference between, you know, a corn plant and an oak tree. But here”—I tapped the words archaebacteria and eubacteria—“are the ones scientists are getting excited about now.”

Then I decided to go AWOL from the worksheet. “Let me ask you one other really tough question. Could anyone go outside right now and know an oak tree when you saw it? Or a maple tree? Do you know the difference between them?”

“Nope,” said Trinity.

“Yes, the leaves,” said Luke.

“The leaves,” I said. “So there’s this huge scientific theory about all the living things on Earth. But usually what we need to know right here in Maine is the difference between a goldfinch, a robin, a hawk. You want to know what a moose looks like. That’s the real world that we’re living in. And this”—I waved the worksheet—“is the scientific world that involves all the species of the Earth. It’s exhausting, actually. But once you realize that the first guy, Linnaeus, started in that simple way with just plants and animals, it makes sense. So fill out the packet and let me know if you have questions.”

Trinity came up. “Can I go work in the hall?”

I told her to do the packet and then she could work in the hall.

Caitlin came up. “Can I work in the hall?”

“Buzz through this worksheet and then we’ll see.”

Lily came up. “Just letting you know. Mrs. Painter sent us a daily warmup that we’re supposed to do. She wants it done and emailed back to her. So you may want to have everyone check their email.”

“That’s a very good point.” I raised my voice. “Mrs. Painter has sent you an email with the daily warmup thing, and she wants it back.”

I went up to Max. “Did you do the email thing?”

“I’m blocked,” said Max. “I can’t get email.”

I told him what the email said. First list the six kingdoms. Then list the classification hierarchy. Then they had to say what a dichotomous key was, and why it was useful. “What does dichotomous mean?” I asked.

“I have no clue,” said Max.

A wounded green tennis ball flew through the air. I ordered Devin, who’d thrown it, to put the ball back on the chair leg.

Caitlin was having trouble with Google Docs.

“Can I go get something out of my bag?” asked Devin.

I asked Lily what a dichotomous key was.

“A dichotomous key,” she said, “is when you’re trying to classify an animal, and it has certain features. It says, ‘Pick A or B.’ Say it was a cat and you picked B. Then it would say, ‘Does this animal have a furry tail?’”

“Great, thanks,” I said.

I walked over to Ashley, who was leaning her head on her hand doing nothing. “I can’t concentrate.” She was sniffly.

“Are you sick?”

“No, just a cold,” she said.

I tried to get her going on the Google Doc quizlet, where she had to list the six kingdoms.

“I wasn’t here for any of this,” Ashley said.

I showed her where the kingdoms were listed in the packet, one at the top of each page. Caitlin came up holding a page of work. “Can I go out in the hall?” I said she could.

Everyone was having trouble defining dichotomous key. I couldn’t blame them. “Why is it called a dichotomous key?” I said to the whole class.

“Because it is!” said Devin.

“Because scientists want to make a word no one knows?” said Ashley.

“Exactly,” I said. “The scientists want to make a fancy word, because they want to sound smart.”

“Yeah, and it’s a pain!” said Ashley.

“Science is full of that,” I said. “Doctors use fancy words like febrile for when you have a fever. But it’s also because the words help them be more specific. So what is a dichotomous key?”

“A way to classify?” said Jason.

“It was just explained by that very smart person over there.” I pointed to Lily. “All it is is a kind of a flowchart. It says, Is it hairy, or is it smooth? Oh, it’s hairy. Go down here.”

A boy named Carl sneezed, rattling his chair.

I said, “Does it sneeze convulsively? Yes? Okay, it’s Carl. That’s a dichotomous key. All right? Thank you.”

A neat, ponytailed girl sitting at one of the side tables, Jillian, seized her head in both hands and moaned in pain. “I’m in the middle of doing the dichotomous key, and I don’t know what to do!” Part of the assignment was that they were supposed to create their own dichotomous key, in order to distinguish between an ostrich, a crab, an elephant, a fish, and a cat. She’d picked the elephant, and she’d written, “Does the organism have a long flimsy nose?”

Her friend Lindsey, in an Aéropostale shirt, who was making a dichotomous key for a cat, was farther along. Did the animal have ears or not have ears? If not, it was a fish. Was the tail long but skinny? Elephant. Was the tail long but furry? House cat.

“That’s pretty good work,” I said. “Seriously, that’s pretty good work.”

“See, that’s what I’m having trouble with,” said Jillian. Finally she came up with, “Does it have a long neck?”

“Ooh, yes!” I said. “You’re flying now.”

I went around the room lavishing praise on various half-completed dichotomous keys. “That’s a seriously nice dichotomous key!” I said to Sage. “Do you know what dichotomous means? It just means cut in half. So you either go this way, or you go that way.” I held up two fingers. “Di-chotomous. Cut in half.”

Devin was poking fruitlessly at his iPad. “It’s blocking my Google Doc,” he said. His screen had a popup message on it: VIRUS SCAN WARNING. I told him to work on paper.

I asked Ashley how things were going. “Bad,” she said. She’d gotten a D-plus on her BrainPOP quiz. On her iPad was a question about which kingdoms included eukaryotes. She had to look through the seven-page kingdom packet, I said. Each page held one kingdom.

“I have to look all through that?” she said.

“It’s not that bad,” I said.

“Yeah it is,” said Ashley. “Look at all those words. Too many of them. I don’t know where a eukaryote lives.”

I started rattling around in the pages of the kingdom packet with her. “Okay, it says here that a eukaryote can be a unicellular organism. So then you go, Whoa, this is not a eukaryote, this is a prokaryote! So what’s a prokaryote?” The packet defined a prokaryote as “a very simple cell.” I felt a rush of exasperation. “You know what?” I said. “Prokaryote is one of those words you were talking about. It’s a very complicated word that means ‘simple.’ Why do they do that to us?”

“Because they want to make money?” Ashley said.

“That’s part of it,” I said. I gave up. “So you’ve just got to poke around, look at the packet, and get familiar with it. That’s how it works.”

I went over to Evan, who again had a hoodie on to hide his hair. “Travis!” I said. “I know you from before. How’s it going?”

“Lovely,” said Evan. “He’s Travis.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Every human being has a name. It’s just too hard for me. Do you guys have the email from Mrs. Painter?”

“I might,” said Evan. “She literally spams me with emails.” He found it in his mail program.

I went back to Jillian, who’d been struggling with her dichotomous key. She recited the taxonomic ranking perfectly: “Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.”

“Fantastic!” I said.

She’d finished her dichotomous key, too. “Now all I have to do is the packet.”

Ashley had gotten a D-plus on her BrainPOP again. I’d carefully helped her find the wrong answer: it wasn’t eubacteria, it was archaebacteria. “I’m sorry, that was my mistake,” I said. This time she was stumped by A vascular plant that seeds with fruits and flowers. Together we flipped through the packet. Halfway down the Plantae page it said angiosperms have tubes, flowers & fruits that produce seeds. “Is it an angiosperm?” I said. She tried it on her iPad, which chirped: correct.

Jason was working on the definition of fungi. “They don’t make their own food,” he said. Devin and Carl were singing tunelessly.

Ashley’s next iPad quiz question was: Has cones, but no flowers or fruits. More riffling through the packet. Was it a fern or a gymnosperm? I couldn’t remember. “I’d say it’s a gymnosperm,” I said. “But I may be wrong.” She tried it. A green checkmark appeared on the screen. Phew.

Travis and Evan were struggling with a stapler, slamming it around. “He jammed the stapler!” said Travis, whose packet had six staples in it.

“Oh, now you’re blaming me!” said Evan. “I didn’t even touch it!”

I asked who was good at unjamming staplers.

“I am,” said Travis.

“You jammed it!” said Evan.

“That was the first time I touched it, Evan!”

“Don’t throw it,” I said. “It’s an expensive piece of medical equipment.”

Max looked up at me curiously. “It’s medical equipment?”

“It is if you staple somebody with it. Like in The Wrestler. Did you see The Wrestler? He staples himself.”

Lily came up. “I’m done,” she said.

I said, “You are good. If you’re done, what you have to do is recite a poem that you’ve memorized. No, do whatever you’d like to do, quietly. Congratulations on being done.”

“Do you have a paperclip?” said Evan, still intent on fixing the stapler. I gave him a pair of scissors. He and Travis pried out the crumpled staple.

Luke and Carl were sharing earbuds, listening to “Truckin’” by the Grateful Dead.

Ashley finally got a passing grade on her BrainPOP. She was happy. And the stapler was working again. I got Evan and Travis to work on their Google Docs, and Travis to define dichotomous key. Evan successfully listed the six kingdoms. “You’ve done the warmup. My god, you’re warmed up! Now what?”

“I get to relax for two minutes?” said Evan.

“Relax?” I said. “You just got warmed up. How many assignments are you behind?”

“Eleven,” said Evan.

“I have twenty overdue things,” said Travis.

“Holy crap,” I said.

Caitlin came back from working in the hall. Class over.

—

A NEW GROUP CAME IN, leaping and screaming. “Can I take the attendance down?” said Laura.

Brittany said Alexandra would be late because she was getting an ice pack. I took attendance, shoutily.

“Can I take the sheet down?” said Brock.

“Yes.”

“You said I could take it down,” said Laura.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just too complicated.” I gave the sheet to Laura. “ALL RIGHT. Mrs. Painter emailed you something terribly important. It’s a bunch of worksheets. You’ve got to answer some questions, and it’s all about the subject of taxonomy. Do you know what taxonomy is?”

“Yep,” said Georgia.

“What is it?”

“Stuffing animals.”

Mandy sang, in a sweet voice, “Stuffing little dead animals.”

“That’s taxidermy,” I said.

“Oh,” said Georgia.

“So about three hundred years ago there was this guy named Carl. Carl Linnaeus. Did Mrs. Painter mention Carl Linnaeus?”

Dana, with hearing aids, pointed at his picture. “Right there.”

“Right,” I said. “He’s one of those people who like everything to be in a certain slot. You know how some people are really organized? They can’t just look at a parking lot full of cars, they have to figure out which cars have good mileage, which don’t — they have to classify them. Some people have minds that work like that. Linnaeus did. He looked at the world — he lived in Sweden—”

This struck Mandy as very funny.

“He looked at the world, and he tried to figure out how living things were organized. Let’s say you were Linnaeus, what would you do? What’s the biggest distinction that you can find in living things? Some living things are stuck in one place, and they grow and turn green, and they have boughs. And some of them walk along, or hop, or fly. What would be the biggest distinction you could see?”

Silence.

Georgia said, “I don’t know.”

“Well, he took a stab at it, and he said, Okay, all living things are divided up into plants — and animals. Plantae and Animalia. Two chunks. Plants and animals. And then there were some microscopes floating around. People started looking down the tubes of the microscopes and they found that there were tiny little animals or plants — they didn’t know what they were. They had one cell, and some of them moved around, and some of them had flagella that would help them move, and they thought, Gosh, is that a plant or an animal? We don’t know. So they gave it a different name. Protist. So now you’ve got three.” I talked about fungi — and that word, too, struck Mandy as funny. She was having a wonderful time.

When I had finished my spiel about the six kingdoms, Sunrise, who’d been standing near the desk, put her pencil in the noisy electric pencil sharpener.

“That was so considerate of you to wait,” I said.

I told them what they had to do — watch a Keynote presentation on classification that Mrs. Painter had made.

An ed tech appeared, a Ms. Bishop, and began coaching a sprawly, wayward kid, Dylan. “What do you have to do?” she asked.

Dylan pointed to the whiteboard, which said, in red marker:

DUE FRIDAY

Quizlet #4

Brainpop—6 Kingdoms

Kingdom Packet

Mnemonic device

Taxonomy key

Darwin Finches (in class activity)

“All that stuff is due Friday!” Dylan said unhappily.

“You can only do one thing at a time,” said Ms. Bishop sternly. “You can look at that list and go, ‘Everything’s due tomorrow!’—or you can say, ‘What am I going to work on right now?’ Do it, and you can cross it off the list.”

Brittany said, “I’m going to do the kingdom packet, then BrainPOP, then quizlet.”

“It’s just relentless,” I said. “The quizlets and the BrainPOPs keep popping.”

Ms. Bishop made a mirthless laugh. She saw through me. She hated me.

Dana was trying to open Mrs. Painter’s Keynote presentation. It wasn’t working.

“I can’t download it either,” said Sunrise.

“A lot of kids are saying that they can’t get it,” said Ms. Bishop. She made an announcement. “If you can’t see the Keynote, we’ll make sure that Mrs. Painter knows. It’s not an excuse to do nothing, though. Make sure to go on to something else.”

“You have to download the Gmail app,” said Mia.

“Some of the kids have restricted iPads, so they’re not going to be able to download the Gmail app,” said Ms. Bishop. Then she spotted something amiss. She made a beeline for Dylan, who had earbuds in.

“What are you working on?” she said.

Dylan looked up at her and plucked out an earbud. “I finished the thing,” he said vaguely.

Ms. Bishop pointed accusingly at his iPad. “Busta Rhymes? You have so much work to do! You have everything done?”

“No,” said Dylan.

“You’re sitting here listening to music on YouTube?” She turned to me. “Mr. Baker? Dylan and I will be right back. We’re going to go upstairs for a minute.” She turned to the kid. “Come with me, please. Leave your iPad.” They left.

“She’s tough, isn’t she?” I whispered.

“Yes,” said Mia.

Brittany and Belle, who was growing out her bangs, came up and said they were wondering if they could go in the little room in the hall and work. “It’s more quiet.” I told them to blast through one of the assignments. If they did it well, they could go in the hall.

Georgia came up. “Can I work in the hall?”

“Get stuff done,” I said. “If you have accomplishments, then you can work in the hall.”

Alexandra was holding an ice pack on her swollen finger. “I really haven’t gotten in trouble that bad this year,” she said to Laura. Alec wasn’t doing anything. I asked him if he’d watched the Keynote.

“My iPad is out of battery,” he said.

“And you don’t have a charger?”

“No.”

“Is that a charger right there?”

“It’s charging somebody else’s.”

Another kid at the table, Timothy, said, “I wasn’t here for the mnemonic device.”

I said, “Then don’t worry about it. Just write you weren’t here.” I looked up. “THE NOISE LEVEL. THE NOISE LEVEL IS GETTING TOO HIGH.”

Georgia came up saying she’d finished an assignment, so could she now go out in the hall? I said she could.

Belle said, “Where did my good pencil go! My mechanical pencil! Brittany! I actually wanted that pencil!”

I raised my voice again. “DID ANYONE GET THE KEYNOTE TO LOAD?”

“No.”

Dana was helping Mandy do the challenge question, about the dichotomous key. “You can go, like, an animal without a backbone, and then you go off from that.”

Mandy sang, “Twenty minutes to go till lunch.”

I sat down on a spare chair near Brittany and Belle, who were collaborating, with mixed results, on their BrainPOP quizzes. I was losing steam. I said, “BrainPOP! BrainPOP! God.”

Belle was drawing a picture of a fungus. “That’s a hypha,” she said.

“I want to see the Keynote real bad,” I said.

“I doubt that,” said Perry, who had on sunglasses.

Things were going fine with the iPads until two weeks ago, Thomas explained. “Then we got restrictions because some kids hadn’t done their work. They ended up restricting half the team. Every student has complained about how the restrictions are so counterproductive. You can hardly go to half the websites.”

“Exactly,” said Mandy.

I was really hungry, and I began reciting the six kingdoms of crunchy snacks: the Dorito Kingdom, the Cheetos Kingdom, etc.

That reminded Thomas of something. “We did our mnemonic,” he said. “Ours was ‘Don’t Kill Penguins Cause Other Friends Get Sad.’”

“That’s brilliant,” I said. “That’s the best one I’ve seen. Do you think it’s crucially important to know domain, kingdom, phylum?”

“It depends,” said Thomas. “Some people want to be scientists.”

Brittany said, “Some kids don’t, they just don’t care.”

“I still think it’s important, though,” said Thomas. He tried to recite the list. “Domain, kingdom, phylum, class — uh.” He fizzled out.

“Wait, I got this,” said Belle. She closed her eyes and held her hands up. “Domain-kingdom-phylum-class-order-genus-species!” Thomas high-fived her.

Dana asked, “Can I go to the bathroom?”

“Yes.”

Brittany said, “What’s binomial nomenclature?”

Jeff, a low-profile kid, was tapping in answers to the BrainPOP. “How do you spell vertebrate?”

“You missed an r,” I said. “V-E-R, vert. Vert means up and down. Vertical. Your spine is an up-and-down bone in your body.” A green checkmark appeared on Jeff’s screen. The next question was: Father of taxonomy.

Brock and Casey were deleting all their radio stations in iTunes. I asked them why.

“There’s a song that’s almost impossible to get,” said Brock.

“But if you delete your station, then put it back on, you can get it,” said Casey. The song was “Wild Boy” by Machine Gun Kelly.

A major slapdown of a notebook made me turn. A kid named Joseph was grinning crazily. “Do you know how loud that was?”

“No, I don’t,” said Joseph.

“It was loud,” I said.

Georgia, who had returned from the hall, said, “They’re boys, what are you talking about? They’re all loud.” She waved at Brock and Casey. “They scream at the top of their lungs.”

“You don’t look like screamers,” I said, disingenuously.

“You don’t know them very well, then,” said Georgia.

“I’m a good boy,” Brock said, smirking.

I asked them what they liked to eat for lunch.

“Pizza, if I can have it,” said Casey. “I like cold pizza.”

Sunrise finished her BrainPOP and said, “Mr. Baker, I got a D-plus.”

Brock made an announcement: “Guys, it’s almost lunchtime, praise the lord! Thank you, lord, for the food! Thank you, lord, for lunch!”

“You’re a porta-potty,” said Georgia.

“How do you spell Jackson?” Mandy asked.

“As in Jackson, Mississippi?” I asked.

“No.”

“As in Michael Jackson?”

“Yeah.”

I told her.

Time slid forward. The noise was like orange marmalade. Laura was helping Timothy spell eubacteria for the BrainPOP. Dana was fiddling with his dichotomous key. He was distinguishing between a penguin, a pigeon, an eagle, and a lion. If it was black and white, it was a penguin; if it wasn’t, go to step two. Good. I looked at the clock. Lunch was at 11:55.

“We’ve got three minutes,” said Laura.

“Were you tutoring Timothy?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Laura.

“That was great. I really admire that, good work.”

“I know, cause I’m awesome like that!” She flung her hair around.

“Well, you don’t want to preen,” I said.

“I’m awesome!”

I yawned. People started to ease halfway out the door. “Not quite yet,” I called. “You’ve got two minutes.”

Belle, Brittany, and Alexandra had turned the classification hierarchy into a clapping and chanting game. “We’re studying,” they said.

“LUNCH! LUNCH! LUNCH!” screamed Brock and Casey.

I ate an apple and sat sleepily and looked things up on the Internet. My mind and soul were dead meat. Mrs. Painter’s sub plans said, “Any student who claims he/she is done can work on the remaining level 2 skills on the capacity matrix. There are plenty to choose from!” Capacity matrix. So much of what Mrs. Painter was required to teach was pseudo-knowledge — lists of tongue-embrambling Greek- and Latin-rooted words like prokaryotic and heterotrophic and halophilic that were perfect for tests because they were hard to remember. This was torture by word list. The uglier the word, the better, because it more efficiently showed who was willing to commit gobbledygook to memory and who wasn’t. That was the true dichotomous key to Lasswell Middle School. (a) Is willing to master empty vocabulary week after week. (b) Is not willing. If (b), an ed tech will escort you away and fuss at you and restrict your iPad.

Pro means “before,” and karyon is Greek for “nut.” A prokaryote is a single-celled organism without a nut, or nucleus, so named by taxonomist Édouard Chatton in 1925. How helpful was that? Many, many years ago I often went around with a sense of futility of all our efforts, wrote a later taxonomist, in 1941. During those periods I would go home after a day at the lab, and wish that I might be employed somewhere as a high-school teacher. Not primarily because I liked that better. But simply because it would give me some assurances that what I was doing was considered worthwhile.

They came back. “Mr. Baker, how was your lunch?” said Brock cheerfully.

“Peachy good. How was yours?”

Casey picked a Cheeto off the floor and ate it.

“Germs!” said Georgia. “Ger-herms!”

A superball was bouncing around the classroom silently.

Ms. Bishop, the ed tech, returned. The room quieted down when she walked in the door. She leaned toward me. “The two guys that are sitting there near the back? They’re looking at inappropriate stuff. So I need to have a little conversation with them.”

“Okay,” I said.

Brittany and Belle tried to recite the kingdoms. Brittany did it almost perfectly. “The kingdoms are: Eubacteria, Archaebacteria, prostates, Fungi, Animalia, and Plantae,” she said.

“And Fungi!” said Belle.

“I pronounced one wrong,” said Brittany.

“You are amazing,” I said.

“I was voted by my seventh-grade class as valedictorian,” Brittany said.

“I voted for her,” said Belle.

“I need help,” said Jeff.

The question was: Two-word scientific name. The answer was binomial nomenclature. Bingo. The next question was: Plant that has tubes and cones.

“That is called a tube plant,” I said to William. “No, you need the sheet. The sheet is your friend.” We found the answer. The next question was: A kingdom of prokaryotes that live in extreme environments.

Georgia was engaged in a hostile sort of middle school flirtation with Perry. “Perry punched me in the face,” she said, laughing.

I walked over. “Is everybody happy over here? Happy stuff?”

“Yes,” said Perry.

“I’m not happy!” said Georgia, hands on her hips.

I asked her to take a seat.

“What if I can’t take a seat? What if this is not my chair?”

Ms. Bishop had left, so I went to the two boys in the back who’d been looking at inappropriate material. I asked what happened.

“I was being bad in the lunchroom,” said Brock.

“How inappropriate is inappropriate?”

“I don’t know,” said Brock. “I was telling her I didn’t want to do stuff and she got mad at me.”

“Gymnosperm,” said Sunrise. “Gym-no-sperm.”

Georgia was dancing and poking at Perry.

“You’ve got a lot of energy today,” I said.

“That’s my anger,” said Georgia.

“Where’s your chair?”

“A ghost stole it.”

I showed Perry the classification packet, page by page, and did a question with him so he knew how it worked. “Just fill this out and you’ll have a world of knowledge at your fingertips,” I said. “Do you want a cheese cracker?”

“No, thanks,” said Perry.

I popped a cracker in my mouth. “Are you having fun?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s science!”

“Would you have more fun if it was math?”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Science has always been my weak subject.”

“Do you like trucks? What do you like?”

“Fast cars.”

He stuffed his earbuds in to get rid of me.

“Have fun with it,” I said. “Fast cars and music, you can’t go wrong with that.”

I circulated three more times and poured myself some coffee. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the class began to leave. I must have been in a fugue state. “Bye, have a good one,” I said.

—

“SO HELLO!” I SAID, to the next crew of twenty-two. “Hello, hello, hello. Taxonomy. Today it’s all about taxonomy. If you were beamed down from a spaceship — first of all, you would NOT HAVE AN IPAD CASE to fling around and hit somebody with. If you were beamed down from a spaceship into a foreign planet—”

“I was!” said Owen.

“That’s clear,” I said. “And you landed, and you asked, ‘How do I make sense of this planet?’ what would you do? You’d have to look at all the growing things, all of the things that are alive, and you’d have to figure out how to classify them. If you came to this planet, what would be maybe the biggest distinction you could see?”

“Biggest distinction?” asked Caleb, with his chin on his hand. “That there’s life.”

“Right. Then basic things, like there’s plants on the one hand, and animals on the other hand.”

“And fungi!”

“So when Carl Linnaeus— GUYS! PLEASE! When Carl Linnaeus started to classify things, he did it just the way anybody in this room would do it. He looked around and said, Okay, the big distinction is between…,” etc. Then came the microscopes and etc. Kingdom packet etc. “So do the stuff that Mrs. Painter sent you, and you’ll be very happy. And so will Mrs. Painter. And so will I.”

“I forgot my charger in the last classroom,” said Caleb. “Can I go get it?”

I heard more silly sentences. Dogs Kick Penguins Climbing Off From Giant Skyscapers. Dolphins Kill People Cause Of Fluffy Girl’s Sweaters. Don’t Kick Pink Cats Or Fun Guys Slaughter.

“Protista is my favorite of all the kingdoms,” said Caleb, plugging his iPad into the wall. “It sounds Italian.”

Sydney came up to describe her homework success. “I did mine on Notability, and I put it in Google Drive, and I put it on my iPad, and then I went onto my house computer, and took it out, and I did it, then I emailed it. My dad is a computer person.”

Cayden said, “We can’t get into the Keynote.”

“Nobody’s able to get into it,” I said.

“Oh, okay.”

“Wait, what are we supposed to do?” said Regan. Kingdom packet, kingdom packet, kingdom packet. I studied some plants growing in one of the aquariums.

“I’d be careful,” said Cayden. “There might be a hornet in there. Last year I was in a science class with Miss Basset, and every day there would be two or three hornets in there. And it was my job to water them.”

“Did you ever get stung?”

“No, I had one of them come this close to my face,” said Cayden. “They kind of blend in with the plants. Owen! I need my pencil!”

“Are you making any progress?”

“I’m going to,” said Cayden.

“I bet you are. Taxonomy. Not taxidermy.”

“Taxidermy would be so fun!”

Owen sharpened a pencil for a full minute. “Can I go to my locker?” he asked. “My iPad’s dead.”

“That’s because he doesn’t charge it at home,” said Jenn, who was smart and thin-boned and easily distracted. She was catching up, doing an old worksheet on binomial nomenclature. She had to use a key to figure out the scientific names for blue jay and Virginia waterleaf—Cyanocitta cristata and Hydrophyllum virginianum.

Chase and Caleb recited the taxonomic ranks. I nodded and gave them a thumbs-up. I said, “Think if you wanted to know about cars, and the first thing they did is say cars are all classified in this crazy way: Hubcapia frontlightia. What if you thought, I really love cars and I really love a certain kind of car?”

“The Ferrari Spider!” said Chase.

“You could become the world’s expert in the Ferrari Spider without knowing the slightest bit about how cars are classified!” I said.

Chase was not interested in my disgruntled theorizing. “What’s your favorite car?” he said.

“The one I’d buy right now is the Fiat,” I said.

“I’d buy a DeLorean,” said Chase. “And not just because of Back to the Future. Just because it’s cool.”

“It makes too much noise,” said Mackenzie.

“And the engine stinks,” said Caleb.

Chase showed me a picture of a Ferrari Spider. Then he said, “Jade! What are you doing?”

I went over to Jade and said, “I was sent over here to find out what you were doing, by certain of your colleagues.”

“What’s a colleague?” said Jade.

“A person you work with. Your schoolmates, your colleagues.” I turned to Owen. “Are you a member of the Animalia kingdom?”

“No,” said Owen. “I’m a eubacteria.”

Mackenzie asked Chase how many questions he’d done for the archaebacteria page.

“Three,” said Chase.

“There is no question three!” said Mackenzie. “It goes one, two, four, five.” She laughed. “Three!”

Caleb said, “I found it. I found the Keynote.”

“Seriously?” I said. “Damn. Nobody’s gotten into it. Or at least they pretend they can’t get into it.”

Caleb began untangling his earbuds so he could hear the audio track that went along with the slides.

Marcy announced that she’d already listened to the Keynote. “I’m all caught up. Now I’m working on another level-two skill.”

Chase showed me a 1929 Bugatti pedal-powered toy car, for sale for thirteen thousand dollars. “In Europe I saw a whole museum of stuff like that,” he said.

Jade asked Chase how to answer a question about vascular plants.

“You’re the smart one,” Chase said. “You should know about that.”

“About taxomony?” she said incredulously.

“Look at the Bugattis after you’ve finished your worksheet,” I said to Chase. I watched him answer a question on the BrainPOP and then swipe back to the Bugatti page. “If you could do anything right now, what would you do?”

“Go to Burger King,” said Chase.

“Do you have a long bus ride?”

“About forty-five minutes.”

I asked him what the hardest part of the day was for him.

“Math,” said Chase. “She handed us a test.”

Darryl whooped; she’d gotten a right answer on her BrainPOP.

“The hardest part of my day,” I said, “is when people start to get really noisy, and I can’t get them to be quiet.”

Chase said that Mr. Hansen had that same problem in English class.

Mackenzie and Jenn were taking selfies.

“My mom ran over my iPhone,” said Jade, who was wearing Daffy Duck pajama bottoms. “After she took my phone away, she ran it over. By ‘accident.’”

I said that I’d dropped mine in the toilet.

“My mom did that,” said Jade.

“Let me see,” said Chase. He inspected the cracks on my phone, then handed it back to me. “Oh, wow, my Safari just logged out,” he said. “Let’s attempt to get it back.”

“What did he call me?” said Jenn. “Sydney. SYDNEY! What did he call me?”

Sydney didn’t want to say.

“She screams like a banshee,” said Chase.

“Don’t pull on people’s clothes,” I said to Jenn.

“Banshee,” said Chase.

“I sense that things are falling apart,” I said.

“Don’t mind them,” said Jade.

“Well, it’s getting towards the end of the day,” I said.

Jade said, “Everyone just wants to go, Whoop, out of here!” She started wrestling with her clothes and giggling. She held up a dry-erase marker.

“I threw it at her, and then it went down her shirt,” said Owen.

“GUYS, THE NOISE LEVEL. BRING IT DOWN. BRING IT DOWN.”

“Sorry, Mr. Baker,” said Jade. She and Owen briefly struggled, trying to sit in the same seat.

“No, no,” I said. “No.”

“Sit next to Jenn,” said Owen, “or in your own seat.”

Jade wanted to sit next to Chase. She moved to an unoccupied seat.

“What scientific conclusions can you draw about this class right now?” I asked her.

“You can look at where they’re grouped,” said Jade. “Jenn would go with Chase, and those three would stay together. Mackenzie would go with them. Darryl would stay with them. Marcy would also go with them. And Sydney would go with them.”

“What are you doing?” said Caleb.

“He asked me to classify the class,” said Jade.

“Any unknown species?” said Caleb.

Chase asked me, “What’s the function of a eubacteria?”

“It doesn’t do a damn thing,” I said. “No, it breaks stuff down, doesn’t it?”

Chase began showing Sydney how to fold her lip down.

“I can’t do it,” said Sydney.

“Just fold your lip down! It’s not hard, look!” He made a bizarre lip face and got a laugh.

Jade looked at the archaebacteria questions and sighed. “What’s the answer to this one?” she asked Chase.

“You’re the smart one,” said Chase.

Jade turned to me. “Can you just like give me the answers and I’ll write them down?” she said to me.

“I think you should do what you’ve got to do,” I said.

I sat down in a different chair. “Are you here tomorrow?” asked Regan.

I said I was. “What that means, I don’t know.” I was making him nervous. “I won’t sit next to you if you don’t want me to. I’m just circulating. I’m like a little blood cell. Meanwhile you’re busy.” I looked at all the pencil writing on his kingdom packet. “I see massive progress.”

Mackenzie said, “We’re all really stressed out right now. We have so much homework. All these level-two things.”

Kyle was passing the time by pretending to stab himself in the eye with his pencil. I looked at his packet. He’d answered question one on the protist page: How are Protists, Archaebacteria, and Eubacteria the same? Different? He’d written, They have one cell. He was stuck on the differences.

Owen’s BrainPOP test crashed and he lost all his answers. He began it again.

“What are we doing tomorrow?” asked Caleb.

I looked at the whiteboard. “Tomorrow you’re doing the finch exercise.”

Jade said, “We could take a picture of all these people, and then write, weird, awkward, short, and tall.”

“You wouldn’t want to make personal remarks, would you?” I said.

“That’s why I didn’t go with sexy, I went with tall, because he’s tall.”

Chase, who was pleased to be called tall, said, “I’m a socially awkward entrepreneur.”

Jade started taking pictures with her iPad.

“No, no,” I said. “Jade, hold it together. There’s five more minutes.”

Worse things were happening on the other side of the class: Darryl, Mackenzie, and Marcy had Sharpies out and they were marking each other with dots on the small of their backs. I got them to cut it out and took a bite from the unbitten side of my apple.

Owen sharpened his pencil aggressively. He checked the point. “There we go!” he said.

Music wafted from an iPad. Pictures were taken and discussed. Chase was a hub of activity. Darryl sang, “Eight six seven five three oh nigh-ee-ine.” The whole class began singing it. I began singing it.

The PA lady came on. “Good afternoon, please excuse the interruption for the afternoon announcements.” Intramurals. Drama rehearsal. The movie Frozen. Cameroon. Nobody listened.

“Thank you, Mr. Baker,” said Chase. “You’re going to be here tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Caleb said, “Thank you for your time.”

“Thank you for your time!” I said back.

“I finished the test!” said Owen.

“He did not finish the test!” said Kyle.

“I did finish it! I finished it twice.”

I suddenly thought, I love these kids. I really love these kids.

End-of-day homeroom. Brock came flying in with his arms out singing, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall!”

Jeff walked in looking worried. “Did you find a paper on the ground with my name on it? It said ‘Jeff Lamarchais’ on it and it said ‘Frozen movie’ on it?” I hadn’t. He hunted worriedly around the desks for the permission slip and then left.

Georgia walked in, saw the empty room, and said, “Everyone went away!” She left. A moment later the room was crowded again. Then it was empty.

“Brock, you’re in trouble,” called Marcy.

“What did I do now?” The room was full again and wild and loud. What the hell, it was Pajama Day.

I asked Luke what the highlight of his day had been, seriously.

Luke didn’t want to say.

Evan said, “He sat with his girlfriend at lunch.”

“‘Girlfriend,’” said Luke bashfully. “Heh-heh.”

Chair stacking. The first-wave kids left. Next to the door, where I stood, was posted the middle school dress code. Forbidden were short shorts, tank tops, belly shirts, basketball shirts without an undershirt, spaghetti straps, tube tops, spandex, spiked dog collars, spiked wristbands, bandannas, and pajamas.

Darryl, Mackenzie, Georgia, and Cheyenne, all dressed in pajamas, came in and put on One Direction. “This is the song we were telling you about!” said Mackenzie.

“Nice,” I said.

Then they put on a beautiful John Legend song, “All of Me.” They boosted the volume by putting the iPhone in a plastic cereal bowl and began singing along: “My head’s underwater, but I’m breathing fine!” They moved their heads and held their arms out and swayed. “You’re crazy, and I’m out of my mind!” They carried the bowl full of music away with them.

The PA lady came on. “Please excuse the interruption. For those of you who are staying for the student council’s showing of the movie Frozen, to benefit the Tara School in Cameroon, we’re going to begin calling down teams. But just a quick reminder that all school rules apply. There is no taking of any pictures. On your way down to the cafeteria to view the movie, please stop by the library and drop your bags and your iPads off, as you typically do for dances. With that said, could all student council members and Team Nile students who are staying for the movie please make your way to the cafeteria.”

Cheyenne had done her hair in a new way, pulling it to the side. “Does this look totally unnatural?” she said. “Be honest with me.”

“Yes,” said Brock.

“It looks like you blow-dried your hair,” said Georgia. “It looks really good.”

The PA lady came back on. “Team Orinoco students attending the movie can make their way to the cafeteria.”

“I want to get good seats,” said Cheyenne. Everyone rushed off.

An excited roar came from the hallway. The full reality of what was about to happen was beginning to register. In the darkness of the cafeteria they were going to watch a beloved movie, and everyone would be wearing pajamas. It was a sort of sleepless best-friend sleepover involving hundreds of people.

When everyone was gone I went to the office. “You survived!” said the assistant principal.

“I’m in one piece,” I said. I drove home.

Day Ten, over.