Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY ELEVEN. Friday, April 4, 2014

LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, SEVENTH GRADE

SHE STOLE MY GRAPE

ON FRIDAY, AN EARLY-RELEASE DAY, I drove to the middle school thinking about my eighth-grade science teacher, Mr. James, a kindly red-haired man with tinted aviator glasses and muttonchop sideburns and a handlebar mustache. Eighth grade in my section of the city was taught at Monroe High School, a brick monster of a place with guards in the hallways. Mr. James made us memorize the taxonomic rankings, and he taught us the classification kingdoms, but there weren’t six of them back then, and they had different names, except for plants and animals. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, Mr. James liked to hang out with the English teacher, Mr. Dean, who had slicked-back hair and a bunchy jaw muscle. Once I took a shortcut to my place in the cafeteria by walking over an empty lunch table. It took only a second. I sat down quickly, hoping that nobody had seen me, but knowing that I’d just done something very wrong and very stupid. A minute went by and I thought I was in the clear. Then I felt a hand take hold of my hair, which was long, and yank my head up hard. It was Mr. Dean, the English teacher, smiling a cruel smile. “You think that’s funny?”

“No.” My hair was held tight in his fist, pulling me up straight.

“I don’t want to ever see you do that again.”

“Okay.”

He let go of my hair and walked away. I saw him across the room, talking to Mr. James and pointing to me.

Because Mr. Dean hated me, my mother talked to the principal and got me moved to a different section at Monroe, with four new eighth-grade teachers. My new science teacher wasn’t nearly as good as Mr. James, but my new English teacher, Mr. Toole, was smart. He winked a lot, and he said I should buy a book of poems called Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle. I memorized a poem in it by William Jay Smith. Mr. Toole wore a three-piece gray suit every day, and he liked Shakespeare. He told me and my friend Nick, who was from Aberdeen, Scotland, to build a scale model of the Globe Theatre, instead of reading To Kill a Mockingbird for a month with the rest of the class. So we got to work. We found some Elizabethan plans and we used Popsicle sticks and toothpicks and pinkish plaster of Paris and made a horrible-looking likeness of the Globe Theatre that sat, quietly shedding bits of plaster, in the project room. We didn’t read any Shakespeare. Later Mr. Toole told us to read Homer’s Iliad and write an epic poem of our own. We did that, too. Mr. Toole was the best teacher I had, and he changed my life.

—

“HOW ARE YOU DOING, MR. BAKER?” said Brock in Mrs. Painter’s homeroom. It was the last day, or half day, of Spirit Week: everyone was supposed to wear green and white, the school colors. Brock, Casey, and Joseph wore black hoodies and sat in a row — I told them they looked like the Supreme Court. The class was still hopped up from Pajama Day and singing snatches of songs. “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow!” sang Sunrise, who was dressed as somebody from The Vampire Diaries. She held out a handful of markers and asked me to choose my preferred color. I picked blue. On the whiteboard, she wrote “MR. BAKER IS HERE!” and decorated my name with blue flowers and stylized Smurfs.

“It smells like that weird hairspray,” said Casey. He was looking at a Vine video.

The sub plans said, “Students are expected to be working, reading, or socializing quietly. They may use their iPads quietly.” Brittany helped me take attendance.

“I have another song,” said Sunrise, twirling. “Somewhere, over the rainbow!” Then she stopped. “Mr. Baker, Joseph has to leave, he’s not in this homeroom.”

“Joseph has to leave?”

Joseph slowly got up and slung on his backpack, shooting me a dirty look.

“Hey, I’m sorry, it’s not my rule!” I said.

“I know,” said Joseph.

Bong, bong, bong. The PA lady said, “Please excuse the interruption. Please stand and say with me.” Pledge. We sat down. The lunch menu was “shaved turkey and cheese on a roll, wango mango juice or dragon punch, Goldfish crackers, fresh apple, mayo or mustard, and milk.” No milk choices today, just milk. Drama rehearsals and girls’ lacrosse tryouts were coming up. Numeracy students were to report to room 127. “Best of luck to Lee Baskin, who is representing LMS today at the state National Geographic GeoBee.”

STAR time followed: delightful silence. One whispered question from Evan: “Can I use the restroom?”

“Of course.”

The phone rang. Ashley was supposed to be in Mrs. Rivers’s literacy class and she wasn’t. She wasn’t in my STAR class, either.

After half an hour, Mrs. Elton, the technology specialist, came by, per the sub plans, to do an “enrichment activity.” She was wearing a red jacket with gold buttons over her giant bosom and had gold dangly earrings on her ears and she held a huge cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. She stood in the middle of the room. “Okay, guys, let’s finish up with our reading,” she said. “Today we’re playing a group activity game called Spaceteam. Spaceteam is an app, which we turn our Bluetooth on to use. Who has seen Star Trek?”

Hands went up.

“You know when they’re yelling out orders to each other—‘Asteroid!’—and all that? This reminds me of Star Trek. You have to do different things on your iPad to adjust for, for example, an asteroid coming. They ask you to shake your iPad until it’s safe. It’s about taking orders, telling your team what the orders are, and they tell you what the orders are. So it’s more or less about team-building, about direction-following, and a little bit about space.” She divided the class into groups of four and explained the workings of the game. “You have to hold down on the green thing,” she said. “You have to yell out orders to everyone.”

The class stared at their iPads and began yelling orders to their teammates. Ignite the grid saucer! Disengage the heliocutter! Activate rotogrid! Abort now! Asteroid, asteroid! Shake!

“Are you guys getting the hang of it?” asked Mrs. Elton. I looked up Spaceteam, billed as a “cooperative shouting game.” It looked like a clever, funny indie game, designed by a former team member at BioWare, but it was premised on rising tension and massive noise, and a class full of four groups of shouting Spaceteamers got unbearably loud fairly quickly. I sat watching the chaos grow, and I discovered that I disliked Mrs. Elton, this untalented gifted-and-talented specialist who had torn into the silence of my STAR class and made everyone play a game that forced them to yell nonsense instructions at each other under the aegis of “team-building.” I wasn’t the only one who was upset. Ms. Nolton from next door poked her head in and said, “Hey, guys — GUYS. Can I have your attention for a quick moment? I don’t want to be mean or anything, but you guys are really loud. I’ve got a couple of people finishing up their testing in here. You guys are working really hard, and I hear good conversation, but since you’re working in groups, can you keep the voices down?”

“They’re playing an app like Star Trek where they have to yell out orders to teammates,” Mrs. Elton explained. “It’s a yelling game.”

“Oh,” said Ms. Nolton.

“We’ll keep it quieter.”

There was, of course, no way to keep it quieter. Even so Mrs. Elton began shushing everyone. “Girls, girls, quietly. Shh!”

“Activate saucer,” said Chase.

“Who has green hair?” Jade said.

“SHH!” said Mrs. Elton. “What did we just say about yelling? Not appropriate.”

Ms. Nolton opened her door again to say that her class was done testing.

“You heard it,” said Mrs. Elton. “They’re done testing!” A noise typhoon followed.

“Once you get to level six you get to shop and buy things,” Mrs. Elton said, amid the yelling. “This is a good homeroom activity.”

Class time was running out; iPads were zipped shut. Nobody had made out very well, and they’d had trouble sounding out the technobabble commands. “Okay, you guys pulled it together as a team, nice leadership here!” said Mrs. Elton. “GUYS, I want you to try this sometime, invite your friends to play with you. Some kids tell me they play on the bus. I don’t know how they do that. A couple kids said they were going to play it in homeroom. Remember, if you get up to level six, you get to add more players, and you get to go shopping.” Then she got severe. “I don’t want you to be standing! It’s not time to go yet! Did you have a good time?”

“Yeah,” said Jason.

Thomas said, “One thing I noticed is that they sent different commands to both players.”

“Yep, that is a challenge,” said Mrs. Elton.

The PA lady came on. “Bridget Rice to the office, please.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Baker,” said Mrs. Elton.

“Take it easy, Mrs. Elton,” I said.

“Engage the wormhole,” said Dabney. “We were so close!”

Ms. Nolton appeared. “Sorry about that,” I said. “They were all totally silent, and then she said, ‘Okay, you’re going to play a game that involves shouting.’ I thought, Oh, okay.”

“Wonderful,” said Ms. Nolton. “The kid who had to make up his test still improved his score. It wasn’t a huge deal.”

I had a break from 8:26 to 9:13. I sat and breathed and thought of the way some people walk dogs. Some yank the leash to make the dog heel, and some let the dog smell the smells.

—

EVENTUALLY SOME STUDENTS gathered from the hall. I asked Perry what he was doing in Language Arts.

“We’re making stories.”

“Adventure narratives?”

“Um.” He thought. “Fiction.”

Alexandra and Brittany were discussing the merits of Vaseline as a lip gloss.

“Can I take the attendance down?” asked Brock. I said he could, but it was early yet. “Did you do the Brainplop, blah blah blah?”

“No,” said Brock.

Georgia flumped in. “What are we doing today?”

“Brainplop, blah blah blah,” said Brock.

Thomas told me that he’d watched the Keynote the night before.

A kid named Curtis said, “I’m not sure why I’m in here.”

“I don’t know why I’m in here either,” I said. “What are you thinking about today?”

Georgia said, “I’m thinking about how I hate the tech teacher. We just hate each other. On his test today, I wrote I don’t know for half the answers. And he hates me now, so I hate him.”

I asked what kind of tech class it was — computers?

“Engines, cars, robotics, stuff like that,” said Georgia.

“That could be interesting,” I said.

“If the teacher was more interesting. Mr. Sterling hates me and my sister, and she’s eighteen.”

I signed the attendance sheet and sent it on its way. Then I threw my arms wide. “HAVE A SEAT, GUYS, IT’S CHAIR TIME.”

“Share time?” said Casey.

“Chair time, green chair time,” I said. “The classification of the entire universe is what we’re looking at — again. And she’s emailed you something exciting.”

“Is it exciting exciting?” said Thomas. “Or are you just saying it’s exciting so we do it?”

Joseph said, “It’s boe-ring.”

“It’s about something interesting,” I said. “It says, List the six kingdoms. You remember those archaebacteria that live in the saline solutions and they can withstand boiling water? That’s pretty amazing. And then you have to do one more thing. You have to list one characteristic that each kingdom has. Like they might be unicellular, or they might be, whatever. That’s for ten minutes. Ten happy minutes of doing the daily warmup from Mrs. Painter. So get the email, and warm it up! Then there’s this thing called the Darwin’s Finch Activity, that will just keep you laughing and happy.”

William looked confused. I said, “Do you have that sheet that everyone’s been flinging around for days?”

“This one?” said William, holding it up.

“Yes.”

There was jabbering to my right. “She stole my grape,” said Jeff.

Belle laughed.

I asked about their daily warmup.

“I already did that,” said Belle.

“Did that,” said Jeff.

“All I can say is, Gasp,” I said. “Why don’t you do six BrainPOPs and a squat thrust.”

“What are we doing today?” asked Perry.

“Did you get the email from Mrs. Painter?”

“Yep.”

“Did you answer the questions?”

“Yep.”

“Then basically all you have to do is sit and zone out for the next five minutes till the other people are done.”

He pulled out a muffin and began eating it.

“I broke my bagel chip,” said Brock.

An iPad charging cord took flight. “Nothing needs to fly through the air,” I said. “Just sit and do the warmup. It’s a warmup! That’s all it is!”

I went back to William. The question he had to answer was Choose two traits that best describe the kingdom Protista. I showed him the section of the packet that described the characteristics of Protista. “Can you graze your eyeballs over that paragraph?”

“They’re gooey,” said Dana, who’d been listening.

“What are?”

“Eyeballs.”

“They’re like saliva,” said William.

“The Internet is very slow today,” said Thomas. “I’m waiting for Portaportal to come up.”

Georgia said, “Wait, what are we supposed to be doing?”

“The Internet is not working,” said Brittany.

In a robot voice, Alexandra read: “How — are — fungi — different — from — plants?” Then she said, “Ugh!”

“Who knows about the Darwin finch activity?” I asked the class. “It’s due today. Darwin owned a lot of finches, and he started measuring their beaks. He was trying to figure out how beaks would change shape based on what they ate. If they had to eat big, hard, hairy nuts—”

Brittany started laughing.

“—they had to crunch down on them hard, and they had to evolve a different shape of beak. So there’s an activity where you measure the beak. Does that ring a bell?”

Timothy said, “I failed the quizlet because I had one spelling error.”

“Don’t step on my ring!” said Mandy.

I went over to a table where Jeff, Belle, and Dana were working. “This warms my heart,” I said. “This guy’s doing Darwin’s finch! Measuring the beak!”

Belle was drawing some lifelike microorganisms, with spikes and squirmy mitochondria. “Whoa, those are some nasty cells,” I said, approvingly.

Georgia said, “I have a question. Did you use to be a hippie when you were younger? You seem really like the hippie type.”

In the seventies, I said, in high school, everybody was a hippie. “I had long hair. It’s gone now, but that’s what happens.”

“Just the way you talk,” Georgia said, “the way you choose to word things — you seem like a hippie. It’s not a bad thing.”

“Sometimes I get in a mood where I don’t know why certain things are being studied,” I said. “And yet they are being studied, and my job is to make them be studied. And then I get a conflicted feeling.”

Jeff and Belle started tussling over a shared iPad.

“No physical struggling,” I said.

“I wonder how many next assignments I have,” said Belle.

“A lot,” said Jeff.

“What happens to your iPad when you miss assignments? They confiscate it and blow it up, don’t they?”

“They actually do something worse,” said Jeff. “They make it so you can barely use it. This is all I have.” He showed me his iPad, which had three lonely apps left on the screen. “I’m twenty-one assignments behind. It’s because when I had my iPad wiped, I lost a bunch of them. It had a bug and it couldn’t update, so they had to wipe it.”

“So are you just going to burn through them and catch up, or you going to figure this year’s blown, lost?”

“Blown,” said Jeff.

I looked over Alexandra’s shoulder. She’d answered a question correctly with the word invertebrates.

“Nice going,” I said. I stood for a while, thinking. “It’s amazing. I think that nobody’s understanding, but gradually it sort of happens, like magic.”

Across the room, somebody said, “Casey, I do not appreciate that kind of language coming out of your mouth.”

Georgia said, “Thermophiles live in hot springs.”

“You ate my grape,” said Jeff to Belle.

“I’m sure you didn’t need it,” said Belle.

“I needed it for starvation and energy.”

Thomas was stumped by a question: Name three animals that are classified as platyhelminthes.

“Flatworms,” I said. “In high school they used to have to cut the platyhelminthes in half, and then they’d watch them grow the other half. That’s the kind of sick stuff you do in high school.”

“Like when you burn magnesium, to prove a metal can be burnable,” said Thomas.

Georgia said, “Have you ever listened to the band Never Shout Never? They’re indie. Listen to them. They’re awesome.”

“We’ve got to get ready to go to the next class,” said Thomas.

I stood up. “That went by in a twinkling!” I said to the whole class. “Guys, you were so good, you actually got work done, thank you so much!”

—

BLOCK THREE ARRIVED. Jade and Caleb were already trading insults. “ALL RIGHT, TAKE IT DOWN, TAKE IT DOWN. Take it all the way down.”

“Caleb,” said Owen. “Take it ALL the way down.”

I said, “Mrs. Painter has been kind enough to email every single one of you two emails. One of them says what you’re supposed to do, which is a ten-minute warmup, and one of them IS the warmup. The Darwin finch activity is kind of neat. There’s little green triangles and you get to resize them. Does anyone like resizing little green triangles?”

“Not really,” said Owen.

“Well, you might find you do if you try it. Finish it, and you will be content, and we can talk.”

“Cool,” said Chase.

“Cool beans,” said Darryl.

I walked around pointing at people. “Make sense? Everything’s making sense?”

“I worked on the quizlet for like an hour, just trying to get everything correct,” said Cayden. She opened the kingdom packet. “Oh my god, I’m never going to get this!” I got her going on archaebacteria.

“I finished the warmup,” said Jade. “I’m a science nerd.”

Kyle was trying to buy a pair of headphones from Luke with a five-dollar bill.

“I’m done with my level twos,” Luke said.

“Are you some kind of a prodigy?” I handed him the book of science questions. “Do me a favor. Pick one question in this book that interests you, and show it to me.”

“Fungi!” said Kyle.

“Do you like mushrooms on your pizza?” I asked him.

“Not really,” said Kyle. “I like steak and cheese.”

“Animalia is multicellular?” said Jenn, surprised.

I said, “You’re an animal, right? And you’ve got a lot of cells. So you’re multicellular, bingo.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jenn said. “A worm doesn’t have a backbone?”

“Right. It’s just pure muscular worminess.”

Mackenzie couldn’t get on the quizlet. “I got on it yesterday, and I tried again today and I couldn’t.”

“There’s a lot of testing going on today, so the Internet is slow,” I said.

BrainPOPs, Portaportal. Quizlet. Wi-Fi. BrainPOP. Packet. I told Darryl her voice was too loud.

“I know,” said Darryl. “I’m just born to be loud. Kyle has a squeaky voice. I used to be like that.”

“I want to see incredible progress,” I said. “Just burn rubber.”

“It’s so hard on a half day,” said Darryl. “Can I do cartwheels?”

“No.”

Owen, sitting next to Regan, shouted, “Every one that he gets wrong, I get right!”

“Is everyone having fun, though?” I said.

“Yes,” said Owen.

“You know what I’m doing tonight that’s fun?” said Regan. “I’m going to a concert. And then on July eighth, I’m going to see Yes.”

“I’m never going to get this done!” said Cayden, bouncing the palm of her hand on the top of her head.

Laughter from Owen about the BrainPOP: “He got the same ones wrong again!”

“I just spelled them wrong,” said Regan, pacing around in circles. “I misspelled vertebrate. I used chart instead of key. So I got it right. I’m not doing it again. It’s disgusting. I’m not doing it again!” He threw his iPad case in the trash.

“You know what,” said Cayden. “I’m just going to do it in Connecticut. I have a long car ride, I’m just going to do it then.”

“It is technically due today,” I said.

“But we don’t have class Monday.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “What should we do right now?”

“Can we make one of those bombs out of baking soda?” said Jade.

“No, I don’t think we should make bombs.” Luke handed me back the question book, How Come? Planet Earth. “I’m going to ask some questions,” I said. And if the question seems interesting to you, then say, ‘I want to hear more about that question.’ All right?”

“Sure!”

I read, “How do cows digest their food?”

“They gnaw it and they burn it in their stomachs,” said Jade.

“Achaebacteria in their stomachs!” said Luke.

I said, “How do cats purr? There’s another question. Why do they purr?”

“Sometimes they’re stressed,” said Darryl.

“Here’s another good one,” I said. “How come so many animals have tails and we don’t?”

“To keep their balance,” said Jade.

“That’s good, like squirrels, when they’re running up a tree. What are some other reasons?”

“When they’re running fast, it helps them turn,” said Dabney.

“Good. So here’s what the super-scientific dude who wrote this, Kathy Wollard, says. The fact is tails come from the sea. Scientists believe that life started in the ocean. Don’t talk. Be quiet. Long before there were land animals, there were primitive fish. Fish evolved with tails because tails allowed them to move easily through the water. Can everyone sit down? SIT DOWN.”

“Kyle, sit,” said Mackenzie.

I kept reading. “Over time, tails specialized to do different things in different animals. Meanwhile, creatures like us that had no use for tails evolved tailless. But you’ve got a tailbone, right? Once I had a sledding accident, I came off a hill and I came down, and my tailbone hurt so badly I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“I did that,” said Jade.

“Oh my god!” said Darryl. “I hate it when the bone right there breaks in two. That happened to me.”

“Ouch. But before we’re born, each human embryo— Guys, dang. Dang.”

“I like this, this is interesting, guys,” said Chase.

“No it’s not,” said Sunrise.

I laughed. “Thank you. Before we’re born—this is the crucial thing! Before we’re born, each human embryo repeats some of our evolutionary history. Tiny embryos start out with gill slits like fishes—”

Owen was talking.

“We’re LEARNING in here,” said Darryl.

“Words are actually flying out of my mouth and going into people’s ears,” I said.

Caleb said, “If you guys be quiet, I’ll give you a Jolly Rancher, okay?”

“Okay, I’ll be quiet,” said Owen.

“And by their fourth week of development, human embryos have little tails. So when you’re a tiny infant in your mother’s womb, you actually have a tail. Isn’t that bizarre?”

“Not infant, fetus,” said Luke.

“Jason had a tail,” said Jade.

I said, “That’s enough about tails, I think. Let’s learn another fact, shall we?”

“No-ho-ho-ho!” said Sunrise, putting her head in her arms and pretending to weep.

“Maybe that’s enough for now,” I said. “Do you think that’s enough? I could do Why do animals become extinct?” No interest. I flipped through the book some more. “Why do fingers get wrinkled after soaking in water for a long time?”

“It’s like a prune!” said Owen.

“It’s to increase their grip,” said Jade.

“I don’t believe that,” I said.

“I read that somewhere,” Jade said. “I don’t remember where, but I read it.”

A Jolly Rancher fell on the floor. Kyle made a lunge for it and put it in his mouth.

“That’s messed up,” said Caleb.

“I picked up a lollipop off the ground,” Owen said.

“Ew!”

“You don’t eat lollipops you find on the ground,” Jade said.

“It was wrapped in plastic,” said Owen.

“Okay, here’s the answer to wrinkly fingers,” I said. “On hands and feet, skin is quite thick,” I read. “Submerge your hands, and the protein of the epidermis will slowly soak up six to ten times its own weight in water. My gosh. As the epidermis swells and swells, it pulls away from the dermis and folds into ridges and furrows.”

“For gripping!” Jade insisted.

I said, “Not — well, okay, for gripping.”

Meanwhile, rummaging in the bookcase, Darryl had discovered a different book of weird facts. “This is cool, can I read this?” she said. I told her to turn toward the class and circulate, and wave her arms around to get their attention.

“Circulate!” said Jade.

“I already read all those books,” said Kyle.

Darryl read: “Slugs have three thousand teeth and four noses.”

“Huh!” Sunrise said, with faux amazement.

“Writers once used bread crumbs instead of erasers to correct pencil mistakes,” Darryl read.

“Wow!” said Sunrise.

“A camel doesn’t sweat until its body temperature reaches a hundred and six Fahrenheit.”

“Wow!”

“That was awesome,” said Chase. It wasn’t clear if he was mocking or not.

Jade, tapping a page she’d found in another book, whispered to me: “Improved grip.”

Darryl read, “A baseball will travel farther in hot weather than in cold weather. Why is that?”

“Because heat rises,” said Owen. “And the bat’s softer.”

“Oh,” said Darryl.

“Is it because the molecules are farther apart in the air?” I said.

“It doesn’t have as much stuff to push against,” said Luke.

“The largest dinosaurs were vegetarian,” Darryl read.

“See that,” I said, “if you eat vegetables, you’re going to become huge.”

“Panda droppings—or crap—can be made into paper,” Darryl read.

“Crap, or scat,” Owen said loudly.

“It would take a jumbo jet about a hundred and twenty billion years to fly across the Milky Way Galaxy,” Darryl read.

“I love Milky Ways,” said the lollipop kid, Owen.

Jade stood and read from her book. “Chewing gum burns about eleven calories an hour,” she read.

Jade and Darryl started tag-teaming.

Darryl: “Kids blink about five million times a year! Do it, Jade, throw it back at me!”

Jade: “Sea turtles weigh about as much as a water buffalo.”

Darryl: “If about thirty-three million people held hands, they could make a circle around the equator.”

Jade: “There are more plastic flamingoes than real ones in the US.”

Darryl: “Bakers in Turkey made an eight-thousand-eight-hundred-ninety-one-foot-long cake. That’s the length of about one hundred fourteen tennis courts.”

“Whoa!” said Kyle.

Jade: “Spiders have clear blood.”

I said, “Spiders have clear blood, people. Know that!”

“Then how come when you smush them, it’s like ull?” said Jade.

“They have clear blood, but their digestive system is a mess,” I said.

“Ew.”

Darryl: “Abracadabra used to be written in a triangle shape to keep away evil spirits.”

Jade: “The average adult’s skin weighs about eleven pounds.”

“So if you want to lose weight, take off all your skin,” said Owen.

Dabney raised his hand. “It’s a proven fact that when you wake up in the morning, you’re three inches taller than you are at night,” he said.

“Three inches?” I said. “No!” Suddenly the whole class began talking at once.

Jade said, “Did you know that hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is a fear of long words?”

The PA lady asked James Moran to please stop at the office before lunch.

“This was fun,” said Luke.

Sunrise, who hadn’t wanted to hear any facts, came up to me and said breathlessly, “Did you know that dolphins were evolved from wolves? I watched a documentary. If you look at a dolphin they have little like feet bones on both sides, but the feet have gone away.”

“No kidding,” I said. “That’s a great fact! Nice going.”

Jade and Chase were looking up a picture of a zedonk, a cross between a female donkey and a male zebra.

“Abracadabra,” sang Owen. Several joined in with “I want to reach out and grab ya.”

“What’s that song?” said Mackenzie.

“Everybody knows that song,” said Owen. “You have no sense of culture.”

I looked at the clock. “It’s time for lunch.”

“Lunch!”

“LUNCH!”

“You don’t have to scream lunch,” I said. “Just go to lunch.”

The early-release day should have ended right there. In fact, all school days should be early-release days, I thought, eating a peanut butter cracker. Nobody learns a thing after lunch — the cafeteria is an endurance roaring contest. Keep teachers’ salaries the same — no, increase them — but cut their hours in half. That should bring in some new blood. And fire the worst of the ed techs and enrichment specialists — the ones who are paid bullies.

The kids came back, squealing and grunting. They were as sick of the Archaebacteria kingdom as I was. So what if the organisms could live in hot springs? About half the girls successfully measured the beaks of Darwin’s finches, some of them working out in the hall; two of the boys did. Jade and Darryl became kooky and flirtatious, following several boys around, grabbing their shirts. There was a disagreement over a Jolly Rancher; Kyle lifted an unoccupied chair in the air and threatened someone with it. That was when I got genuinely angry. “PUT THE CHAIR DOWN AND SIT IN IT,” I said.

“Can I go get my iPad?” Kyle asked.

“NO. Sit.”

Later one of Kyle’s friends brought him his iPad and he played some game on it defiantly. I ignored him. What did it matter? I left a fatuous note for Mrs. Painter and drove home.

Loud bad funny brilliant sullen blithe anxious children. If I were a real teacher, I would go completely nuts. I love them.

End of Day Eleven.