Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY FOURTEEN. Tuesday, May 6, 2014

LASSWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, SECOND GRADE

WHEN YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES AND THINK OF PEACE, WHAT DO YOU SEE?

BETH CALLED AT FIVE FORTY-FIVE to ask if I’d like to be a substitute gym teacher at Lasswell Elementary. I’d been in a deep sleep, but the word gym made my eyes snap open: sweaty children screaming and running in circles for six solid hours. “I just don’t think I’d be able to keep control of a gym class,” I said. She gave me another choice: ed tech in a second-grade class at Lasswell. Sure. After she hung up, I lay in bed next to my sleeping wife, regretting having mentioned the favela scene in Call of Duty in connection with the problems of urbanization. Maybe the reason why the teachers in the break room had acted cool toward me was because I had undisapprovingly invoked hyperviolent video games, when they blamed those very games for the boys’ inattention and wound-upedness and disrespectfulness. It was easy for me to be “cool” by making a few mildly subversive references, but they had to keep a lid on the lunacy day after day. On the other hand, what was wrong with Jerome writing an argumentative essay on why Skechers shoes were a ripoff? He was obviously smart. Why not let him run with it?

I bought a huge iced Turbo Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and checked in at Lasswell, where it was Teacher Appreciation Day. I was substituting for an ed tech named Mrs. Spahn, in Mrs. Thurston’s second-grade class. When I got to room 5, Mrs. Thurston wasn’t there. Two tiny human people were sitting at their desks. I found a chair and said hello and sat and sipped some iced coffee. One kid sneezed. “Bless you,” said the other kid. The first kid sneezed again. “Bless you again,” said the second kid. I read two posters taped to the wall. One said, “When you TEACH what you LOVE and SHARE what you KNOW you open EYES, MINDS, HEARTS and SOULS to UNEXPLORED WORLDS.” The other held a quotation from somebody named Todd Whitaker: “The best thing about being a teacher is that it matters. The hardest thing about being a teacher is that it matters every day.”

Mrs. Thurston arrived and said, “Are you Mrs. Spahn today?” She had on a high-waisted linen dress and her hair was pulled back into a black braid with a pencil poked into it. She went over the day’s schedule with me and gave me Mrs. Spahn’s folder. “She usually hangs out back here,” she said. “Percy, Tyler, and Curtis are the three kids she works with in here.”

“Thanks so much,” I said. She wrote my name on the board. I read the sheet about Percy. It said, “At the main entrance, watch for a dark green van. This is Percy’s transportation to and from school. You will need to go out and get him and walk him to Classroom No. 3, Mrs. Thurston.”

A bell rang. I said, “I think I have to go out and meet him, right?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Thurston. Jeez, she could have told me. I hustled around the library toward the front entrance.

“Hi, Mr. Baker,” said Cerise, the plump second-grader from Mrs. Heber’s class.

“Hi, good to see you,” I said.

Kids poured in through the front door.

“WALKING! WALKING! WALKING!” yelled a teacher.

At the end of the row of yellow buses, which were idling and puffing air from their air brakes, was a green van. The sliding door opened and a small boy got out. He was a good-looking, alert boy in a green shirt and black sneakers.

“Hey, Percy, how are you?” I said.

“Good.”

“How long have you been coming to this school?” I asked.

“Since kindergarten,” Percy said. We walked to class. He put away his backpack and sat down. “My mom hurt her arm on a pillow,” he said.

“How’d that happen?”

“I have no idea. A pillow!”

I skimmed the sub sheet. “So you know how to do all this?” I said. “You need to get your sunglasses, headphones, snack bag, lunch bag.”

“I have most things in my backpack,” said Percy. He handed me a sheet of paper called a “Communication Log.” I was supposed to note things down on it for Percy’s parents.

“Are you Mr. Baker?” said Tyler. He was a little blond bony kid with a big smiley mouth.

I said I was.

“There’s only one girl here, and the rest are boys,” he said. “See, one, two, three, four boys, and you.”

“I’m a boy,” I said.

As more students arrived, he counted them.

Finally Mrs. Thurston looked up. “Okay, Tyler! You have morning work to do. Not wandering about. You all have morning work to do.”

Tyler pulled out a spelling crossword puzzle. “Can you help me with this?” he asked me.

“Sure, let’s take a look.” I asked him whether he liked to go across or down.

“I’ll go downwards,” he said. He read the first word of the clue, which was the. “Three,” he said, counting the number of letters in the.

I explained that you didn’t have to count the number of letters in the words of the clue, you had to count the number of boxes for letters for that bit of the puzzle. There were six letters.

“Three,” he said, counting the letters of the again. “One, two, three.” I explained it again, and read the clue for him. “The second day of the week.” We both got confused about what the first day of the week was and tried Tuesday. But the sentence made it clear: After a great weekend, it is hard to go back to school on ______. Sunday was the first day of the whole week, and so they wanted Monday. Tyler wrote the word down in the square boxes, as I prompted him with letter sounds. When he was done, he laboriously wrote Monday again on the blank line, with light darting marks of his pencil. “We don’t want to let anything be blank,” he said.

I asked him if people called him Ty.

“Tyler,” he said. “But I usually call me Ty.”

We read the next clue. Past tense of the verb “to find.” Zach ______ James’s glasses on the shelf. Tyler was stumped. For shelf he read shirt. Past tense meant it happened a little while ago, I said. “You know the word find, like you find a candy on the floor?”

“Yeah.”

“What if you found a candy on the floor yesterday? How would you say it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d say ‘I found a candy on the floor,’ wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah!” He wrote the letters in the boxes, with help from me.

“Now I get it,” Tyler said. He checked off clue number two, and tried to read four-down. “What—” he said. He coughed. He had a cold. “What something is called,” he read. “What is your—? Name!”

“You got it right off,” I said. “First try.”

“Now I need six.”

“Right — six-across,” I whispered.

“And it starts with an E and it ends with a Y.”

“Exactly, that’s how it works.”

Six-across was Including all. The teacher gave a cupcake to ______ child. Tyler coughed again and snuffled and wiped his nose with his sleeve. This was a tough one and he couldn’t get it until I mimed every in the sentence. Then he forgot the R when he spelled it.

A three-note doorbell bong came on the PA system, and some children incomprehensibly chanted a greeting, a weather summary, and the lunch menu. They closed with a joke. “What did the egg say to the clown? You crack me up.”

Tyler wrote yellow in the crossword puzzle.

Mrs. Thurston came by and pointed out to us that all the words in the puzzle were up on one of the whiteboards. “They’re all right there,” she said.

“We’ve been flying blind,” I said. “That helps.”

Mrs. Thurston put her hand on her heart. The class rose. We all pledged.

Percy came over, holding his worksheet. “Ta-daa!” he said. He was finished.

“Sir, nice job!” I said.

The students in the class next door sang “God Bless America.”

Mrs. Thurston started collecting the crossword puzzles. Tyler and I were about halfway there.

A boy came up and said he was Curtis. My third kid. I asked him if he’d done the crossword puzzle.

“No. I didn’t get time.”

I asked Tyler what he was supposed to do now.

“I’ve got to get ready to go somewhere else,” he said. He grabbed a binder and left.

I asked Curtis what he’d been up to.

“My dad’s buying a new car,” he said. “We’re going to go camping and he got a car to sleep in. We’re going to go gold-panning.”

“You’re going to search for gold?” I whispered. I didn’t want to disturb the rest of the class.

“Yeah, the campsite we’re going to has a place where you can go panning for gold.”

“Amazing.”

Mrs. Thurston was doing the rounds. “Andrew, you should be done by now. It’s time to be done.”

She gathered many of the students around her to talk to them about how to write a letter. Dear and deer were homophones, she told them. “There’s a lot of chattering in the room,” she warned. “What are you supposed to be doing when you’re sitting on the floor?” She scolded a girl with a bad cough named Marnie. Then she said, “It’s time to get ready for round one, please. Round one. BRITNEY!”

She gave me a stack of parent handouts to put into each student’s cubby. “Marnie,” she said. “I’m not sure why you’re hanging out right there with that group. Please choose your spot and get started. Corey, you’re not to be anywhere near Adrian all day.” Ah, but Corey wanted to be near Adrian, who was wearing white corduroy pants and a red T-shirt. Mrs. Thurston raised her voice. “Corey, you now owe me a gem! You should be working right now, reading from your book bucket. If you are reading to self, you are not shopping for any more books, and I already gave you the directions for not being anywhere near Adrian. That’s enough.”

She began a grammar lesson in nouns and pronouns and verbs and adjectives, subjects and predicates. They had to underline parts of speech with different-colored pencils. Adrian, who wasn’t on the floor with the more advanced students, asked if he could work out in the hall. I said I didn’t know, it was up to Mrs. Thurston. “She says we can,” said Adrian.

“Let me just check, because I’m a sub,” I said. I whisper-asked Mrs. Thurston if Adrian could work in the hall. She said, “Adrian, you do not need to work out in the hall, we have plenty of space in here.”

Percy said he needed to sharpen a pencil. I handed him a sharp pencil from a cup.

“I only use one kind,” said Percy. “That’s how I am.” He sharpened his pencil, which had a special rubber grip on it.

“What about the rest of the stuff that you’re supposed to take out of your backpack — the vest, the thermos, all that?”

“The vest should be in there,” he said.

“Okay, if you know what’s happening, that’s good,” I said. “So you finished that whole crossword puzzle?”

“Yeah.”

“Find the noun,” said Mrs. Thurston, across the room. “What is the noun?”

“Spider?”

“Why don’t you underline the rest of the nouns. I want to see if you can do it on your own.” Mrs. Thurston looked up. “Britney and Grace. You should be in your own space, please, and working quietly. Evan! I should not hear you talking.”

“I wasn’t talking, she was talking!”

“Coral, go find a different spot to work. Coral!” She explained to a smart girl, Ariel, that these, as in “these animals,” was a pronoun used as an adjective. “It’s showing you which kind of animals,” she said. “So the adjectives are still part of the subject. If you said, ‘The animal has five eyes,’ the five would still be an adjective, because it’s telling you how many eyes.”

Ariel said, “If I said, ‘A animal has five eyes—’”

“I’m hearing some chatting around the room!” Mrs. Thurston said in her admonitory voice.

“Are we ready for our quiz?” asked Ariel.

“I want you to read it through one quick time,” Mrs. Thurston said, “and then I’m going to give you the quiz.”

“YEE,” said a smart boy, Stuart.

“Stuart loves quizzes,” said Ariel. “Right, Stuart?”

“I love roller coasters.”

“I’ve never, ever been on a roller coaster,” said Ariel.

“You’ve never been on a roller coaster? I’ve been on an upside-down one,” said Stuart.

“You’re crazy. Hey, you want to know something? In a month and a half, I’m going to Disneyland. Well, Disney World.”

Mrs. Thurston focused on Reed. “Have you finished reading the book?”

“No.”

“You’ve got to read it through before you take the quiz. You’re not following directions, there, Reed.” Thirty seconds passed. “Reed! I’m watching your mouth move!”

Some of the kids could work just fine on their own, and some could not.

“Corey, if you’re reading to self, I should see you with a book the whole time,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Not looking around. Reading it.”

Marnie’s cough was bad. Mrs. Thurston gave some special help to some of the more with-it students. “Why do you think the author wrote this book?” she asked. “What was he trying to do?”

“He wrote it so people will learn about animals?” said Ariel.

“Most people don’t know about the praying mantis,” said Stuart.

“That’s called inform. The author is trying to inform you about something. They’re teaching you about it. The other thing that he could be doing is to entertain. So when you read a story like this one—” She pulled up Buzz Said the Bee. “Emmet, you should be looking at me and paying attention. I’m telling you something. This one’s for entertaining.”

“Can we read that one?”

“I’ve already read it,” said Stuart.

“So with a book, it could be to entertain—you’re just having fun. It could be to inform you, so that you learn about something. Or it could be to persuade you. The writing we had you do on Friday, telling me about what your favorite season was, was trying to convince me. Why is that season your favorite? You’re trying to get me to change my mind.” She handed out the quizzes and scanned the class. “I still hear some chatting in the corner over there,” she said. Then, louder, “Marnie! You are not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. You’ll be spending some recess time reading, because you’re not getting stuff done like you’re supposed to be. You should have been reading this whole time. It was fine that you went and got a library book, but you’re supposed to be reading it.”

Curtis, who was very small and quiet, with rolled-up jeans on, came up and said, “Excuse me? Whenever I close my eyes, it hurts really bad. Whenever I close my eyes.” He squinted his eyes shut for a while and then opened them.

I whispered, “Maybe you should just hold them open.”

“I’ve just been trying to keep them closed.” He sat down and resumed reading his book.

“Time to clean up soon,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Marnie, what are you supposed to be doing? Get going right away. You’re finishing up how you care for your dog.”

Two girls gathered the colored pencils. “There’s markers in here!” said one loudly.

“Girls!” said Mrs. Thurston.

“I know, but there’s markers in here.”

“Without talking,” said Mrs. Thurston. “You’re interrupting the entire rest of the class with it.”

Percy was searching all over for a book. “I have to read it by tomorrow,” he said. He found it in his desk: A Book About Your Skeleton, by Ruth Belov Gross. Now half the kids were reading softly aloud to a partner. Mrs. Thurston explained the two pronunciations of bow, as in “bow and arrow” and “take a bow.” Adrian was playing with a set of cloth blocks on a tray. Each block had a letter on it. He’d spelled T I T A N I C. I gave him a thumbs-up.

Percy finished the skeleton book.

“You seem to be a fast reader,” I said. “How did you learn?”

“Practice,” he said. “I’ve just been reading a lot.”

“Am I supposed to remind you to drink from your thermos?”

“Oh.” He poured something into his thermos cup and drank it. Mrs. Spahn’s sub plans said, “Prompt him to drink his water and tea. His thermos schedule is: First thermos finished by 11:00; second thermos finished by 1:00, and third thermos finished by 2:45.”

Percy showed me a picture of a skeleton wearing a red baseball hat. It had red and yellow arm bones and green finger bones. We counted the number of bones that are in one hand. “How many bones are in your body?” I wondered. “A hundred?”

“Two hundred and six,” Percy said. “It’s in the back.”

“Wow,” I said.

“I think I’m going to read the book again, because we’re going to do a quiz tomorrow. So I might want to read it again. I’m not that good at remembering the first time. I’m not a good rememberer.”

“You seem pretty good,” I said.

“I can remember things for, like, ten minutes. But after that I have a hard time remembering.”

I asked him why that was.

“Maybe because I’m always thinking of a lot of other stuff? Like hundreds.”

“What’s in your thermos?”

“Water. That’s my favorite drink. Tea’s my second, and orange juice third. Soda I do not even like. Throw it away. Apparently I do not like weird food.”

“So you like, say, a very simple cheese sandwich?”

He shook his head. “And I do not like cheeseburgers.”

What did he like?

“Mm, chicken. Or pizza.”

He read me a page of the skeleton book, which was nicely illustrated. “Everyone has bones,” he read. “If you didn’t have any bones, you would flop around like spaghetti.”

“Wow, you’re quite a good reader,” I said. “You don’t mess around.”

He kept reading. “Every bone in your body is joined to at least one other bone. Put your thumb and first finger together. Can you see where your fingers touch?”

Some animals couldn’t do that, I said — for instance, a dog has to pick things up with its mouth. However, he can smell much better than we do.

“He can smell a lot better,” said Percy.

I leaned over to the girl sitting near us. “Are we talking too loud for you?”

“Just a little bit,” she said.

Percy kept reading, but now he whispered. He had trouble with the word ligaments.

“That’s one of the longest words so far,” I said. “Ligaments are like rubber bands.”

“I think I actually know how to spell the word through,” Percy said. “T-H-R-O-H.”

I typed the word on my computer screen. “The way I think of it is, in order to get all the way through the word, you have to go through this O-U tunnel.”

He nodded. “I’m a good speller. I actually know if there’s a word that isn’t spelled right.”

He whisper-read another page. After so many halting readers I’d been helping recently in middle school, it was a joy to hear this gentle second-grader chug right along.

Mrs. Thurston was explaining compound words like baseball to her “normal” students. Percy told me how he jump-roped. “You have two important joints in your skull,” he read. “I like to swing a lot. Sometimes I actually swing for twenty-five whole minutes straight.” He pulled out his vest.

“What’s that for?”

“I wear it three times a day.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. I wear it.”

I pointed to a word. “Do you know this one? This is a tough one.”

He looked at it. “Cartilage,” he read.

“Dang!”

“It is made of soft, rubbery cartilage,” he read. “I’m a good reader!”

“All right, let me ask you a question. How many bones are in the body?”

“Two hundred six.”

“Okay,” I said. “I think you did a good job with this book.”

He looked at the clock. “Wow, recess is in only seven minutes!”

“Do you like swinging in recess?”

“Yeah, but I also like playing with Tyler. Unless he owes his whole recess, like he usually does.”

“Poor guy,” I said. “Where’s Tyler now?”

“He’s in Mr. P.’s. He’s the one who makes him owe so much recess. He isn’t getting work done. I keep telling him to get his work done.”

“Well, maybe he has a little trouble with reading.”

“Yeah, he does. I try to help him out when he reads.”

“That’s good, because everybody learns at a different rate.”

“First I sound it out for him, and then he usually knows the word. But he doesn’t sound it out.”

Mrs. Thurston said, “Eaman, I have a feeling that you should not be sitting anywhere near Jayson. You need to make better choices.”

I sat back and yawned and whispered, “Holy shit,” to myself.

I went over to Curtis. He’d learned how to spell difficult, which was one of the spelling words Mrs. Thurston had given them.

Mrs. Thurston was dealing out punishments to various children. “You already owe some recess time today,” she said. “It’s about the choices we make.” The noise grew. “Uh, you know what? I’m having a really hard time hearing. And I shouldn’t be. Coral, where is your attention focused? Britney, what are you supposed to be doing right now? I’m still hearing chatting from people sitting on the floor. What are you supposed to be doing when you’re sitting on the floor?” Some of the kids had raised their hands, showing that they were ready to line up. She nodded to the hand-raisers to line up at the door. I stood up, figuring that I should.

Mrs. Thurston said, “Those of you who have more than five things in your folder? You are staying with me as part of your recess.”

“I only have four things!”

“AND, if you have less than five things in your folder, you are quietly getting yourself ready.” She pointed to a boy. “Wear your jacket, you can always take it off.”

“I don’t have my jacket.”

“Whose job is that?” said Mrs. Thurston. “Whose job is it to get dressed in the morning?”

“Mine.”

More hands signaled readiness. I asked Tyler what was up. He was trying to finish his crossword puzzle.

“I have things that aren’t done,” he said.

Mrs. Thurston counted the things in somebody’s folder. “Four, five, SIX. Sit down!”

Tyler said something to me I couldn’t hear, so I sat back down to be closer to him, accidentally sitting on my computer. “Whoa,” I said.

“One time my dad almost sat on his tablet,” Tyler said.

“Corey! Come get to work. You’ve lost some reading time. You’re not reading out loud anymore, you’re sitting here. I don’t want you reading anymore to Alison. You’ve lost that privilege. Marnie! You’ve got tons to finish! Focus!”

Tyler and I murmured our way through another word in the crossword.

“Um, I’m not going to let the rest of the class go out, because I’m still hearing chatting in the line!” Mrs. Thurston said. “I’m still hearing chatting!”

Suddenly I realized that the chatting she was hearing was my murmured coaching of Tyler. I looked up.

“You go out for recess,” Mrs. Thurston said to me.

“Oh, you’re staying?” I said.

“I’m staying with them.” She pointed to six sad laggards. She turned to Tyler. “You’re focusing on what you need to do,” she said.

I got in front of the line.

“Jayson, you’re standing in the back for your ten minutes,” Mrs. Thurston said. He had lost ten minutes of recess for an earlier infraction.

I asked her how long recess was.

“The bell rings,” Mrs. Thurston said. “You’ll know when to come back.”

She stood beside the line of silent children, near Ethan, the line leader. They began chanting. “WHEN MY HANDS ARE AT MY SIDES, AND I’M LINED UP STRAIGHT AND TALL, MOUTH IS SHUT, EYES LOOK AHEAD, I’M READY FOR THE HALL.” Mrs. Thurston gave a nod. “Ethan, you may go ahead.”

“My gosh,” I said. “That’s excellent.” I hurried along beside Jayson.

Jayson said, “We’ve been practicing that for SO LONG we know it.”

The door leading to a cement sidewalk squeaked as it opened. “It’s so sunny out!” said Jayson. “What are you doing?”

“I guess I’m on duty,” I said. “Will you explain it to me?”

“I have to stand on the map.” We walked around the side of the school and Jayson stopped on a ten-foot-wide map of the United States that was painted on the asphalt. Most of the kids sprinted off toward the playground. “Nice jacket,” I said to Jayson, just to have something to say. The snow was gone, the frozen pond was gone; I could see revealed, along with the swingset and various climbing structures and a field of dandelioned grass, a large assemblage of bolted-together tractor tires, over which several kids were already screamingly scrambling.

“Look at all those tires!” I said. “This is where you have to stand?”

Jayson nodded.

A girl ran up and said, “He has twenty minutes,” and ran off.

“Ten!” called Jayson after her.

“Just ten,” I said. I turned to him. “That’s kind of a bummer.”

“Mm.”

I asked him what had happened, but he didn’t want to get into it. He had a round serious face with straight black bangs and black sneakers and a jacket with white sleeves.

“Do you want me to go somewhere else?” I said.

“You have to go,” said Jayson. “When my ten minutes are up, you have to come and get me.”

“Okay, good luck!” I waved and walked toward the tractor tires, setting the stopwatch on my phone so that I’d know when to set Jayson free from his exile in the United States.

I made a slow wide circuit over the newly green grass, amazed by all the dandelions, and checked in with a young teacher, Ms. Fierro, who was standing in the shade near a picnic table with several discarded jackets on it. I asked if there was any place in particular I should be.

“You’re supposed to stay with Percy,” she said, when I told her who I was subbing for.

“Oh, okay,” I said. “I’ll hang tight with Percy.”

“Not too tight, though,” she said.

I said, “He seems perfectly—”

“I know!” said Ms. Fierro, shaking her head.

“He’s got a weighted vest and all kinds of fancy stuff.”

“And he’s like one of the best students,” she said.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Sometimes it’s hard to get things,” Ms. Fierro said. “I don’t get everything, either.” She laughed. I wandered off in search of Percy. A girl fell while she was running. “Are you okay, Sukey?” asked her friend, with two hands on her mouth. Sukey got up and kept running. Percy was standing near the swingsets waiting for his turn to swing. He wasn’t with Tyler because Tyler was inside with Mrs. Thurston. I was hesitant to embarrass him, so I turned and went back to the asphalt United States — I felt sorry for Jayson, who looked abandoned and forlorn.

“How much time has it been?” he asked.

“It’s been two minutes,” I said. “I’ll come get you, don’t worry.” I walked the grass some more. A little boy zoomed past me and turned, smiling, hoping I’d noticed. “Wow, that was fast,” I said. A girl called, “Hi, Anna! Hi, Anna!” I loved these kids.

I walked over to the screamiest place, near the wide shiny slide. A cluster of boys were sliding down the sliding pole. A girl told her friend that her mom had decided to make gingerbread muffins, not gingerbread men. I looked over at Jayson, a tiny figure with white sleeves. I walked back to him and checked my phone. “Special time report,” I said. “Six minutes, forty-five seconds.” I looked down at the map. “You want to know where California is? You’re standing on South Dakota. Over here is California. If you flew across the United States, and you landed right here, this is Maine. This is where we are. What state were you born in?”

“Maine,” said Jayson.

A girl came up. “What are you doing on the map?”

“We’re learning about the United States,” I said.

The girl tapped her foot on Massachusetts. “That’s Massachusetts,” she said. She tapped on New Hampshire. “This is New York.”

I showed her Long Island, and where New York State was.

“That’s so big,” she said. “You know what the biggest state is in the United States? Texas!”

“Can you find it?”

She tapped her toe on Texas. “I’ve got to go back,” she said. She ran to rejoin her friends near the basketball hoop.

Jayson took a step over to Florida. “That’s an interesting one, Florida,” I said. “Florida is where they have hurricanes.”

“Why is that one an island?” he asked, pointing.

“That’s Alaska. That’s near the north pole, and it doesn’t fit on the map because it’s not connected to these ones.” I looked at my phone. It said nine minutes and something. Close enough. “And you, my friend, are free to go!”

Jayson walked off and found a friend.

I moseyed past two teachers. One was telling the other what to expect. “You’re going to find parents who don’t help their kids, and you’re going to find teachers who are working so hard with those lower-echelon kids, whose situation could be prevented. And the kids in the middle get lost.” Ms. Fierro, who’d told me to stay with Percy, was standing off to one side by herself.

“Sun, happy children, my gosh,” I said to her.

“I miss the days when they had two recesses,” she said. “I think they should have two recesses. For the second-graders, this is all they get for the day. It’s over at ten thirty-five, and then it’s all learning.”

“They’re burrowing away in there,” I said, “doing the parts of speech, jeez.”

“Yeah, I think next year they’re not going to do this. This is an idea of the administration’s. They thought they could use lunch for motor breaks, but lunch isn’t like being a crazy wild child. You’ve got your head down, you’re eating, it’s very structured.”

She made a no-no gesture at a boy. “They’ve started playing a game where a boy will hug a girl,” she said.

I went over to Percy. “How’s it going?” He was waiting for another turn at the swings.

Marnie walked up, coughing and limping. “I fell on the bench,” she said.

“You hurt your leg.”

“Uh-huh.” She coughed and ran off. The sunlit wildness and screaming reached a crescendo and tapered off a bit. The bell rang. Everyone ran toward the asphalt map area to line up.

A boy held up a sweatshirt. “I found this on the ground,” he said.

“Do you know what to do with it?”

“I have to bring it to lost-and-found with another thing I found.”

“Can I take off my jacket?” asked a girl.

“Sure, just tie it around your waist,” I said.

“Can I take off my jacket?”

The line leaders stood in front of their four lines.

“I’m a door helper,” said a boy.

“So when do I tell people to go?”

“You pick which class to go first.”

“Okay.” I raised my arm. “Quiet. Hush it up!”

“QUIET,” said a girl. “The teacher said.”

I picked what seemed to be the quietest line, and they marched toward the door. The other lines followed. As we turned the corner I could hear Mrs. Thurston saying, “Voices off.” Reed was in the middle of explaining to his friend why he was carrying his shoe. “Reed. Stop. Put your shoe on. Step out of line and put your shoe on. Voices are off in the hallway. Voices off in the hallway.”

I held the door for a girl, who said, “Thank you.”

“Oh my goodness, so much talking in the quiet zone,” said Mrs. Thurston.

It was snack time. Curtis got out a juice pack and poked in a straw. “Do you like peanut butter and fluff?” he asked me.

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“It tastes good,” he said.

Mrs. Thurston distributed Band-Aids and warned a boy not to put his milk on the corner of the desk. “You’ll have spilled milk,” she said. “Reed and Jayson, you should not be talking. You have work to do.”

“Are you going to be at movie night?” Percy asked me.

“I’m not. What happens on movie night?”

Mrs. Thurston looked in our direction. “There’s an awful lot of talking. The only voices I should really hear are Marc’s, Dale’s, and Tricia’s. Everyone else should be quietly working.”

In a whisper, Curtis asked me how old I was. I told him: fifty-seven.

“My great-uncle had a heart attack,” he said.

Percy had a sheet of addition to do. He worked at it steadily. Curtis still hadn’t done his crossword puzzle. Marnie coughed juicily on us.

“You should probably stay home tomorrow,” I said.

“Adrian?” Mrs. Thurston said. “You’re not interrupting anyone else’s work, you’re getting to work yourself.”

Curtis and I whispered over his crossword.

“FOCUS,” said Mrs. Thurston, to Reed. “Focus, focus, focus.”

“Focus, hocus, pocus,” said Lila.

“Focus, hocus, pocus,” echoed Mrs. Thurston. She indulged the smart ones.

Curtis figured out the answer to one-down: Monday.

Mrs. Thurston had written a sentence with misspelled words in it on her easel. “Coral — go sit down and work,” she said. “You have a desk all by yourself. You should be able to find more than one word spelled wrong.”

Curtis and I sounded out the word including.

“Jayson, you should not be chatting. Reed, move over, you have more work to finish. Open your folder.”

“I finished,” said Reed.

“No, you did not finish. There are like three or four things in your folder. You don’t just stick them somewhere else. You finish them. That’s your goal, during snack time.”

“I know,” said Reed. He had several markers on his desk.

“Put those markers away. I took them out of your bucket yesterday. Go put them away where they belong. This is not what we do during snack time.”

“I already cleaned out my bucket,” said Reed.

“NO, I DID,” said Mrs. Thurston angrily. “I went through all the buckets, and I sharpened a whole bunch of pencils, and I took all the extra erasers and pencil grips out that were sitting in there. They should not be in there. Markers and crayons should not be in those pencil buckets. Those are for your pencils. The art center buckets are over behind the art center table.”

Curtis sounded out a clue: Continuing to do something. We are ______ learning our spelling words. We got the answer: still. I whisper-explained why a crossword puzzle was called a crossword: the words crossed.

Mrs. Thurston began a lesson on apostrophes. “Reed, who do I still hear talking? How many times have I said in the last ten minutes, ‘Stop talking’? Tyler and Percy, that’s not what I should see, that’s why you’re not seated together. Britney, when do I put an apostrophe in a word?”

“When it’s someone’s,” said Britney.

“When it’s someone’s. You need an apostrophe-s if it belongs to somebody. So: Mrs. Thurston’s class right now should be sitting quietly on the floor, listening.” She told them about contractions. “You put two words together, and you pop out some letters. Where those letters pop out, you put an apostrophe. You have to find where those apostrophes go. I want you to write the sentences again correctly. There is an apostrophe in every one. I’m giving you a hint! There’s only one in each sentence, not more than one.”

“How about two?” said Taylor.

“Not two. And when you’ve finished those, please make sure you’ve written your letter about where you want to sit.” She said the class had eleven minutes to finish the apostrophe sentences.

The sub plans said that Curtis, who had made no further progress on his crossword puzzle, had to go to the resource room at eleven-fifteen. “You’ve only got three left,” I said. “You can finish it.”

Mrs. Thurston turned in our direction. “Tyler and Curtis, did you write me a letter yet, about where you want to sit?”

They hadn’t.

Tyler thought about what he wanted to say in his letter. “I have a lot of stuff coming out of my nose,” he said. “Dear Mrs. Thurston, I want to sit at the blue table. From Tyler.”

“Very good letter,” I said. “Do you remember how to write Dear?”

“D-E-R? No!” Tyler had a revelation. “It’s D apostrophe E!”

“You don’t need an apostrophe,” I said. “It’s D-E-A-R.”

“D-E?”

“A-R,” I said.

Tyler was doubtful. “A-R?”

“A-R.”

He took a shot at Mrs. by spelling it “misis.” I showed him how to write Mrs.

“That’s merss,” he said. He had a point.

He pointed to a scab on my hand. “What’s that?” I said it was psoriasis, a problem where your skin grows too fast. It wasn’t a bad problem, I said, but it was itchy sometimes. “Does it gross you out?”

“No.”

“Good.” We began figuring out how to spell Thurston.

Mrs. Thurston came over and glanced down at our work. She said, “First thing on your paper is your—?”

“Name,” sang Tyler, “and your number.” The number was the number on his desk. Mrs. Thurston moved on. Tyler sang the name song over again happily: “First thing on your paper is your name, and your number,” to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”

“Good song,” I said. “Okay, so you’ve got T-H-R. Add a U in the middle there, just for giggles.” We had five minutes till Curtis had to take off for the resource room. “Thur-ston,” I said. Curtis wrote STIN. “Tawn,” I said. “Thurs-tawn.”

“ThursTIN,” Tyler corrected.

“I know it sounds like tin, but it’s on. It’s one of those weird words. Just stick an O in there.”

“Mrs. ThursTIN is more better than TON,” Tyler said. He refused to write the letter. He tapped his pencil on the desk and shook his head.

“What’s going on, man?” I whispered. “Write that letter!”

“Mrs. ThursTAWN?”

“Yes, and put a comma after it, and go, pshoo.”

“Okay, that is crazy. T-O-N?” He gave me a suspicious look, as if I was tricking him.

Marnie walked up and said she needed help with apostrophes. I got her started reading about the two kinds of apostrophes. Meanwhile Tyler had successfully finished writing Thurston.

“Then you write a comma,” I said.

“What’s a comma?”

I drew a comma for him. “It just looks like a little tadpole at the bottom of the line.” I showed him where to put it. “It’s kind of a neat thing, it just means a pause. All right, now, what do you want to say, real quick?”

“Dude, this is where I’m going to sit,” said Adrian.

“I want to sit with Percy and Curtis,” said Tyler.

“Good,” I said.

He wrote I want. Then he said, “Which kind of ‘to’ is it?”

Marnie was prowling nearby us, bored, confused about apostrophes, and obviously ill. She held out her paper to me. “Marnie,” said Mrs. Thurston, “that’s not one of your choices right now. You’re not to be interrupting anymore.”

“Which is the simplest one?” I asked Tyler.

“T-O?”

“Right. So what do you want to do? Sit? Fly?”

“Sit. Sit next to Curtis and Percy.”

“Tyler can’t sit next to Percy,” said Adrian.

“I’m sitting next to Adrian,” said Percy.

“Adrian!” said Mrs. Thurston. “When I see your request, I’ll see how many of those requests I can honor. Just let me know in writing what your request is — where you want to sit. Marnie, back to your work, hon.”

Tyler and I sounded out sit.

Mrs. Thurston said, “Those of you who have finished our letters and our apostrophe pages, come on down.”

Tyler and I successfully got the word next onto the page.

I raised a hand. “Is it time for them to go to the resource room?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Thurston. “Tyler and Andrew!”

“Okay, so you’ll have to finish that later,” I said. “You want to put that in your folder?” Tyler put the unfinished letter in his folder. It was a lost cause, anyway. He wasn’t going to be allowed to sit next to Percy and Curtis.

When she’d gotten the class settled and in listening mode, Mrs. Thurston opened a book. “It’s called Dear Deer,” she said. “It’s all about homophones.”

Oh, great. I walked the resource room kids out to the hall. “Do I go with you guys, or stay?”

“You stay.”

I went back to Mrs. Thurston’s room and sat down to listen. A moose had just eaten eight bowls of mousse. “Oh my god!” said Grace, shocked.

“Have you seen the ewe?” read Mrs. Thurston. “He’s been in a daze for days. A female sheep is called a ewe. When someone’s been in a daze, they’ve kind of been staring off into space.”

“Sometimes I do that,” said Lila. “I look at something and I just start to stare.”

“That’s him,” read Mrs. Thurston. “The horse who is hoarse from humming a hymn. When your voice doesn’t work as well, when you’ve got a cold, you’re hoarse. And when you’re humming a hymn, like a song from church—”

Several girls started humming.

“Shhh! Corey, MOVE NOW. You are not to be near Adrian. Ever.”

Mrs. Thurston kept reading. It was a pretty good book, if you were in the mood for homophones, or were perhaps stoned. The illustrations were cheerful, and the listeners laughed when the toad was towed to the top of the seesaw so that he could see the sea.

“One day,” said Lila, “I was walking in my driveway, and I heard a rustle in the bushes. It was a female deer. I was scared and I ran inside.”

“Usually they run away from you,” Mrs. Thurston said.

Ten minutes and the book was done. “So, thinking about homophones,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Some of them you might already know. Some of them now you know.” She put the book down. “Moving on with math. Please stop talking. If you have a comment or question, you raise your hand. Everyone needs to get their journals, and a pencil, and come on back over here.” A girl started singing her ABCs. “Uh, EXCUSE ME? You’re grabbing your journals and coming to sit back down, not standing over there in the way. Someone else is still trying to get their journal.” She got them all sitting down, with their journals open to page 180, in order to review yesterday’s activity: they’d had to hold their arms open wide while a partner measured their arm spans with a tape measure. Arms measured, they’d tallied and graphed the results and made a block chart. All this had happened under the supervision of a substitute — Mrs. Thurston had been out all day — and she wanted to know how far they’d gotten. She used her iPad to project the worksheet on the whiteboard. “All right, so you should have had this part here filled in with tally marks, right?”

Yes, they said.

“Marnie, turn your paper, you need to be on page one eighty, not one eighty-one.”

“I am on one eighty!”

“I’m still hearing talking. Ian, move. Move. Don’t argue, just go. What was the first one that you listed for your arm span, in inches?”

“Forty-four,” said the class, reading off of their worksheets.

“How many tally marks?”

One.

“Next number was what?”

Fifty-one.

“How many tally marks?”

Four.

She went through a long series of arm-span measurements and tally marks. “So which one had the most?”

Fifty-one, said the class.

They made a chart, going from lowest to highest. “Your papers should look like that,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Yes? Hands up if you have that?”

Hands went up.

“Good.”

They reviewed the bar graph. “Did you do the graph on your own?”

Yes. No. Yes.

“Good, that was what you were supposed to do. I have to check, because sometimes when we have subs, sometimes we don’t know what’s going to happen when we come back! Marnie, you’ll need to fill in your graph.”

As he listened, Percy sometimes made little stressed coughing sounds — he had a slight nervous tic. I ate a peanut butter cracker and watched Mrs. Thurston zoom through the rest of yesterday’s math exercises. They’d had to draw five different ways to make forty-five cents, they’d had to make a ballpark estimate, and they’d had to read a thermometer. They’d had to find the “mode” in a group of numbers. “The most popular number is the mode,” said Mrs. Thurston, in review. They’d had to do some things with simple fractions. “Reed, please stop doing that, that’s not helpful. With the fractions, you’re looking at what’s colored in. One piece out of how many pieces? This is the what-do-you-know-about-fractions page. What’s this shape?”

Triangle! Rhombus!

“There it is, rhombus — thank you, Tricia. If this rhombus is one, how many of those triangles would fit into that rhombus?”

Two, said a few.

“Two. If this is one, then one triangle would only be half of what was there.”

Silence.

“We are going to do a whole lesson on that. Because on the next page starts unit eight. So it looks like, for most of you, we’re ready to advance. We’ve been practicing our double-digit addition and subtraction. We’ve been practicing graphs. We’ve been practicing some of that beginning multiplication, in arrays. We’ve been practicing reading clocks. We’ve been practicing some measurement. Right? We’ve talked about our arm spans and our jumps. We’ve talked about the median.” What was the median?

The middle, said Dale.

“The middle. The median is the middle. But you can’t find the middle until you put them in order. That’s super important. The mode is what, again? We just talked about it. The most what?”

“The most numbers in that thingamajig,” said Grace, pointing to the projected chart.

“It’s the most popular. Okay? You might think of it as the one that comes up the most. So when I look at those letters over there — that you wrote to me as to who to sit with — our mode right now for a person, as to who people want to sit with, is Dale.”

“Oh,” said Lila, smiling.

“Because right now there’s three people who have requested to sit with Dale. He’s the most popular person to sit with right now.”

“I don’t want to be popular,” said Dale.

“Oh, popular can be good,” said Mrs. Thurston.

She continued with her résumé of recent work in unit 7, paging quickly through the book. “We had some charts, we had some graphs that we read, we talked about doubles and halves, right?”

The class next door was having a motor break, loudly singing, “Wobble, wobble, wobble.” Marnie and Coral joined in softly.

“We talked about those multiplication words — when I have lots of tricycles I can count how many wheels I might have. And fractions. Which tells me that we are ready for our”—she held up a stack of papers—“test.”

No! Yay! Today?

The class got violently squirmy. Some of them were chanting along with the motor-breakers next door. Mrs. Thurston said, “Excuse me? What are you supposed to be doing? You shouldn’t be banging pencils. Still waiting for everyone to be listening. Coral. So, everyone who’s ready for our math test, we will be putting our journals away, getting yourself set up with a privacy folder and a sharpened pencil and sitting quietly.”

Pencils were vigorously sharpened. Privacy folders came out. These were tripartite, made of heavy cardboard, decorated with names and stickers, and they stood up on each desk, surrounding and fencing off every test paper, so that nobody would be distracted or tempted to copy an answer. Adrian made exploding sounds as he sharpened his pencil.

“Please stop, Adrian,” said a smart girl.

“All right, looking around I see some of you ready,” said Mrs. Thurston. “Marnie, you need to focus.” Percy looked at me over his privacy folder. “Good luck,” I said. Mrs. Thurston walked the class through the test to get them ready. “You have to read the questions,” she said. “The first one says, Three packages of paper towels, three rolls per package. How many rolls? Don’t just add them. I’m going to give you a hint. Draw a picture.”

“Do we have to?” asked Stuart.

“If you know the answer already? No. But for most of you in here, you’ll need to draw a picture in order to figure out what the answer is. The test has three of that kind of question. The ones at the bottom of the page are missing addends, just like your homework the other day.”

“Homework?” said Jayson.

“There is a word problem. Marcus is the boy in it. There’s a table to make a bar graph from, just like the table we worked on yesterday. Make the graph that comes from those numbers. Please stop making noise. There’s a find-the-rule, there’s an in-and-out, you find what the rule is. There are some three-D shapes. Do you remember what those are called?”

“Yes,” said a few kids.

“There’s another complete-the-table on the back. There’s a find-the-median-of-two-sets-of-numbers. There’s a find-the-median-and-the-mode. If you forget what those were, it tells you again: the middle number, and the most popular. Then missing numbers on the grid, using some bigger numbers than before. Last one on there is adding three numbers together.”

Percy made one of his little nervous coughs.

“All right,” said Mrs. Thurston. “Everyone’s got pencils and papers, privacy folders are out. Voices off. We should not have noises. You’re not looking around at anyone else’s paper.”

“I might look up at the ceiling once in a while,” said Stuart.

“You might look over at the number grid, you might look up at the number line on the ceiling, you might go get cubes. Okay.”

The class went to work. Mrs. Thurston came over and reminded Percy to put on his weighted vest. Silently he put it on and set a timer, which made loud beeps as he pushed the buttons. He didn’t seem to mind. Coral sang softly to herself, her pencil moving, her head held to one side. Marnie coughed and went into the bathroom and locked the door.

“Drawing a picture often makes it much easier,” Mrs. Thurston said softly, as she stepped slowly around the desks, her hands held behind her back. “I see a couple of you drawing pictures, and you’re really understanding it. That’s awesome. Reed, focus.” Mrs. Thurston asked me if I’d written anything in Percy’s communication log. I hadn’t. The question was, Did he need help at recess? I put a 1, meaning no.

I whispered that I didn’t understand why he needed all the monitoring. “He reads really well.”

“He’s done great,” Mrs. Thurston whispered. He might not need an ed tech next year, she said, because he’d done so well this year.

The room became quiet, and we could hear the teacher next door doing a math word problem with her class: “Anthony, can you read number three for me, please?” she said.

Stuart finished his test.

“If you’re finished, check to see if you have anything in your math journal.”

“I have.”

“How do you spell trouble?” asked a girl.

“Make your best guess,” Mrs. Thurston said. “We’re not counting for spelling. If we were testing spelling words, it would count. But we’ve not had that for a spelling word.”

Mrs. Thurston paused at the bathroom door. “Finish up in the bathroom,” she called to Marnie. “Come back and join us.” To me, she whispered, “She’s just kind of hanging out there, avoiding the work. It starts at this age and continues on.”

Marnie emerged and sat down at her privacy folder and put her chin on her fists.

More people handed in the tests. Coral continued to sing happily. Percy’s timer chirped in triplets, like a hotel alarm clock. He turned it off and put it away. He took off his vest.

Adrian read a question to himself, threw his head back, and said, “Ugh!”

“Can I go get some water?” Marnie asked.

“Go get some water, sweetie,” Mrs. Thurston said.

Adrian read another question. He made a crazy throat sound. “ULHHH!”

“Adrian,” Mrs. Thurston warned. “Shh.”

Privacy folders were folded up. Percy handed his test in. Mrs. Thurston told him to go through his math workbook and finish the pages that he’d skipped over. “You still have tons of this to do. Big chunks.” She turned more pages. “Little bits in different places. Okay?”

Percy turned the pages. “Can you please help me?” he said to me.

I pulled up my chair. He had pages and pages of half-finished math.

“Can you do that one?” I asked, pointing to a column of three two-digit numbers that were supposed to be added together. He did it. He moved on to some subtraction problems.

The spell of test-taking hadn’t lifted yet. “Those of you who are working on unfinished work,” Mrs. Thurston said. “If you’ve not finished your biography now would be a good time. If your biography’s not done you have about ten minutes to work on it.” They were supposed to be writing a biography of someone else in the class, including a colored-pencil portrait.

Tyler brought out his request letter. “I want to sit next,” he read. He wrote to, and Curtis, and and. Then he said, “Perse’s real name is Percy.”

I told him how to spell Percy and we worked slowly through the spelling of sincerely. He didn’t want to put his name after sincerely.

“How else will she know who wrote it?” I said.

He saw the point of that and wrote Tyler.

A line had formed of people waiting to hand in their tests. “Standing quietly in the line,” said Mrs. Thurston. Tyler joined the line to hand in his letter. “Tyler, no! Go finish your biography, buddy.” Tyler pulled out a piece of paper and began drawing a portrait of Percy, while Percy did more subtraction. Unfortunately, Tyler talked to Percy while he was drawing him. “Tyler, no talking to Percy!” Mrs. Thurston said. “You are not to be interrupting.”

When he’d finished his Percy portrait, Tyler said, “I’m doing my word search.” He pulled the unfinished crossword puzzle from his folder. “I want to do number seven,” he said, which was still. We are ______ learning our spelling words.

“I want to do sixty-five!” said Adrian.

Tyler read, “We are—blank.” He couldn’t read learning. “Like,” he guessed. “Love.”

“Learning,” I prompted.

“Learning our sp—”

“Sp, sp, spelling words,” I said.

He looked at the list of not-crossed-off words. “Still!” he said.

“Bingo,” I said. “Good, so just copy out still into those boxes.”

“Now I want to do number nine,” he said. He couldn’t read it. “Crazy,” he said, shaking his head.

I started him off. “A primary—”

“A primary color—looks.”

“Like,” I corrected. “A primary color like—”

“A primary color like yellow and red,” Tyler read. “Blue!” He began filling out the boxes.

Curtis’s desk was clean and he was sitting quietly. “What’s happening now?” I asked.

“Cleanup.”

“Is it almost lunchtime?” I asked.

“It is lunchtime,” he said.

I made a stifled sigh of deliverance and turned back to Tyler. He’d written BULE in the crossword squares. We got that straightened out.

“WHO WANTS THE WIGGLE SEAT?” somebody called out.

“Put that right in my writing folder,” said Mrs. Thurston, “so it doesn’t get lost in my pile, please.”

“Can somebody give me a video game?” said Adrian. Percy laughed.

Tyler checked the remaining words. “I haven’t did pink,” he said. He copied it in the puzzle.

“I’M HEARING TALKING, BRITNEY AND GRACE! I should not be hearing any voices whatsoever.”

“You are flying now, dude,” I murmured to Tyler. He finished the K. “You’re done,” I said.

“The word search are easy easy peasy, easy peasy,” he said happily. “I’m hot lunch.” He went to wash his hands.

I went over the checklist with Percy. “You got everything?”

He nodded.

Mrs. Thurston took a position by the door. “I should have most everyone standing quietly in line. You should not be talking in the quiet zone unless you have something to ask me before we go to lunch!”

“Are you on duty today?” asked Dale.

“That’s not something you need to ask me.”

Mrs. Thurston stood straight and put her hands at her sides. The class began the hall chant. “WHEN MY HANDS ARE AT MY SIDES, AND I’M LINED UP STRAIGHT AND TALL, MOUTH IS SHUT, EYES LOOK AHEAD, I’M READY FOR THE HALL.”

“Jayson, go ahead,” she said. “Voices are off for the hallway.”

We walked silently around the library, except for Tyler, who was quietly singing.

The cafeteria was a cavern of sound that got louder and louder as we got to the entrance.

“Marnie, walking please,” said Mrs. Thurston. “Percy needs help opening his containers. He’s raising his hand.” She left.

I went over to Percy. “I got them open,” he said. I took a position against the wall and watched two hundred children eat and shout.

Tyler came by with his food on a tray. I asked him where Mrs. Spahn usually stood.

“She just walks around and looks at people and sees if they’re doing something wrong.”

“Does she have a stern look?”

“She says, ‘Don’t do it again.’ And if you do she takes away recess. Just walk around.”

A teacher clapped the five-clap attention-getter and shouted something I couldn’t make out about how it was already too loud.

Curtis came up to let me know that somebody had been bitten by a tick in recess.

“I love sausages,” said Tyler, dipping his in a little container of syrup.

“I can’t stand sausages,” said another boy.

A four-foot-high yellow banner was taped to the back wall. The headline said, “When You Close Your Eyes and Think of Peace, What Do You See?” The rest of the banner was covered with hundreds of individual hand-printed messages, written by Lasswell Elementary students. Unicorns. Florida and Disney. Buffalo. Nothing. I see people smile and laugh and play together. Freedom and candy. Lucky penny. The Nutcracker. Snow boding. Not fighting with sibs, no war, and to be nice to everyone. Video games. Darkness. Soccer.

A teacher clapped her hands again. “HANDS UP. HANDS UP.” Everyone put their hands up. “You have five minutes left — actually four minutes — to finish eating your lunch. Open up your milks! Open up your juices!”

The roar resumed. I walked around the tables saying, “Open up your milks, open up your juices!”

“Mr. Baker, Tyler thinks that there are no ticks in limes,” said a troubled girl, Diana.

I shouted that the ticks came from Lyme, Connecticut, and carry a disease.

“It’s a disease that makes your bones not work!” shouted Diana. “There are no such things as deer ticks!”

“There are deer ticks,” I said. “They’re very small.”

“They’re so small that you can’t see them! I went to the zoo and I saw a python.” She told me a long story I couldn’t quite hear about a python eating a rat and about how her friend fell down in the bathroom.

“Wow,” I said.

The sound of children rose to a full riot-gear fluffernutter death-metal maelstrom. How could human people endure this every weekday? I got a paper towel from a wall-mounted roll to clean up some milk that had spouted from someone’s straw.

Another teacher came in to relieve me. “You’re on break,” she said. I had a half hour. I staggered to my car, famished. “I’m hurtin’ real bad,” I said aloud, slathering my hands with sanitizer in the hope that I could avoid Marnie’s cold. There was just enough time to drive to the nearest restaurant, Dunkin’ Donuts, to get another Turbo iced coffee for the afternoon. “What would be a good hot sandwich?” I asked the intercom.

“We have a new one. It’s called Chicken Apple Sausage — it’s really good.”

“Okay, let’s do that.”

The sandwich, served by a small blond woman in a brown hat who’d probably gone to Lasswell High School, was very sweet and full of odd flavors, but I ate it anyway, and sucked down the coffee.

“What a nice day,” said a teacher, back in the parking lot.

“I love it,” I said.

“Me, too. I’ll take all of this we can get.”

The secretary buzzed me in and I went back to room 5. I was late. Mrs. Thurston’s class was already on the floor, seated around Mrs. Kris, a learning enrichment social-workery woman who was dispensing advice on how to keep focused, listen, and not cause trouble for others. “Think about that this week, those skills, and work on that,” she said. She was an extremely short older person, bejeweled, with a beehive hairdo and redrawn eyebrows. In a Mister Rogers voice, she read the kids a book called When I Care About Others, by Cornelia Maude Spelman, which featured a cute bear and a cute cat. “When someone is sad,” Mrs. Kris read, “I help him feel better.” “I can imagine how others feel. And I treat others the way I want them to treat me.” I found myself wondering whether Mrs. Thurston would want to be treated the way she treated her students. “Do Unto Others” is a lovely maxim, but the golden rule doesn’t operate fully in school: The children have no choice. They must go. Teachers are paid and choose to work there; children are unpaid and must endure rhombuses and homophones and tally marks and recess punishments whether they want to or not. Teachers have total power over their lives, and some of them are corrupted by it. Mrs. Kris read, “I care about others. And others care about me.”

While Mrs. Kris read, Tyler got in trouble. He’d been fidgeting and pulling his arms into his shirt so that his sleeves dangled. Mrs. Thurston tapped him on the shoulder and they left the classroom together.

“So what I want you to do,” said Mrs. Kris, “is I want everyone to think about something that you can do for someone to show that you care about them. Either here at school or at home. I want you to look down and think. Think of something that you will do for someone to show you care. When you have it, you can look up.”

Marnie coughed.

“Cover your mouth,” said Mrs. Kris.

The class on the other side of the divider was so loud that I could barely hear what most kids said they were going to do. Grace said she would help someone if they fell on the swingset. Marnie was going to help a friend who was being bullied, she said. Curtis said, “If it’s a sunny day out, tell them, Isn’t it a nice day out, and ask them if they want to come over to your house and play.”

“Very nice, yes,” said Mrs. Kris. “What about when you come in to school in the morning? Do you say hello to Mrs. Thurston with a big smile? That would show that you care.”

Coral told a story about a time her little dog was bullied by a much bigger dog and she went to the big dog’s owner to tell him. The owner put the big dog in the car and brought out a puppy from the car and got mad and said, “I have a little dog, too, I care about my dog!”

Stuart reminded Mrs. Kris that reading period was over.

“I know, I was waiting for Mrs. Thurston, who’s out of the room. I don’t want to leave until she comes back.”

“I have something to share about my dog,” Adrian said loudly. “I was at the ball game with my biological father. It was in the dog park — it was really funny—”

Mrs. Thurston arrived and whispered something to Mrs. Kris about Tyler’s office detention. Adrian stopped telling his story.

“All right, I’ll see you next week!” Mrs. Kris said to the class.

“That was so exciting,” said Ariel.

Mrs. Kris put her finger on her nose and disappeared.

“REED, GO PUT THAT AWAY,” said Mrs. Thurston. “This is why you’re not finished with the things you’re supposed to be finished with. In your desk or in your backpack. This is not playtime.”

Percy came back to his desk. He was downcast. He took off his vest. Tyler was in hot water again. “He has to owe recess and go to Mr. Peterson’s office,” he whispered to me.

The class lined up. It was time for me to take them to gym class. “OH! I’m hearing voices!” Mrs. Thurston said. Then they chanted, “WHEN MY HANDS ARE AT MY SIDES, AND I’M LINED UP STRAIGHT AND TALL, MOUTH IS SHUT, EYES LOOK AHEAD, I’M READY FOR THE HALL.”

I led them around the library to the gym, where they instantly began playing scream-and-chase, running themselves ragged. I said hello to the substitute gym teacher, Ms. Bithell, a tired, amused-looking woman in her thirties with a whistle and a clipboard. She was doing the job I’d refused. I asked her if I could help in any way.

“We’re going to play dodgeball,” she said. “So if you want to stay and get hit by the ball, you can.”

At the far end of the gym, in the midst of the running and screaming, Marnie had a coughing fit and bent over, her hands on her knees. She should definitely take a break, I thought, walking in her direction. Ariel sprinted over. “Marnie threw up,” she said.

“Oh, god.” I held my arms out near Marnie so that kids wouldn’t track through the mess. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” I said to her. “Do you need to go to the nurse?”

Marnie wiped her mouth on some bunched-up fabric from her sleeve. “No,” she said. “When I cough hard, I puke,” she explained.

“Wow, okay.” I told her to stay put while I got something to clean up with. Ms. Bithell came over. “I’ll get some towels,” I said. Jayson and Adrian charged toward us. “Watch out, watch out!” I said.

“Did you puke?” said Adrian. Two girls stood guard with Marnie near the wall, while Ms. Bithell went back to the middle of the gym. I asked Marnie if she was still okay. She nodded. Just next to the gym was the cafeteria, now empty and quiet. I saw the tail end of the roll of paper towels on the wooden dispenser on the wall, and I took it back to the gym and cleaned up the worst of the throwup.

Meanwhile, Ms. Bithell was trying to get the class to sit in a cross-legged crescent in the middle of the gym, so that she could teach them how to play dodgeball. “The longer it takes for you to learn to follow the rules, the longer we’ll sit,” she said. “It’s difficult for me to be a substitute teacher if you don’t listen.”

I went back to the cafeteria and asked a woman in the kitchen if by chance there were more paper towels. She brought me a fresh roll. “Thanks a million,” I said.

“Not a problem.”

When I got back, Ms. Bithell was standing next to Marnie near the door.

“I’m going to take her to the office,” she said.

“I’ll do that,” I said.

“Is it all cleaned up?” she said.

“It just needs another go-round.”

Marnie and I went to the nurse’s office.

“What’s the matter, honey?” said the nurse.

“This happens a lot at home,” said Marnie.

“What?” said the nurse.

“When I cough really, really hard — I start to feel bad,” said Marnie.

The nurse looked at me.

“She’s congested, so she kind of threw up,” I said.

“Oh,” said the nurse. “Where did you throw up?”

“I, um, my teacher wants me to take a break,” said Marnie.

“In the gym,” I said.

“Just have a seat and relax, honey,” said the nurse. She told me the custodian would take care of cleanup.

“It’s almost all done, I just didn’t have any spritzy stuff,” I said.

“I’ll get that,” said the nurse. She gave me a blue squirt bottle of disinfectant from under the sink. “You’re too good. You’re too nice.”

Marnie asked if she could go to the bathroom.

“Yes, you can, honey,” said the nurse.

In the gym, Ms. Bithell was beginning to take attendance. I spritzed and wiped until the floor was clean, happy to have something helpful to do. Far better to be cleaning up a puddle of child puke than teaching gym all day, I thought. I washed my hands in the bathroom and went back to observe the rest of gym class. “What does the word dodge mean?” Ms. Bithell said to the class.

“To throw the ball at someone?” said a girl.

“Throw the ball? No.”

Another hand. “If someone throws the ball at you you move away?”

“Yes, moving away. So how would you dodge something? IF SHE’S DISTRACTING YOU, IGNORE HER AND MOVE RIGHT OVER THERE. YOU NEED TO GO RIGHT OVER THERE. And if I see you talking to someone, I want that person to say to you, Please stop. So. Why are you dodging? Why?”

“Because you don’t know how to play the game?”

“Nope.”

“To be safe?”

“To be safe, yes. Why else are you dodging? What are you dodging from?”

The ball.

“All right, so the goal of the game is to throw the ball gently, from the waist down, and get as many people out as possible on the opposite team.” She demonstrated the right way to throw, with the help of a kid from class. “I don’t want anyone to get hit in the face. If I throw it toward you and you catch it, that means I am—?”

Out!

“I am out. So do I want throws like this?” She made an extremely gentle throw and her chosen helper caught it.

No!

“I know you’re strong. But if I see anyone that’s not safe, I will ask you to sit. If you get hit on the foot, are you out?”

Yes!

“If you get hit on the knee, are you out?”

Yes!

“If you get hit on the head, are you out?”

No!

“I don’t want to hear people saying, ‘He’s out!’ Just play the game. You need to be honest. If you hit someone, and they don’t go out, just continue playing the game. Do you know what honest means?”

“Do not lie.”

“Do not lie! If someone hits you and you don’t go out, and you continue playing, is that being honest?”

No!

“No. I’m teaching you honesty, and fun, and good arm strength, and dodging.”

She divided the class into two teams. Curtis ran up to where I was standing by the wall. “They called their team Thunderpussies,” he said. He ran away.

“Go, go, go!” said Ms. Bithell.

A girl got hit right away and was hurt and affronted. “Are you all right?” Ms. Bithell said. She was. Another girl fell. “Do you want an ice pack? Do you want to go to the bathroom?”

Two of the boys began debating an out. “Don’t argue!” said Ms. Bithell.

Marnie came back and began sprinting after the ball and flailing her arms and coughing. Finally I said to her, “Just sit it out, okay? Don’t keep running around. You’re sick.” She rested for a while and then ran back in.

The class dodged and yelled for some minutes, and then Mrs. Thurston arrived. I told her that the sub had done a good job of cluing the class in about dodgeball — and that Marnie had thrown up. “She’s not well.”

“Most of it’s the coughing,” Mrs. Thurston said.

“ALL RIGHT, BOYS AND GIRLS,” said Ms. Bithell. The class lined themselves up on the blue line as they’d been taught. “Raise your hand if you liked the game.”

Most hands went up.

“Ah!” she said, relieved. “Tell me anything you didn’t like about the game.”

“Getting out,” said a girl.

“OH, ON THAT BLUE LINE,” said Mrs. Thurston. “We’re getting ourselves ready.” They chanted, “WHEN MY HANDS ARE AT MY SIDES, AND I’M LINED UP STRAIGHT AND TALL, MOUTH IS SHUT, EYES LOOK AHEAD, I’M READY FOR THE HALL.”

We walked silently to room 5 and sat down. “We are reading to self, writing, or working with words,” Mrs. Thurston reminded the class. “We’re not making things. It’s not craft time.” Grace asked if she could go to the nurse. Mrs. Thurston said, “Are you bleeding or throwing up?”

“No.”

Mrs. Thurston went around scolding, helping, threatening, and checking on progress. “COREY, what are you supposed to be doing right now? UNFINISHED WORK IN THAT FOLDER. Unfinished work in that folder. You’re not just going to look at books, sweetie, if you’re not done.” She stopped by Tyler’s desk. He was reading a picture book, not making a sound. “You’re not supposed to be reading any words now, Tyler,” Mrs. Thurston said, “you’re supposed to be doing a ‘picturewalk.’ No stopping and looking at the words, you’re looking at the pictures.” She helped one kid finish a worksheet about the kinds of work dogs do. He was supposed to write down two main ideas. “Stop that,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Hold the pencil correctly.” Marnie was looking at the corner of an easel. “Marnie, that’s not working,” she said. “You can still work through a cold. If you have a cold, you need to focus and work. I’ve had colds so bad I couldn’t even talk, and I was still here at work. You can do it.”

“If you have a fever…” said Marnie.

“If you have a fever, and you’re throwing up, then yes, you’re not going to be at school, but if you have a cold, we need you here. You miss too much stuff if you miss school.”

Marnie worked on a drawing for a while and showed it to me. She’d drawn spiders and zombie pigs. “They’re like these big huge zombies with a half a pig,” she said. “It’s all about Minecraft. Me and Percy play it together. My mom has the movie Slither. It’s a really horror movie. Ooh. I watched it.” She coughed.

“I’m sorry you’re so sick, kiddo.”

“That’s what my dad calls me — kiddo,” she said. “Or goober.”

“I think you should stay home tomorrow and rest.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you should see what your parents say.”

Mrs. Thurston announced that it was time for everyone to clean up.

“Time for me to put my cushion away,” said Percy. He had a special textured cushion that he was supposed to sit on sometimes.

“Packing and stacking!” said Mrs. Thurston. She went through Percy’s paperwork and told me to make a photocopy of today’s log, on which I’d written what a wonderful kid he was. I made a copy in the break room and returned.

Mrs. Thurston was going over a subtraction problem, calculating the number of school days left in the year:

176

— 144

____

She pointed to the ones column. “Is there more on the floor?” she said.

No!

“More on top?”

Yes.

“More on the top, you don’t need to stop. Six minus four is—?”

Two!

Tens column. “More on the top, more on the floor?”

More on the top!

“More on the top, no need to stop. Seven minus four is—?”

Three!

“One take away one is—? Zero.”

“Yay!” said a girl

“Thirty-two days left!” said a boy.

“We have to learn a lot in thirty-two days,” said his friend.

“Adrian, your table’s a mess. Marnie, you’re supposed to be coming to sit down. Coral. You should sit down. Stop wandering and wasting time. Marnie, you’re continuing to talk. If you’re sitting on the floor, sit quietly please. Percy and Tyler, you’re not talking right now. If you’re talking right now you’re not listening to directions. I still have folders here. Same people as usual, Britney and Coral. How are you going to have your homework at home, if you haven’t even gone to go get it? If you continue to talk while I’m supposed to be reading, you will be sitting with your heads down. No! And Tyler, you’re not supposed to be next to him anyway. Go sit behind Curtis, please.”

When everyone was quiet, Mrs. Thurston opened a book and read from it. “‘Putrid cheese puffs!’ It was nine o’clock, and I, Geronimo Stilton, was late for work — again! Pretty fast, considering I was not a morning mouse.” She read rapidly, in little bursts, hurrying through the paragraphs. It was a story about a mouse. “‘Taxi!’ I shouted, jumping into a cab. ‘Seventeen Swiss Cheese Center.’ Minutes later, we pulled up to my editorial office. Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you that I run a newspaper. It’s called The Rodent’s Gazette. I took the stairs two at a time.” She heard a noise and looked up. “Coral, I’m TAKING A GEM. Right now you are not to be talking, you are supposed to be listening.” She rushed on with the story. “My head felt like it was about to explode. Even my whiskers hurt. I wouldn’t wish this day on the meanest cat ever! I hate Mondays.” She glanced up again. “Tyler, let go of the chair. You also left your snack on your table. If you’re continuing to talk and make noises, there’s no way for me to read.”

The bell rang and reading was over. The class began to line up.

“Coral, right now you’re supposed to be standing in line. Right now you’re blocking the path. Come here. Take that, put it away. It does not belong on the floor.”

“It’s been nice spending the day with you,” I said to Curtis.

“When would you come back?” he asked.

I said I’d be back if they asked me back. “I’m going to a different school tomorrow, Buckland,” I said.

“Do you get assigned ones?”

I nodded. “Depending on who’s sick, and that kind of thing.” I asked him what his parents did.

Curtis said, “My mom takes care of a lady on Wednesdays and Fridays, and the day after Friday. And my dad checks out houses for banks. Sometimes he goes inside. He takes pictures of houses what don’t pay for the bank. And there’s some houses that are creepy. I’ve been to a creepy house.”

“That’s neat,” I said.

“In one house there was a little door in the basement that was locked. My dad got in it, and there was a hook in it on the top. Creepy. I wasn’t there. My dad said there was a house where the floors were really bad.”

Mrs. Thurston made sure people had their eyeglasses put away in their glasses cases and their backpacks on, and she said goodbye to her favorite students. “Bye bye, butterfly,” she said. “Give a hug, ladybug.” Lila and Ariel hugged her. Tyler and Percy talked about a special substance in Minecraft called enchanted TNT. Because it was the end of the day, Mrs. Thurston didn’t tell anybody to be quiet. When the three-note doorbell sound came on, meaning first wave was dismissed, she didn’t make the class chant the hall chant.

“Out the door, dinosaurs!” she said.

I thanked her and walked Percy to the green van. The nurse greeted me in the office when I signed out. “This was our afternoon custodian,” she said, meaning me.

I drove home thinking about the golden rule.

Day Fourteen was all done.