Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY SEVENTEEN. Monday, May 12, 2014

LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, TENTH-GRADE ENGLISH

NON-NEGOTIABLES

BETH CALLED AT FIVE FORTY-FIVE A.M. to say she had a job for me at the high school teaching Mrs. Kennett’s tenth-grade English classes. I got there more or less on time, donned my substitute lanyard, greeted Paulette, and found room 15, Mrs. Kennett’s classroom.

Above her desk Mrs. Kennett had taped pictures of her mom and dad wearing party hats, and her husband, who was a rock climber, and her daughter, in a princess dress, and her dog, with a Frisbee in his mouth. There was also a quote from Through the Looking-Glass: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” On the wall, in addition to the familiar taxonomy-of-learning poster, was a wall chart with advice on what to do before, during, and after reading:

BEFORE READING

Activate Prior Knowledge

Set a Purpose

Identify Text Structure

DURING READING

Visualize

Take Notes

Ask Questions

Monitor Comprehension

Reread

AFTER READING

Summarize

Connect

Discuss

Activate Prior Knowledge! Identify Text Structure! Monitor Comprehension! It sounded like Spaceteam, the shouting-game app.

Steve, in a gray T-shirt, sat at one of the six-sided tables, his backpack in front of him, waiting for the day to begin. He looked about twenty and was built like a linebacker.

“What’s been happening in here, anything?” I asked.

“Hm?” Steve said, politely plucking out an earbud.

“What’s been happening in here?”

“We’ve been working on soundtracks,” he said. “For our book that we just read.”

Beep. The PA lady called Ron Bonacki to the main office, please. There were no sub plans on the desk, so I looked over a grading rubric for the soundtrack project. The assignment was to make a sort of playlist for Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam War. “Choose 12 chapters to depict through song,” said the rubric, downloaded from iRubric.com. “You will need to identify the mood and tone of each chapter and then find one song that best represents that. For each chapter, fill out an analysis form.” The analysis forms were filled with blank lines, where students were supposed to write what they thought the mood of each chapter was, give quotations from the text that supported the assigned mood, give quotations from the lyrics of the songs, and offer an explanation of “how this song depicts the mood/tone of the chapter.” There was a full-page chart explaining what got you a good grade on the soundtrack project and what didn’t. “Student is able to support all song choices with developed explanations, using lyrics and quotes that relate to the main idea of the scenes.” That got you a 4. “Student does not have a grasp of the content. The explanations of the song choices do not show a relationship to the scenes chosen. Lyrics and quotes do not relate or were missing.” That got you a 1. You also got a 1 if the analysis sheets had “four or more spelling, punctuation, and/or grammatical errors.” Jeepers, I thought, how to lay waste to pop music and Tim O’Brien at the same time.

The head of the Language Arts Department, Mr. Markey, came by to give me a printed-out email of sub plans from Mrs. Kennett. Block 1 was the soundtrack project, he said. Blocks 2, 4, and 5 were all doing the same thing in my class and in his class — watching a YouTube video. He didn’t say what the video was about.

The PA woman had announcements: “Drew Eschenbach to the main office. AP Bio students should be in the great room of the North Building to take your AP Bio test at this time. Nicholson Baker to the main office, please.”

I hustled to the main office. Paulette had a change to the schedule. For block 3, I was covering for a chemistry teacher in room 22. The six beeps and the pledge happened while I was on my way back to class.

“So Mrs. Kennett is absent,” I said to the class. “You’ve got an extra day to work on the soundtrack project.”

“Awesome,” said Kaylee.

Artie was in this class, and so was Sebastian, who seemed fine — jokey and cheerful and loud — getting more sleep these days, I guessed. He wasn’t drinking mango juice this morning. Keith was eating a bagel with cream cheese. Mrs. Meese, the kindhearted ed tech from Mr. Bowles’s room, walked around the class asking each kid if he or she had finished the project. “I think we should wait a little bit to take attendance,” she said, “because I know some of them went to get breakfast.”

Sebastian and Brad launched into a joshing argument. “You’re such a jackass,” said Sebastian.

I took attendance — it was a big class of twenty-six kids — while the students gossiped about iPad restrictions. Steve put his head down to take a nap.

I asked the class if they’d had any luck finding songs that went with the mood of the chapters.

“I’ve had no luck,” said Steve, looking up. “I’ve been sleeping for the past week.”

Mr. Clapper, the principal, stuck his head in the door. “You can disregard that third block,” he said. “We’re all set.” No chemistry for me today.

Kaylee loaned me her copy of The Things They Carried. I read, Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend’s pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. I read, You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. I said, “Theoretically everybody’s read the whole book?”

“Theoretically,” Pearl said.

“I don’t want you guys talking at this table,” said Mrs. Meese, to a crowd of big-voiced boys.

I let Mrs. Meese police the class. “What are you working on?” she asked, over and over. She had a nice, loose, jokey way of dealing with these “low-performing” students; she seemed resigned to the fact that none of them were going to do much in the way of actual work. I asked Steve if Mrs. Kennett had read any of O’Brien’s book aloud.

“No,” he said, “me and Keith read the last book out loud. We made a deal with her that if we read the book out loud to the class we didn’t have to do the assignment.”

I asked Brandon what chapter he was working on. He held up an analysis page for a chapter called “Enemies,” half filled out. He said, “I’ve done like five of these. You’re supposed to do eight. Or twelve, sorry.”

I said, “For each chapter you have to fill out that same worksheet?” I hadn’t quite taken that in. “My god.”

“Imagine my enthusiasm,” Brandon said.

“I can only dream,” I said. “So how do you figure out the tone of something?”

“I don’t know.”

Mrs. Meese was full of enthusiasm and pep. “Three left to do?” she said to Harmony. “Good job!”

Keith said he had eleven analysis pages to go.

“It was due today,” Mrs. Meese said. “You guys are lucky she’s out sick.”

“I have nine left,” said Brad.

I asked Dale if any of the chapters had grabbed his mind.

He shook his head.

Jared slammed down his AriZona iced tea and burped.

“That was a bad one,” said Anabelle.

Shamus told a story about his cousin being chased by a Scotty dog. He said to me, “I’ve written one word. Love.”

Pearl softly read aloud the first sentence of a chapter: “But this too is true: stories can save us.”

“I like dancing to dubstep,” said Dale, with his iPad blaring.

“DO IT,” bellowed Jared.

“Guys, come on,” I said. “Just do something. Do you have some headphones?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Pearl continued to read: “But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.” She kept on going. The narrator, Tim O’Brien, walks into a village in Vietnam after an air strike. He sees an old man lying faceup, dead, with his arm gone, and flies feeding on his face. One of O’Brien’s platoon-mates goes over and shakes the dead man’s hand and says, “Howdee-doo.” Later, his platoon-mate says, “Maybe it’s too real for you.” Pearl and a kid sitting next to her wrote that sentence down on their analysis sheets: “Maybe it’s too real for you.”

Bong. Mr. Clapper came on the PA system. “If I can have your attention just for a moment,” he said. “Over the weekend, we had a technology glitch, where a thousand of our iPads, as several of you have found out, were accidentally put into lockdown mode. We’re fixing the problem this morning. More information will be out shortly. So bear with us, and we hope to have this error corrected shortly. Thank you.”

“A ‘glitch,’” said Artie, with air quotes.

I loaned out my headphones.

“Fuckin’ double-tap it!” said Jared. Jared and Artie watched a viral video in which a girl hits another girl in the head with a shovel.

Anabelle wrote about the chapter in The Things They Carried in which a nine-year-old girl gets a brain tumor.

Suddenly Jared blasted the first measures of “#Selfie.” That got a laugh. Trevor shook his head and popped a Cheeto in his mouth. I went over to Jared. Had he gotten any of the worksheets done?

“No, not today,” he said.

Shamus had written another mood word, after love: caring.

I looked at the clock. “So that’s one word every twenty minutes.”

“That’s more than I usually do,” Shamus said. He said he’d already chosen three songs and filled out three analysis sheets, and then he’d spent two days in ISS — i.e., in-school suspension — the week before, when the due date for the soundtrack project was changed. Mrs. Meese came over to say that if he didn’t have the project done by tomorrow, when Mrs. Kennett was back, he’d get a zero. “You could have been working on it when you were in ISS,” she said.

“But I never got the paper for it,” said Shamus. “It’s not my fault.”

“It is your fault, because you got an ISS,” Mrs. Meese said.

“Yes, but it’s the teacher’s responsibility to give me my work,” Shamus said, reasonably.

“Then you talk to the teacher about it,” Mrs. Meese said. “Check with her to see if she’ll give you more time.”

“I’m not trying to make a thing about it,” Shamus said. “I was just asking a simple question.”

“And I don’t know the answer,” said Mrs. Meese. “That’s something that she has to answer.”

“Okay.” Shamus pulled the brim of his hat way down.

When Mrs. Meese had moved off to talk to somebody else, I tapped Shamus’s copy of The Things They Carried. “I met the man who wrote this book,” I said to him. “He put his heart and soul into it, and he wrote it as a work of fiction. He kept insisting that the stories are not true, but he’s kind of presenting them as if they are true. What if you found out that, say, fifty percent of the stories were exaggerated, were not true, in this book? Would it matter?”

Shamus thought for a bit. “I would say that it wouldn’t matter. I don’t see how it would.”

Dale handed me twelve pages, with some words and random song titles hastily scrawled on each one. “I’m done,” he said, zipping up his backpack.

“You are finished, man,” I said. “You are done.”

“I’m DONE.”

It was time to wrap things up. The kids who had taken out school laptops in place of locked iPads put them all away. Jared began telling the story of a movie called The Maiden Heist, with Morgan Freeman. “What the FUCK would be so important that you can’t help your old friend Christopher Walken?” he said.

“Jared, you really need to watch the language,” said Mrs. Meese, but since there were plenty of bad words in Tim O’Brien’s book, which was assigned reading, she couldn’t muster much outrage. What was interesting, though, was that Jared had a complete mastery of the Morgan Freeman movie. He could give a succinct off-the-cuff plot summary, and yet he’d done practically nothing on the analysis forms.

Mrs. Kennett wasn’t to blame, though — she taught what the Language Arts Department at Lasswell High School told her to teach. And the Language Arts Department wasn’t to blame either — filling out analysis sheets about The Things They Carried was standard operating procedure at American high schools. The people to blame were educational theorists who thought that it was necessary for all students to do literary criticism. If you want unskilled readers to read, I thought, make them copy out an interesting sentence every day, and make them read aloud an interesting paragraph a day. Twenty minutes, tops. If you want them to take pleasure in longer works, fiction or nonfiction, let them read along with an audiobook. Don’t fiddle with deadly lit-crit words like tone and mood. And don’t force them to read war books about shaking hands with corpses.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. The PA woman said: “All iPads should unlock themselves by the end of block two today. All iPads should unlock themselves by the end of block two today. Thank you.” She read the names of about twenty-five students who had to report to the office.

Mr. Markey — curly hair, gruff voice, sleeves rolled up — came in with a projector to show the YouTube video, and we hooked it up to a school computer. “It’s a video of Oprah interviewing Elie Wiesel,” he said.

I said, “That’s heavy-duty.”

“Yeah — at Auschwitz,” said Mr. Markey. “So they’re walking around it and talking about it.” I had a sinking feeling. The Holocaust, at Lasswell High School. Pictures of mass death in this pale blue cinderblock room.

As he left, Jared apologized to Mrs. Meese for his bad language.

“That’s okay, Jared, don’t be sorry,” she said.

“They’re going to write an essay comparing this video to whatever book they read,” Mr. Markey said. “The idea is, what’s the best form for teaching a particular audience about the Holocaust? The best thing for today is just to pay attention to the video.”

I passed out the assignment sheet.

“Ooh, an assignment,” said Chelsea.

She and her friend Madonna were debating whether they should get their hair cut at the hair salon at Walmart on Saturday: the Walmart salon was cheap and supposedly they did a really good job.

I skimmed the assignment sheet, which said, In an essay decide which one of the mediums we have looked at is the best for telling a survivor’s story. Defend your decision, but you must also acknowledge at least one counterclaim. In addition, be sure to use varied transitions to link your ideas and develop cohesion in your essay. If you did that, you got a score 3. To get a score 4, you had to consider the problem of which medium is best for a specific audience. Every essay had to have a thesis statement, and the students were allowed one spelling mistake — these were “non-negotiables.” “If I find a second mistake I will return it to you ungraded.” On the back was a blank chart, to be filled out with the several qualities, or “criteria,” that a Holocaust survivor’s story must have, each of which was to be multiplied by a factor of importance, one through four, called the “multiplier.” Students were asked to assign values to each format and figure out its overall score. The Holocaust assignment conformed to the following standards: Text Structures Level 6, Opinion/Argument Level 7, and Writing Process Level 5. It used the mass murder of Jews to evaluate the efficacy of various media.

“All right, my friends,” I said. “Give me some examples of some books that you’ve been reading — because you’re going to have to write an essay comparing the book that you’ve been working on with the video that you will watch.” Gloria said she’d read The Book Thief. Madonna and Chelsea were surfing makeup options. “Dark mascara?” I said. “Would that be good? Good. So this video, called Auschwitz: Death Camp, is Oprah Winfrey talking to Elie Wiesel, who’s a Holocaust survivor, in Auschwitz. The idea is to watch it and then compare it with one of the books that you’ve read.” I held up the assignment sheet. “And you have to use these criteria. I wouldn’t know how to do this, honestly, and I write for a living.”

Having discovered that his projector had no sound, Mr. Markey brought all of his students into my classroom. Some of them sat on low cabinets or on the floor; the room was crowded and hot and dark.

We watched the video. It opens with Oprah standing on the railroad track leading into the front gates of Auschwitz, on a wintry day. We see a close-up of Hitler’s eyes, and then, one minute into the movie, begins the parade of visual horror: pictures of piled, starved, naked Jewish bodies, bodies being bulldozed, bodies tossed into trenches full of more bodies. We were given a two-minute history of the war and the creation of concentration camps. Oprah said, “When American and Russian troops finally liberated the remaining camps, all they found left behind were the dead, and the walking dead.” Elie Wiesel and Oprah talk, walking on the frozen pathways of Auschwitz, exclaiming at its vastness. “This is the largest cemetery in recorded history,” Wiesel says. “I come here, and try to see the invisible, and try to hear the inaudible.” Oprah has her mittened hand in Elie Wiesel’s arm, and Wiesel is cold — you can hear the shivering in his voice. “I still don’t grasp it,” he says. “It must have some meaning. What does it mean? That evil can triumph? We knew that. That humiliation exists? We knew that. But this, which was a scandal at the level of creation?”

Wiesel is eloquent, and Auschwitz: Death Camp is a moving, freshly shocking, well-made video. But as I watched the kids sitting slack-faced, in plump-cheeked, polite silence, surreptitiously checking their text messages every so often, glancing up at the screen and away from it to think their own thoughts, adjusting their hair, while laughter and shouts floated in from the hall, I knew that this was the wrong documentary to be showing to a group of choiceless, voiceless high school kids at eight-thirty on a Monday morning, in connection with a compare-and-contrast media-studies essay assignment. The atrocity pictures kept coming, the staring corpses, the bodiless heads, while a violin played, and Wiesel read aloud from Night. And there was another problem: the particular copy of the video on YouTube that Mr. Markey had found repeated one section of the original program, so we were presented with some of the dreadful footage twice over. In the last fifteen minutes of the movie, we saw, displayed behind glass in the Auschwitz museum, a dark mound of empty cans of Zyklon B gas, and a low mountain of suitcases taken from Jewish families. We were shown a collection of confiscated baby clothes, more panned-across photos of bodies and charred faces — and then thousands of shoes, including children’s shoes. “Elegant shoes, poor shoes,” says Wiesel. “If these shoes could tell the stories of the lives of those who walked in them, imagine what they would say. Here it’s like the camp itself: we were all together. A whole community of shoes.” And then, still in the same museum, Wiesel and Oprah walk along the gigantic glass-fronted display case of human hair, which looks to be more than twenty feet long and four or five feet deep. “The first thing they did was to shave your head, from the corpses as well,” says Wiesel. The hair was sold to factories, Oprah explains: “At the time of the liberation, seven tons of hair was discovered at Auschwitz.” Wiesel almost can’t look at the hair — it’s too awful. “More and more,” he says. “Oh my god,” says Oprah. “It’s really unimaginable.” Wiesel says, “They wanted to push their crimes to the outer limit, thus depriving us of the language to describe their crimes.” The movie ends with the two of them again out in the cold, shivering, standing near barbed wire. Oprah says she can’t get her brain around the Holocaust, even now. “Oprah, the death of one child makes no sense,” Wiesel says. “The death of millions — what sense could it make?” Wiesel’s last words are, “Whenever people try to conduct such experiments against another people, we must be there to shout, and say, ‘No. We remember.’”

When the credits came on, Mr. Markey stopped the video. “Questions or comments right now?” he said. There were some small unhappy moans — no comments.

“Okay,” Mr. Markey said. “Those who came from next door, let’s go back next door. If you brought a chair, bring it back.” Many clinks and shufflings of moving chairs.

I said nothing. I sat in my chair and felt dismal. A boy named Graham and his friend talked softly together about Night—how it compared to the video they’d just watched. They discussed the museum of hair.

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

Madonna and Chelsea were giddy after seeing so much death: as if they were cheerleaders, they chanted, “H! O! L! O! C-A-U-S-T, YEAH!” At least they could spell it.

—

I SAT FOR AN HOUR. I had lunch and listened to voices in the hall. The bell bonged again six times. “They asked to see your ID?” said a boy. A girl called out, “Garth! Garth Connolly!”

I continued to sit. A tall tousled kid appeared at the door. “Is Mrs. Kennett not here?” He said he usually sat in the room with her this block.

I said I thought her daughter had croup.

“Huh?”

“I think her daughter got sick.”

“Oh, all right.” He waved and left. I noted down the SAT word of the day: prudent.

In the hall, a girl said, “I’m not sick, I have allergies.”

The PA lady said, “At this time, all chorus and chamber singers please go to the music room. All chorus and chamber singers to the music room.” She read off fourteen names of people who had to report to the main office.

“Your butt’s hanging,” said a boy in the hall. A girl came in and stopped. “You’re not Mrs. Kennett,” she said. She left.

The PA system booped. “Happy Monday, Lobster Nation!” said a high schooler’s male voice. “I’m Monk Bissette, and it’s a beautiful day outside. I’m here with my best friend and cohost, the one, the only, Dr. Might B. Righty.”

“Yo, wassup, Lobsters,” said Dr. Might B. Righty. “Today the boys’ and girls’ tennis team has matches with Kennebunk. Matches begin at three-thirty p.m. Also the JV and varsity softball team travels to Bonny Eagle for a four-thirty game. The JV boys’ lacrosse team hosts York at six p.m. Good luck to all Lobsters!”

Monk Bissette said, “Any student who has signed up for AP Government or AP History next year will need to attend a meeting on Tuesday, May thirteenth, during activity block in the auditorium. And our spring chorale concert will be held on Wednesday, May fourteenth, at seven p.m. in the auditorium. Mark your calendar today. See you there.”

Dr. Might B. Righty said, “Also, reminder to all seniors again. Please, seniors, LISTEN UP. You must turn in your permission slips and ten dollars to hold your spot for our class trip. We’re taking an awesome trip to Birch Point State Park, so PLEASE make sure you get that in by this Friday, all right — because we’re going to have to start canceling buses or adding buses. So get that IN! And also get your dues in. We’re graduating SOON, people. Get those dues IN!”

“That’s all for now. I’m Monk Bissette.”

“And I’m Dr. Might B. Righty. Stay classy, Lasswell.”

More quiet. Mr. Markey came in to say he’d gotten his sound to work with the projector.

From the hall, two girls: “That’s so cute.”

“Oh my god, that’s adorable.”

I got the Elie Wiesel movie ready to play for the next class, which was split in two parts: twenty-five minutes of Holocaust, then twenty-five minutes of lunch, then twenty-five more minutes of Holocaust. I leafed through an anthology that sat on the desk until a boy named Thad arrived. “I’m guessing I’m supposed to be in here,” he said. “I don’t know.”

I told him we were watching a video about the Holocaust. “It’s seriously heavy.”

Zach and Carter blew in. “Dude, she took my iPad with literally a minute left in class,” said Zach. “Everyone was sitting and not doing anything. So I have to get it back next block.”

“You got any food?” said Carter. Zach brought out a sandwich, which Carter rejected.

“Dude, you’re making fun of my mom,” said Zach. “You can’t make fun of my mom.”

Cece said, “Give me my headphones back.”

“Are we watching a movie today?” asked Carter.

“It’s not a cheerful movie,” I said, passing out the Holocaust assignment sheets.

“What the?” said Paul, scrubbing his face.

Mathias and Pat were planning to go to the JV lacrosse game at six.

“I have a science Keynote to do,” said Wynonna.

“Oh my god,” said Phyllis. “I forgot about that.”

“All right, hi, hello,” I said. “HELLO.”

Mathias and Pat just kept talking about lacrosse. I clapped my hands. “All right, so the deal is, I’m Mr. Baker, I’m the substitute, filling in. Hello, hi. Mrs. Kennett’s child is sick, so she’ll be back tomorrow. What you’re going to do today is watch an incredibly depressing movie.”

“Hah hah,” said Cece.

“In which Oprah Winfrey takes a Holocaust survivor named Elie Wiesel through Auschwitz. There are a lot of really tragic images. You’re supposed to watch this movie, and while you’re watching it, you will want to be thinking about whether it’s a better way of conveying what is actually going on—”

Several conversations sprang up simultaneously. I stood watching their young, heedless mouths open and close. I waited for them to be quiet. Wynonna said, “Shh.”

“The sound on the video is really soft,” I said, “so if you want to hear it, you have to be quiet.”

I started the video. “It’s my girl, Oprah,” said Remington.

“I can’t hear,” said Cece.

Oprah was saying, “… where it’s estimated that one point five million Jews perished — here in the Holocaust, most of them Eastern European Jews.”

“Stop talking,” said Phyllis. Laughter. Two softly muttered conversations in the back. Again, horrifying pictures of death on the screen.

I walked to the back. “Just be quiet,” I whispered. “Just listen to the movie, okay?”

“Yeah, dudes,” said Remington.

“Well, I can’t hear it,” said Cece.

“That’s because you’re talking,” I said.

“When American and Russian troops finally liberated the remaining camps,” said Oprah, “all they found left behind were the dead, and the walking dead.”

“The Walking Dead TV show,” said Remington, but nobody laughed. The class was listening now.

“Each time I come,” Wiesel said, “I try not to speak for a day or two or three, and just to go back and find the silence that was in me then. And I say to myself, How many of us did not live, and simply vanished?”

They listened quietly for maybe three minutes, and then two boys started joking about the word “non-negotiable” on the assignment sheet. When Oprah said that Wiesel, on arriving at Auschwitz, smelled “the stench of burning human flesh,” they went quiet again. Phyllis and Wynonna began quietly discussing whether they should quote from this part of the interview, which led to more talk about whether one of them had handed an earlier assignment in or not. Somebody laughed.

“Guys,” I said irritably, “watch the movie. Or don’t watch the movie! It doesn’t matter. Just don’t make a lot of noise, okay?”

They were quiet for two minutes after that. Then more whispering arose like frail weed sprouts from the girls. Cece and her friend Christina simply could not shut up. What was I supposed to do? She was chatting rapidly about some grievance she had with a teacher while Oprah talked about the deportation of Hungarian Jews. I wanted to turn off the movie. “… were packed into the gas chambers by the thousands,” Oprah said. “As the toxic pellets mixed with air, cyanide gas was released, and felt like suffocation.” I waved at the loud table to be quiet. These high schoolers were being tortured to the point of numbness and indifference by gruesome imagery — those few who were paying attention—and the Holocaust was being trivialized through inattention, both at the same time. Why was this happening? Why was I a part of this? We came to the section that repeated. “Once naked,” said Oprah, “mothers, their babies, children, the elderly, and anyone else deemed unfit to work were packed into the gas chambers by the thousands. As the tox—” I skipped past the overlap. The conversations in the room continued. I went over to Remington and his knot of compulsive chatters and confiscated a disputed water bottle. “Just go to sleep,” I whispered.

“How can we watch the movie if we go to sleep?” Cece asked. She was wearing a yellow shirt. She sounded just like the girl in the selfie song.

“Whatever,” I said. “Just don’t sit and talk.”

But I had no authority. There were five separate conversations now. “I was like, Oh my god,” said Cece. We came to the part where Wiesel is talking about the suitcases of the dead. Not a soul in the class was listening. It was almost time for lunch. I stopped the movie.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. The class left. “I have a boyfriend!” said Cece.

Mr. Markey came in to ask if the movie played all right. It had. I guess he thought it was a good assignment because mass murder is real. But it wasn’t a good assignment. I don’t want to be a substitute teacher who forces teenagers to shake hands with the dead. All they want to do is flirt and joke and get through the day.

Everyone came back from lunch, laughing and coughing. Christina pointed to the screen. “Are we watching this the entire time?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Fabulous,” she said.

I gave Remington his water bottle back. “If you’re not interested in watching the movie, I understand,” I said. “But just don’t make a lot of noise.”

“Yeah, girls,” said Remington.

“Remington, shut up,” said Cece.

I hit play. Wiesel and Oprah looked at the suitcases and the shoes, and the hair. The class talked quietly about their lives. I hissed, “Shh.” I stood up. I wanted them to see the hair. We came to the end. I turned on the light.

“So how many here have read Night?” I asked.

“Never heard of it,” said Cece, who was scrolling through things on her iPad. She read aloud a repost from a Tumblr blog: “I was just about to fall asleep and then I sat up and almost screamed because I was struck with the realization and I discovered the ultimate truth of the universe: Teletubbies are called Teletubbies because they have televisions in their stomachs.”

That pissed me off. I gave Cece a hate smile and I said to her, “Why don’t you go up in the front and read that, to the class? Why don’t you go ahead? I’d like to hear it. It’s kind of a different approach.”

“Do it!” said Remington.

“Go on!” I said.

“Do it, Cece, do it!” said Christina.

She couldn’t have read it aloud, even if she’d wanted to, because the class was too noisy. Christina said, “I have four sisters, well, three sisters and it’s four including me, and there’s four Teletubbies, so we’re each a Teletubby.”

“I see,” I said.

To anyone who was listening, I said, “Thanks for watching the movie. It’s really too intense, I think, to show in a school. Too many dead bodies.”

“Thad!” said Cece.

“You guys are so pathetic,” I said aloud — and not in a whisper, either, although nobody heard me. I waited for a while — we still had ten minutes of class left. “Guys, can I ask you a question to think about? What’s the difference between—” And then I stopped. Nobody had quieted down. I didn’t exist. I tried again. “What’s the difference between trying to tell—” I stopped again. I was going to ask them about the difference between watching a documentary and reading a book, but there was just no way, short of yelling like a maniac, to be heard over seven full-strength conversations. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“I want to hear the question,” said Zach.

“It’s not that interesting a question,” I said. “It doesn’t matter, because I don’t care, and they don’t care.”

“Then don’t bring it up,” said Cece. “You make us curious.”

“We were listening,” said Zach, smiling.

I tried again. “When I watch a documentary like that, I—”

Cece made a disgusted laugh, and I asked her what she was laughing at.

“It’s Cece, she always laughs,” said Carter. “Just ignore her.”

“The tallest sub in the world,” said Cece, scornfully.

“I learned something from that movie,” said a boy named Gibb. “They had to make handmade clothing, for children.”

“In that movie, you learned that?” I said.

“That’s what they said,” Gibb said.

“What should happen now?” I shouted. “Independent reading?”

“I don’t know how to read,” Gibb said.

“But you know how to listen,” said Zach.

“Come on, you know how to read,” I said.

“I can read, but I can’t read books,” said Gibb.

I opened a window to let out some of the noise. Remington was recounting a dream he’d had: his brother was chasing him with a butter knife. Zach and Carter stood up. I asked them where they were off to. “We need to stand,” one said. “We’ve been sitting down for too long.”

I took a bite of an apple. Cece said she couldn’t wait for summer. “You know how when you try to tie your hair in a knot,” she said, “and it always comes out?”

“Yes, I always do that,” said Christina.

“Because the more healthy your hair is, the loosener it gets,” said Cece.

“Not really,” said Christina, “but I hope so.”

A large girl, Cloris, said, “Guys, I can’t even tie my hair in a knot. I’m proud of my hair.” She floofed it.

Kids in the back talked about basketball and video game upgrades.

Cece said, “I wanted to cry the other day because I found dark-chocolate-covered pomegranate, and all I wanted to get for my mom was dark-chocolate pomegranate and all the stores were out of it and I could not find it anywhere. And then I found it after at CVS.”

I stood by the door, waiting for the bongers to bong. “What normally happens in this class?” I asked Remington.

“It’s about like this,” he said. “She’ll yell at us when we get too loud, but she usually lets us do what we want.”

Thad startled me by tearing up the Holocaust assignment sheet and throwing it in the trash can. “You just tore it up,” I said.

I asked him what he’d like to do in the class.

“Play games.”

“Dude, you’ve got a thirty-five in this class,” said Zach.

“You don’t need an education,” Thad said.

“The rest of us have nineties,” Zach said, joking.

“How’s your mood?” I asked a silent girl, Betsy. “Stable?”

She made a seesawing gesture with her hand.

“I hate asking kids to do what they don’t want to do,” I said. “Nobody wants to sit through the movie.”

Betsy gave me a pitying look. In the pecking order of the class, she was low, but I was lower.

“Twist the cap, Thad,” said Cece.

Zach, Carter, and Remington were off to a math class. “Dude, you ready for the test?”

“No,” said Remington.

“Everyone’s failing that class,” said Zach. “Culver’s got like a thirty-eight.”

Six bongs and they were all gone. I had a long stretch of quiet until the new class began to arrive. A girl named Amity sat down, checked her makeup, and asked me what the movie was about.

I said it was about the Holocaust. “And it is grim. It’s seriously grim.” I really didn’t want to play the movie again.

“Hi, Amity, how are you today?” said Eugene.

Unenthusiastic response from Amity.

“How’s your foot feeling?” said Eugene.

“Better,” said Amity.

In the back, Wade did fist bumps with his friend Ross. “Yeah, break my knuckles. Come on, break them. Yeah!”

I passed out the Holocaust assignment sheets. “How’s everybody doing? I’m Mr. Baker, I’m substituting for Mrs. Kennett. How does this class normally go? Do you talk about stuff, or do things, or have fun, or what?”

“Have fun,” said Wade. “Strictly fun.”

“Well, this will fit right in, then,” I said sarcastically. “The Holocaust essay. May fifteenth it’s due. You’re supposed to watch this movie, which is Oprah Winfrey walking around with a Holocaust survivor talking about terrible things that happened. The point of this assignment is to look at the movie and think about the way you’re learning about what happened, versus if you read, let’s say, a book about the Holocaust, or if somebody writes a poem about it. You’re trying to figure out which form will have the most immediate impact. Do you learn more watching a documentary? Do you learn more when you’re in the immersive world of a book? I find I learn more sometimes watching a ninety-minute documentary than I learn reading a three-hundred-page book. I don’t know about you. That’s the question that this essay is all about. So watch the video and think about how much you’re getting from it. It’s got some appalling images. It’s what you’d expect a movie about the Holocaust would look like.”

“Shut up,” whispered Rose, who was playing a number game on her iPad.

“What is your issue with him?” said Tom, who was also playing a video game. “Bear’s done nothing to you.”

“Is there tension?” I asked. “I feel tension right here.”

“She has tension with me, I have none with her,” said Bear.

“One more thing about the movie,” I said. “These speakers are not very loud. So if you want to hear what somebody’s saying, you have to be quiet and listen. Or else move sort of towards this side of the room. And even if you don’t want to hear what they’re saying, it would really be nice if you just were quiet.”

Amity’s hand went up. “Can I go down to the tech department to get my iPad looked at? It’s still not fixed.”

“How tall are you?” asked Wade.

“Six four and something. I never know. Let’s watch the movie.”

“You never know?” said Wade.

“Okay, the movie’s going. Oprah Winfrey is talking!”

Oprah said, “It is here, right here, on this railroad track, that a young teenage boy arrived in a cattle car, with his family, friends, and neighbors, in 1944.”

This class was quieter, it turned out. “I thought, Maybe it’s the end of history,” Elie Wiesel said. “Maybe it’s the end of Jewish history.”

After a while, the little white laptop ran out of battery, and I had to plug in a power cord. “Hang on, guys, technical excitement here.”

“Do you know Mr. C.?” asked Wade. “You and him should have a sub showdown.”

I said, “Mud wrestling or something?”

“Pig wrestling,” said Wade. “I’d put my money on you.”

I positioned the laptop on a chair so that the power cord could reach it. We waited for it to reboot. Tom said he’d read Night. I asked him whether, so far, the book was more powerful, or the movie.

“The book, probably,” Tom said. “He goes into details about what happened.”

Rose helped me log back in to the school network. We messed with system preferences and display preferences. While I was fiddling, Tom threw out a pair of broken sunglasses. “Nothing gold can stay,” he said, quoting Robert Frost.

“I say we just have a study hall,” said Wade.

“It’s the orange button,” said Rose, pointing to the projector.

“I’ve been pressing it like mad!” I said.

Amity began braiding her friend Dolores’s hair, saying that her father had texted her that he needed to borrow her hair straightener. Amity had texted him back, “What do you need it for? Haha, don’t want to sound disrespectful, I’m just curious.” She said, “What the heck does my father need my straightener for?”

“I told you,” said Dolores, “he wants to straighten his hair.” She swiped through her iPhone photos. “My brother’s such a faggot.”

“That’s okay,” said Amity, “because my brother’s more of a faggot.”

“Which one, Gregory?”

“No, Kenny.”

“Oh,” said Dolores. “I like Gregory.”

No signal, still, coming from the projector. “This is really not happening,” said a blue-bandannaed goth girl, Brandy.

“Does somebody have a beautiful piece of writing they want to read, while I fuss with this darn thing?” I said.

“Come on, Tom,” said Amity.

Brandy said, “My poem consists of murder.”

“Just murder?” I said. “Is there sometimes a happy moment?”

“No,” said Brandy.

Amity got a text from her father about the hair straightener. “He says it’s for ‘uniform maintenance,’” she said. She sat for a while.

Dolores said, “I want to go home. I want to die.”

All this time, I was trying to get the projector and the computer to handshake properly. “Maybe we could chat amongst ourselves,” I said.

“Like a study hall?” said Rose.

“Very similar to a study hall,” I said.

“I could read my murder poems,” said Brandy. “Just kidding.”

I said, “I think we should have an interesting chat about anything at all.”

“How about the economy,” said Brandy.

“The American economy,” I said.

“No,” said Amity. “Let’s talk about the European economy.”

Dolores suggested we play a game.

I said, “Like with winners and losers? I’m not sure about that.” I gave up on the computer and stood up. “I just want three minutes of your time. Since I can’t get this thing to play, I’m just going to tell you what happens. Elie Wiesel, the survivor, was there when he was fifteen, and he fortunately was one of the people rescued in 1945. So Oprah Winfrey takes him around, and they look at the big room where the Zyklon B gas came down from the ceiling. Zyklon B is a kind of crystal, and when it’s exposed to air, it turns to cyanide, and it was used to kill people.”

A girl in the back burst out laughing.

“It is hilarious,” I said, giving her a sour look. “Then they go to this display that I had never seen before. It’s human hair. It’s a massive, twenty-foot-long display of human hair. And there are displays of the clothes that they confiscated from people. It’s just a massively depressing immersion in one of the most horrible things that happened in human history.”

Amity and Dolores started talking about their hair.

“What’s up?” I said. “You’re talking about your hair? What I want you to think about is, why would you want to subject people now to that tormented period? What is the point of seeing stuff that’s that intense? It’s about an hour of seeing dead bodies. Why would we want to do that? You’re all eighteen, seventeen?”

“Sixteen, seventeen,” said Tom.

“Is it a good thing for you to spend an hour looking at that much death and destruction? Is that good for your souls? Or what?”

Brandy said, “It’s probably good for our ways of thinking. Not necessarily for our souls, but it could influence the way we think about things.”

“We take things for granted,” said Rose.

Brandy said, “If it speaks spiritually, it might actually benefit our souls, because we’re wanting to connect directly with the event.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said. “Because I was thinking that maybe you would watch something this bleak and you would think, What is life all about? If they’re capable of doing something this horrible, why are we striving and struggling here?”

“It puts things into perspective,” said Dolores.

“It puts things in perspective,” I said. She was right. “So that’s a recapitulation of what you would have seen if the technology had been working. Now, do you have lots of homework from other classes that you’d like to do? Would you like to sing ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’?”

“I would like to read my murder poems,” said Brandy.

“You would?”

“No, I’m not going to read them.”

“You keep talking about it, as if you want to read them,” I said. “You’re desperate to read them. But you don’t want to.”

“She’s afraid to share,” said Tom.

“As are we all,” I said. “All right, I’m going to be brave, and read a poem, gosh darn it. I’m seriously going to read a poem, if I can find it.” I flipped around in the anthology looking for a Robert Frost poem I’d seen earlier.

“Is that documentary on YouTube?” said Eugene.

I looked up. “Yes. If you want, you can put in your earbuds and watch the documentary solo. ‘Oprah Wiesel full documentary,’ it’s called.”

Eugene got the movie going on his iPad, and then he connected the iPad via AirPlay to the projector by typing in a code. “There it is, I’m going in,” he said. “I’m going in hard. We don’t ask no questions.”

The video came back on, and we turned up the volume. Oprah said, “Bodies were burned in open pits. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel witnessed these atrocities as a boy, and gave the world his account.”

The class watched attentively, especially Brandy. When we got to the part that looped back and repeated, Eugene skipped ahead ten minutes. “I’m going to go hard with it,” he said.

“You are really into that phrase,” I said.

Oprah said, “It was here in Auschwitz One that the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the angel of death, conducted sadistic medical experiments on prisoners, infecting them with diseases, rubbing chemicals into their skin, and performing crude sterilization experiments, in his quest to eliminate the Jewish race by any means possible.”

We watched in silence. When we got to the part about the display of suitcases, the video stopped again, buffering endlessly. Still nobody spoke. Nate tried to get it going again on his iPad, but the school’s Wi-Fi was down.

“Well, thank you for watching what you could watch,” I said. “It was a pleasure having you in this class.” I listened as they talked quietly about random things — razor burn, water bottles, crutches, locked iPads — for several minutes.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Mr. Markey came in to retrieve the computer and the tiny speakers.

In homeroom, while waiting for the buses, Madonna and Chelsea drew quite a beautiful magenta tree on the whiteboard. “You’re such an A,” said one girl.

“Language,” said her friend.

Some boys stacked the chairs on the hexagonal tables.

An alert-looking kid named Braden was standing near me. “Are you energized?” I asked him. “Filled with knowledge and ready to confront the afternoon?”

“No,” he said.

“Me neither,” I said. “I’m exhausted. Is it an engine of oppression, school? Yes, no?”

“Nyeah,” he said.

Six bongs. “Tootles,” said Gloria.

I wrote a note for the teacher: “Dear Mrs. Kennett, All went well. Block 1 kids worked (with varying degrees of intensity) on the soundtrack project — and the rest of the day was spent watching Elie Wiesel. Mr. Markey was very helpful in setting up the A/V — and the kids were cheerful and good-natured. Thanks for letting me sub in your classes. Best regards, Nick Baker. P.S. I hope your daughter is feeling better!”

Outside, I saw Sebastian sitting by himself on the front lawn, plucking at a tuft of grass, waiting for his ride. I asked him how he was doing. “You sleeping better these days?”

“Eh,” he said. “A little.”

I walked out to the car and fished around for my key, which wasn’t in my pocket. At the main office I told one of the secretaries that I stupidly might have left my car key in the classroom.

“Does it look like this?” She held up my key. “It’s been on the counter all day.”

Mr. Clapper, the principal, said, “Thank you for being here today.”

“My pleasure, thank you.”

Day Seventeen was over.