Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY EIGHTEEN. Tuesday, May 13, 2014

LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, NINTH-GRADE SCIENCE

THE MAN WHO NEEDS IT DOESN’T KNOW IT

BETH GAVE ME A JOB as a ninth-grade science teacher. I got to Lasswell early and parked on a gravel path in a cemetery not far from the school. Among the gravestones were many little American flags poked into the ground, motionless, curled like upside-down sugar cones. I recognized some of the surnames from school — French names, from the Quebecois who came down to work as loggers and in the paper mills, and Scots names, descendants of the prisoners of war sent to Maine by Cromwell in 1650.

To work. At seven-fifteen I checked into the office and walked to the North Building, to Mrs. Moran’s classroom, which was large and neatly arranged, with two pink file cabinets in front of the teacher’s desk and inspirational quotes everywhere you looked. “Don’t make lemonade, get mad, make life take back her lemons,” said Cave Johnson. “Never, never, never give up,” said Winston Churchill. “Don’t fight a battle if you don’t gain anything by winning,” said Erwin Rommel. “Believe you can and you’re halfway there,” said Teddy Roosevelt. In the very middle of the whiteboard, in tiny red letters, someone had written

(Fuck

my

life)

The carpeting was black, with flecks of yellow and green and purple in a stain-hiding pattern, and pushpinned to a corkboard was a chart of LEARNING TARGETS MET! and seven festive diagrams of the layers of the Earth’s atmosphere, all made by ninth-grade students. One was done in colored pencil, with a blue thermosphere and black stars. One was done in watercolor, with a yellow stratosphere. One was a circle cut out of mattress foam. And one was a yellow balloon with the layers drawn to scale in black marker: the troposphere, the ozone layer, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, and the thermosphere. I’d never heard of the thermosphere. All the chairs were stacked on the tables. Everything was waiting to happen.

Mrs. Moran’s sub plans began with a capitalized command: “PLEASE LEAVE ME A NOTE TO LET ME KNOW HOW THE BEHAVIOR WAS FOR EACH CLASS.” The class rules were: (1) listening to music was allowed in all classes during independent work; (2) students didn’t have to ask to go to the bathroom, although they did have to sign out, and only one student was allowed to go to the bathroom at a time; and (3) “If iPads or phones become a problem you have the POWER to confiscate them.” Block 1, from 7:30 to 8:28, was a “FREE BLOCK!” While I was reading the plans, a math teacher said hello. She looked done in. I asked her if there was anything I should know. She hesitated. “They can be challenging,” she said.

Ten minutes into my free block, a guileless, big-boned girl, April, dressed in aqua knee pants and black sneakers, came in to work on her atmospheric model. She had painted a Frisbee blue and glued it to a piece of cardboard, surrounding it with white pipe-cleaner clouds. “Can you be honest with me for at least two minutes?” April said, bringing her project over to my desk. “I don’t know if you’re a mean person or not. How does that look?”

I told her I thought it looked very good. “You’ve conveyed what’s going on,” I said.

“That’s the Earth,” she said. “It was originally green, so I painted it blue, to look like the water.” She’d made labels for the mesosphere and the thermosphere that she was going to glue onto the cardboard and she had some coloring left to do. “You see those ones?” She pointed to the “Student Exemplars” on the corkboard. “That’s what I’ve got to get this to look like, but not exactly. In my own way.”

She was 90 percent there, I said.

“Thank you,” she said. She sat back down and began positioning the labels.

Long ago, I said, when I’d learned about the Earth’s atmosphere, they hadn’t mentioned the outer layers. “That’s all new. I like your idea of using the Frisbee as the Earth.”

“I have three Frisbees,” April said. The one she was using for her project she’d found at the beach. “I looked down and I was like, Oh, interesting.” One of her other Frisbees got broken. “And I got one for Christmas that was pink, and it glowed in the dark.”

I said, “It’s interesting to think of a Frisbee flying through space, in some giant game of ultimate Frisbee.”

April began hunting around for something. I asked if she needed some colored markers.

“Nope, I’ve got about forty-five Sharpies. If you don’t believe me…” From her backpack she pulled a large clear plastic envelope filled with every color of Sharpie you could think of. “Forty-five Sharpies,” she said.

“You are set,” I said. “That’s more Sharpies than I’ve ever seen in one place.”

“Sixteen bucks.” She gave me a savvy nod, and went back to arranging the labels. “Tropo,” she said softly. “Strato. Meso.”

How easy and pleasant it was to be in a large classroom with one student, or two, or three — even four or five. Above five was when the noise problems began. One grownup can’t teach twenty digital-era children without spending a third of the time, or more, scolding and enforcing obedience. What if we cut the defense budget in half, brought the school day down from six hours to two hours, hired a lot of new, well-paid teachers who would otherwise be making cappuccinos, and maxed out the class size at five students? What if the classes happened in parental living rooms, or even in retrofitted school buses that moved like ice cream trucks or bookmobiles from street to street, painted navy blue? Two hours a day for every kid, four or five kids in a class. Ah, but we couldn’t do any of that, of course: school isn’t actually about efficient teaching, it’s about free all-day babysitting while parents work. It has to be inefficient in order to fill six and a half hours.

April was coloring in her troposphere. “You’re in the home stretch,” I said.

“What’s the home stretch?” she asked.

“If you’re in a horse race, the home stretch is the last bit of the race where all of the horses go full out — it’s seconds away from the end.”

I read aloud to April from the sub plans. Assignments were to be found, wrote Mrs. Moran, “in the lime green milk crate on my hot pink file cabinets.”

“You can’t miss it,” April said. “She did that herself.”

“She painted the file cabinets? That is dedication.”

“She loves pink and she loves green.”

I asked April which class she liked best.

“I loved Mrs. Tucker, the math teacher, and then she had to go out because of labor. She had a baby.” She tipped her head in the direction of the math classroom and went down to a whisper. “Ms. Webb is a…” She shuddered. “She low-grades everyone. I shouldn’t be saying this. Mostly everyone on this team had nineties. Now we’re all down to fifties, forties. All she’ll grade is our test scores. She’ll grade our worksheets, that she gives us in class, but she’ll put down a one, two, or three in responsibility. I don’t like math at all. Most people on this team don’t like her — just in general. Mrs. Moran I had last term. I fricking hated her. But now it’s like, You’re not bad. Mrs. Marsh is okay for English. She can be grouchy sometimes, and then other days she’s perfectly fine with happiness.”

I asked her what made for a good class — was it the kids, or was it the teacher?

“It depends on what kind of a day it is,” April said. “It may be a gloomy day, but the teacher may be happy. I have a few classes with class clowns, which is hilarious. In this class, I cannot work at all. And we have you last.”

“Everybody’s tired,” I said.

“But that’s not really the reason I can’t work. It’s because of the loudness.”

It’s especially hard for a substitute to keep the noise level down, I said.

April said, “We have this sub, I don’t know if you know him, he’s Mr. C.? He’ll just sit there and do nothing. Just like literally sit there.”

“That’s when you give up,” I said. “I’ve done that.”

“The kids try to overpower every single substitute on this team. The only one they don’t overpower is Mrs. Carlisle. She likes it here. She’s trying to get from being a sub to being a full-time teacher. Everyone loves Mrs. Carlisle.” She stopped and held her hand to her mouth, thinking. “Technically, I should be working,” she said. She took out a worksheet on which she was supposed to fill out the temperatures and kilometer thicknesses of the different atmospheric layers.

“Good luck,” I said. “Don’t let me bother you. I’m going to study up in case somebody has a question.” I flipped through the geophysical sciences textbook.

Something else occurred to April. “It’s nothing against you,” she said. “It’s just that we might not ask you for help.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s sort of awkward to have a totally new person.”

April said, “With a sub, pretty much the only class that gets their work done is honors. My class does no work. I will try to work, and the girl next to me, Marcia, she will try to work, too. And then there will be a girl named Daisy sitting there, where my purse is. At that table in the back. And there will be a girl named Jill. That one’s blond. Daisy, Jill — all they do is goof around.”

“I know what I’m in for,” I said. “And I don’t take it personally, because I think one of the things a sub can offer is a little break from the routine. But I feel sorry about people like you who are bothered by the noise.”

April said, “I use my headphones, but then once I get sidetracked, it’s like, Oh, I’m going to message my friends in class, and I’m not going to partake. I’ll put my backpack in front of my iPad or use my best friend’s phone. I use it for a certain messaging app. And then when I do try to work, it’s like, Oh, there’s not too much of class left.”

I read the textbook and April worked on her work. Then I dashed out to my car to get a power cord. “Troposphere,” I whispered to myself.

Two boys were laughing at the doorway to the North Building. “I’ve got gas, I’m telling you,” one said.

Back in class, April was gone and a boy I didn’t recognize pointed at me and said, “It’s HIM.” He was eating a bag of chips. He left. Others showed up.

“I’m going to go to the vending machines,” said Penelope.

“That’s a very important mission,” I said. “And I’m going to write my name on the board.”

I wrote “Mr. Baker” and sat down. My car key dropped out of my pocket.

“You dropped your key,” said Rob. He picked it up and handed it to me.

Block 2 was called “Intervention,” and there were only eight names on the roster. I asked Rob what the class was all about.

“Basically we make up work,” Rob said.

“How’s that going for you?”

Not well, Rob said — he was behind. “I got a concussion,” he said. “I was out for a year and two months. I was hospitalized. And I got suspended recently.” The concussion, his third, happened during a football game. “For two and a half months, it was constant headaches every day,” he said.

I asked him if he’d stopped playing football.

“No, I’m playing next year.”

“Dude, that’s frightening,” I said.

“My mom doesn’t want me to play,” Rob said. “My dad said I just have to be careful.”

“How can you be careful? You’re going to get creamed once in a while.”

Six bongs. Class was in session.

“Especially if I play running back,” Rob said.

Next to Rob was a kid called Bucky, who had a little mustache. “Do you play football as well?”

“I play basketball,” said Bucky.

Rob said, “My sister’s ex-boyfriend — we were playing basketball, and he was probably like fifty feet away from the hoop at one end of the driveway. The basket was behind his back and he just threw it up and got it in, from one end of the driveway to the other. I don’t know how he did it. All luck, no skill.”

Time to meet and greet other students. “Let me know if I can be of assistance in your endeavors,” I said to Rob and Bucky.

Jill, the blond girl April told me about, brought in a five-color model of the atmospheric layers made of painted Styrofoam arranged like a wedding cake. She wasn’t in the class this block, she said, but she didn’t want to carry it around all day.

“Wow!” I said.

“It kind of broke on the bus,” Jill said. She tried to find a place for it on Mrs. Moran’s desk. “Just throw it on the ground — it’s broken anyway.”

“Don’t reject it, it’s beautiful,” I said. “Believe in what you do!”

A stony-faced girl named Azure handed me a piece of paper. She wore a pumpkin-colored sweater whose sleeves went over her hands.

“Thank you,” I said. “Do I deserve this yellow piece of paper?”

“Yes,” she said. “Just keep it or throw it away.” It was a tardy slip.

Bucky discovered that a Monster drink had spilled in his backpack. He pulled out his stick of deodorant and wiped it down with Kleenex.

Attendance. Robert, here. Dixon?

“He’s not in this room right now.”

Azure, here. William? William Boucher?

Azure pointed to Bucky. “He’s right there in the hat,” she said.

“And you’re Bernard,” I said to a kid in black. Bernard had an iPad mini. “You got one of them newfangled little iPads.”

“My old one broke,” Bernard said. “I got angry with it, and I smashed it against a pipe.”

“He has a temper,” said Bucky.

“You must have been pretty mad,” I said. “Mad at your work?”

“At my mom,” said Bernard.

Ah. Gerard?

“I think he has ISS,” said Bucky.

“Yeah, he’s in ISS for starting a fight this morning,” Bernard said.

Rob said, “That’s not what he’s in there for. He was in a thing with Ms. Dahl, and he said some words.”

“Bad words?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Rob. “Words were said. He swore at her and called her a very inappropriate name.”

Penelope, here. Noah, here. (So many Noahs!) Liam?

“Liam is in Mrs. Hoy’s. You won’t like her. Nobody does.”

“It smells like paint,” said Penelope, who had big retro glasses and wavy hair. She was making the exosphere by gluing down bunches of blue tissue paper.

Daisy Patten? Here. Marcus? Marcus Spinney? Here.

“Hi, Marcus Spinney,” I said. “I’m checking you off. The thing is, taking attendance for this class doesn’t mean a thing. It’s only the first period that makes a difference. This is all just an exercise.”

Dixon came back with a box of Kleenex. Noah tried to glue his finger to his nose. “I know that’s one of the units that you’re doing — nose gluing,” I said.

Intervention, however, proved to be a small, calm class. “I love the way all this quiet working is happening,” I whispered.

“The next class isn’t going to be quiet,” Penelope said.

I turned off a bank of lights to make the whisperiness last longer.

After five minutes Azure asked if she could wash her hands. Of course.

In the continuing bounty of quietude, Bucky and Bernard began stealthily playing Hungry Shark on their iPads. They whispered together about how deep the shark could swim. Later they moved closer to an electrical outlet so that they could plug in their tablets. Rob, the one who’d had three concussions, was at the same table as they were, writing something. Jill sat at a middle table with her boyfriend, Marcus, who had on a periwinkle-blue baseball hat. They were sharing earbuds. Marcus cracked his knuckles every so often. I read about the thermosphere, which is many miles above sea level and reaches bizarrely high temperatures during the day, hot enough to melt steel, but doesn’t feel hot because the individual molecules up there are so sparsely distributed. Each hot molecule is like a burning spark in a walk-in freezer. In other words, the thermosphere is not hot, it’s extremely cold. I read another inspirational quote on the whiteboard: “Fake it till ya make it!”

“I’ve got blue hands,” Penelope said.

Five minutes before the end of the block, a guidance counselor came in to see how things were going. I didn’t remember her at first — she was one of the women who’d explained lockdown procedures during substitute training. Mrs. Moran had left good plans, I said, and everything seemed to be going fine. As she left, she detoured past the table where Rob, Bucky, and Bernard were sitting. “What are you guys working on?” she said.

“Writing,” said Rob.

Bucky and Bernard mumbled something about working on a Keynote and listening to music, having swiped Hungry Shark from their screens. “You should know what you’re working on,” said the guidance counselor. “Class is almost over, and I don’t want to have to take away the music, or take away the iPad.”

She left. “Was I supposed to be fussing at you for playing the shark game?” I asked Bucky and Bernard. “I figured that you would know what you need to do.”

“I’m only missing one paper,” said Bernard. “I usually do it in class.” Bernard was probably lying — one of the main things that school taught, I realized, was how to lie to get by.

I turned to Rob, who had filled several pages with writing. “Whoa, words on a page!” I said.

“This is a book I’ve started writing,” Rob said. “It’s about this kid named Adam. He runs away from his house. He’s running through the woods and he comes to a tree. He tries to catch his breath, and the tree grabs him and drags him into the ground. So he’s drug underground, and then he has to try to find a way back up. There’s a city under there that he sees, and this giant forest to the side. He’s just getting to the gates, and goblins come up to him and confront him and say, ‘State your business, or you die where you stand.’ That’s what I have so far.”

“I like it,” I said. “He’s in jeopardy already. I love the idea of an underground world.”

Rob pulled out a new, thick copy of The Fellowship of the Ring from his backpack. “I’ve read The Hobbit about ten times now,” he said. “I just got this yesterday.”

Penelope said, “I don’t like reading a book after I’ve seen the movie.”

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Gosh, that was an easy class.

“So this period coming up is pandemonium and craziness?” I said to Penelope.

“Pretty much,” she said. “Just saying that now I’ll be talking a lot.”

“You have a complete character shift?”

“I have different friends in different classes,” she said.

Before Rob left I asked him whether he was writing the book for himself or for a class.

“I’m writing it just because,” he said.

—

A KID NAMED COLBY appeared and saw me. “She’s out again?”

Another kid, Tucker, said, “Oh, hello. Your name is?”

“Mr. Substitute,” I said. “Mr. Baker.”

“Hello,” said a third boy, Aiden.

“You having a good day?” I asked.

“Yes, I am,” said Aiden. “You?”

“Yes, actually,” I said. “The last class was great. Everybody was just sort of sitting, doing their thing.”

Colby said, “This is probably the most active class you’ll have today.”

“What sort of activity will be happening? Give me the full rundown.”

“We’ll just be talking, not doing work,” said Colby.

I said hello to a few more people.

“Can I take the attendance down?” asked Diana. Yes.

Four kids were clustered around one table at the far end of the room eating Doritos and talking about hashtags. “Is this the cool kids’ corner?” I said.

“I’m the only cool person over here,” said a long-haired goofball named Lionel. He was wearing a Kid Cudi T-shirt.

Students kept coming in. It seemed like a large crowd, but it was really only about fifteen. Plus an ed tech—“THE BEST Ed Tech EVER,” according to the sub plans. Her name was Ms. Worrell.

“Aiden, that’s not your seat, sit in your seat, please!” Ms. Worrell said.

“As soon as you walked in, everyone went tranquil,” I said to her.

“They know that I’ll be angry otherwise,” Ms. Worrell said. “They’re a little chatty sometimes.”

I said I didn’t mind. “But I’m a little bit looser than I should be. You should keep me in check, too.”

Ms. Worrell laughed mirthlessly.

I gave a little spiel to the class. “So I’m Mr. Baker, the substitute, filling in. I’m very glad to have you in the class. And really today you’re supposed to do what you need to do. Which is—” I looked at the plans. “The WebQuest Carbon Footprint. And then we have the project questions and the study guide. And we could maybe have a dramatic rendition of the troposphere? Have you done the layers? When I was in school there were none of these upper layers. The exosphere — amazing. Some people have used pipe cleaners, and some people have used little bunches of tissue, and it’s all good.” Colby poked Bucky. “And elbow management, it’s called. That’s when you keep them to yourself. I don’t mind mild talking. What I don’t like is the wave of sound that starts to build, and then it washes over you, and then one of us fusses, and it gets quiet, and then there’s another wave of sound. Just talk kind of like this, and there won’t be those crests. So, do it! Go to work! Let me know if I can help you in any way.”

Ms. Worrell spoke. “Who still has yet to do the 3-D model? Let’s see hands. Because it is due today.”

“It’s due Thursday,” said Lionel.

“No, WebQuest is due Thursday,” Beth said. “It says right there on the board, ‘3-D Model Project, 5/13.’ Today’s the thirteenth, Lionel.”

Ms. Worrell turned to me. “I’m going to take my kids down the hall, someplace quiet, where I can crack the whip.” She began herding some boys toward the door. “Down to the Dean’s Den, please. Bucky, you’re coming, too. Gather your belongings. I don’t want you making eighty-five trips. Markers, paper.”

I asked Lionel’s table which iPad game was taking the world by storm right now.

“Piano Tiles,” said Lionel.

“They got rid of Flappy Bird, that was a major major thing,” said Hank.

“Some guy killed himself over it,” said Tucker.

“No, those are all rumors,” said Lionel. “He took it down because he didn’t like the fame. The hate, and the fame.”

“Couldn’t handle the celebrity,” said Hank.

“Just tear through the troposphere,” I said. I pointed to the thermosphere layer. “This is where it gets nutty. It’s hot, but it’s far away? I don’t like that.”

“You don’t believe in it?” said Lionel.

“No,” I said. “I can’t feel it, I can’t taste it. It’s a myth.”

“Are bananas a myth?” said Hank.

“Bananas are a myth,” said Lionel.

I laughed. “You insane person. I believe in bananas. Let’s not question reality here.” I liked Lionel. The three of them began using pipe cleaners and straws to build a planet Earth.

Bucky returned from the Dean’s Den to get some pipe cleaners from the supply cabinet.

Aiden explained how the grading worked. If you did the worksheet about the layers, you automatically got a passing grade, even if you didn’t do the 3-D model. So you could skip the 3-D model and still pass.

“Interesting strategy,” I said.

Surprisingly, this class, too, was quiet. I watched some YouTube videos, and then I interrupted Tucker, who was now making a hat out of pipe cleaners, to show him and Lionel a video made by a GoPro camera hanging from a helium balloon that went nineteen miles into the air. “It hits these high winds,” I said to him. “This is the only teaching I’m going to do today. We’re almost done. The balloon is going to pop.”

“They had an iPad attached to a balloon, and they flew the iPad up there,” said Lionel. “The case that it was in kept it safe.”

“I saw that,” I said. “Bear with me now. It’s going to pop. Nineteen miles high. That’s a day’s hike, but straight up in the air. That’s more than a day’s hike.” We watched the camera fall to earth and land in a tree.

Hank brought out some Q-tips from the supply cabinet.

“Those are going to come in handy,” I said.

“He has really dirty ears,” said Lionel.

A man from the guidance department came in. “I want to borrow Aiden,” he said. I went over to another jokey table and sat down. “It seems like there’s a lot happening over here,” I said. “I can’t see why you couldn’t use some of those pipe-cleaner shapes to, let’s say, represent the troposphere as imagined by a certain N-dimensional alien who would think in alternative—”

“Did you just call me an alien?” said a sporty boy, Marco.

“Basically,” said Diana. She pointed to Marco’s pipe cleaner. “Is that a heart?”

Hank began looking in Mrs. Moran’s desk for the glue gun.

“Do you have full permission to look in her desk?” I said.

“I do not even have half permission,” he said.

The man from guidance returned. “Can I borrow Nora for a second?”

“What’s happening?” I asked the class. “Everybody’s being borrowed.”

“They’re looking for Nelson,” said Hank. Nelson was a ninth-grader who’d gone missing the week before, after school. “He went out for a walk and then he disappeared.”

Diana poked her finger in the glue gun. “Don’t do that,” I said. “That could hurt you.”

Marco began crinkling up a water bottle.

“All right, guys, seriously,” I said. “You’ve got fifteen minutes left. Apply yourself now — total atmospheric activity. Just layer it up, and do it, and you’ll be done. And then you’ll get, you know, an eighty-seven.”

“Have you ever been poked with a soldering iron?” Lionel asked me.

“No. You’ve got it all arranged, so why waste all that good effort?”

Hank typed the wrong password too many times into Tucker’s iPad and disabled it.

“Here’s your hot-glue gun,” said Diana to Marco. They began gluing down random pipe-cleaner shapes.

Penelope couldn’t find any cotton balls, so she began pulling the cotton off the ends of the Q-tips.

“I got glue in my pants,” said Diana.

Marco, showing off for Diana, tried to start a fire in a pool of molten glue. I dissuaded him.

Penelope was finished with her colored-tissue project. “It looks like a blob,” she said.

“No, it looks like the planet Earth as interpreted by your tissuey sensibility,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

I checked the clock. “Eight minutes to go,” I said.

“I’m here again next block, by the way,” Penelope said.

“You’re really spending the day in this classroom,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

I stopped Marco from squirting hot glue on his teeth.

“That’s a horrible idea,” said Lionel.

“There are limits,” I said.

“Tastes bad,” said Marco.

“Why am I being responsible for you?” said Lionel.

I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back, Marco had commenced eating the glue stick as if it was string cheese.

I said, “NO, NO. I draw the line in the sand.”

“It’s a snack,” Marco said.

“No, it’s not a snack, it’s a fricking glue stick,” I said. “Don’t eat that. Seriously. DON’T DO THAT.”

“It’s like gum,” said Marco.

“It says nontoxic,” said Diana.

“When they say ‘nontoxic,’” I said, “they mean it’s nontoxic if you’re gluing stuff. If you eat sticks of it, it’s probably going to be toxic.”

“I just chew on it,” Marco said. He spat out some pieces of glue stick into the trash can.

I asked Lionel what he was handing in.

“This finished piece of fine, fine work,” he said. It was an eight-foot-long conceptual-art piece made of straws and pipe cleaners and yellow construction paper, the troposphere at one end and the thermosphere at the other. Very little was glued or taped down. He took a picture of it with his iPad. “Now I just have to put it up on eBackpack.”

“Hey, guys, you know you didn’t measure it out correctly, right?” said Diana to Lionel and company.

“Who measures?” said Lionel.

“You have to have it measured,” Diana said.

“That’s crazy,” said Lionel. Actually he had done some rough measurements, jotting down kilometer distances.

“Dude, that’s so off,” said Marco.

“I hate you,” said Lionel.

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

“Hear that?” I said. “Stack and pack.”

—

ACTIVITY BLOCK WAS from 10:40 to 11:14. “It’s the end of the trimester and they ALL have overdue work,” said the sub plans. A big round boy in a maroon polo shirt introduced himself and shook my hand. His name was Stefan. He said, “Do you know a good riddle? I love riddles. They’re the best.”

I asked Stefan to tell me a riddle.

“What has four eyes, but cannot see?”

“A flounder,” I said.

“Mississippi,” Stefan said.

“Ah, nice,” I said. He waited for me to tell him a riddle, but I couldn’t think of one.

Stefan wasn’t officially in this Activity Block, he was just visiting, he said. “I have you last today,” he said. Ah, I thought, so he was one of the class clowns that April had told me about. “If you give me liquid, I will die,” he said. “If you give me food, I will live. What am I?”

“A chocolate-covered cherry,” I said.

Penelope said, “I would be like, Give me CPR!”

I looked at the attendance list. There were many more people in the room than were on the list. “Huge class, my gawd!” I said. I shushed the shouters.

“People come in from their other activity,” Stefan explained. “They let their teachers know, and they come in here.”

“They do their work and they’re civilized and quiet?” I said.

“I’ll let you determine that,” Stefan said.

Melanie showed me her cotton ball project. “That’s beautiful,” I said. “Every ten miles is two centimeters. My god, it’s to scale.”

“A fire,” said Stefan. That was the answer to his riddle. “What goes around the world, but stays in a corner?”

“An office chair,” I said.

“No.”

I guessed again. News? A satellite?

“A stamp,” Stefan said. He pointed triumphantly at me. “Haaaaaah!”

Time to get started. “Okay, guys, hello. Hello, hello.”

“Hi!” said Rhys, a girl with a hairband.

Ashton crumpled up an empty packet of peanuts.

“Shh, for a second,” I said. “Quiet for a second with the peanuts. I just want to welcome you to this class. I like conversation, it’s good, what I don’t like is when the sounds kind of crest and get too loud. So just talk in a normal voice.”

Stefan stood and boomed out another riddle, reading from his iPad: “THE MAN WHO INVENTED IT DOESN’T WANT IT, THE MAN WHO BOUGHT IT DOESN’T NEED IT, THE MAN WHO NEEDS IT DOESN’T KNOW IT.”

I said, “When you read that thing next time, just read it in a softer level.”

“I will, I’m sorry.”

Beep, the PA lady. “Please excuse the interruption for a few announcements. All students who’ve signed up for AP Government or AP History next year should report to the auditorium at this time. Congratulations to the girls’ tennis team on their three-to-one defeat of Kennebunk yesterday.” More announcements — about softball, baseball, yearbooks, and Project Aware, which was an antibullying initiative. Nobody listened.

I asked a catatonic but smart kid, Greyson, how he was doing on the Earth’s atmosphere. He couldn’t work on the project, he said, because he didn’t have his iPad, and all his notes were on his iPad. I told him to make something with pipe cleaners.

“It’s all got to be to scale,” said Greyson.

“No, it doesn’t have to be to scale,” I said. I waved at the exemplars on the corkboard. “None of those are to scale.”

“That’s a different assignment,” said Greyson. “It has to look like this.” He showed me an exemplar lying on top of a bookcase.

“Well, then make it look roughly like that.”

“Okay, I can handle that,” said Greyson. “Uh, can I go to the nurse real quick?”

I nodded.

“Thank you,” he said.

Lionel, Hank, and Tucker reappeared. “Come on in,” I said.

Penelope called out, “Lionel, you’re my favorite.”

A sketchy-looking boy, Chris, dropped by. He stood, thumping his water bottle against a file cabinet, trying to decide if he wanted to stay in the class. I told him to take off his backpack and have a seat.

Chris said, “I don’t trust some people around here, you know?”

“Just don’t make loud noises with the water bottle.”

The PA lady came on with an announcement about picking up cookie dough.

Chris stopped thumping the water bottle and instead twirled it in the middle of a table, saying, “Are you a man, or are you a woman?” Then he hopped up onto a low bookcase and sat. He began poking Ashton with a pen.

“God dang,” I said. “What’s up with you? Just get some homework out and pretend to do it. Put a piece of paper or a freaking iPad in front of you and do something with it. Don’t poke. It’s ridiculous!”

Chris finished drinking from his water bottle and commenced making crinkling, crackling sounds with it.

“Dude, this is pathetic,” I said. “Take out some pieces of paper, put them in front of you, and make some marks on them.”

“You heard the man,” said Hank.

“Why are you telling me to get to work and not him?” said Chris.

“The reason is, he’s sitting quietly and you’re doing things with the water bottle. The water bottle is what’s killing me.”

“All right, I’m sorry,” Chris said.

“It’s that crackling sound. Doesn’t it drive you insane? Obviously it has driven you insane.”

“I like it,” said Chris. “I play it on my phone, and that’s how I go to sleep. You want to see a magic trick with gravity?” He took out a Verizon phone and put it on the table.

“I see what you did there, nice,” I said. I did the Chinese egg drop with a thumb drive I had in my pocket.

“That was pretty good,” said Chris. “It took me a second to realize it.”

Ashton came up. “I have to go to the South Building and get that cookie dough.”

“Go get that cookie dough,” I said. “It’s urgent.”

Beep. The PA lady asked us to excuse her interruption. “Freshmen, if you sold cookie dough, please report to the New Caf at this time to pick up your order, thank you.”

Stefan read me a riddle: “From the beginning of eternity, to the end of time and space, from the beginning of every end, to the end of every place. What am I?”

“A Milky Way bar,” I said. “No.”

“Read it again,” said Tucker.

Stefan read it again.

“I got it right off,” said Nora.

“It’s going to be stupidly easy,” said Penelope.

“What is it?” said Tucker.

“It’s E,” said Stefan.

“The letter E,” Penelope clarified.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“I get it now,” said Tucker.

Melanie and Sisely came back staggering under a load of Otis Spunkmeyer cookie dough, in tubs.

“Mr. Baker!” Stefan said. “What’s round on both sides and high in the middle? If you know it, don’t answer.”

“A cheeseburger,” I said.

“I know this,” said Penelope.

I said, “John Belushi? No. Sponge cake. I don’t know. I’m bad at riddles. I can’t do it. What’s the answer?”

“Ohio,” Stefan said.

“Ah. I’m going to find you a riddle,” I said, wagging my finger. “I’m going to find you a mega-riddle.”

Stefan said, “What can you catch, but cannot throw?”

“AIDS,” said Chris.

Another kid found a riddle. “What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries?”

“I have the dirtiest mind ever,” said Tucker. “Can I answer?”

“No,” said Stefan. “A towel. It gets wetter and wetter the more it dries you.”

“I get it,” said Chris.

Sisely said that she’d ordered so much cookie dough that she’d had to make two trips to the cafeteria. “My mom’s going to have to come in and get it.”

“Mr. Baker, do you have a riddle for me?”

“I’m trying,” I said. “I’m a little riddle challenged.”

Beep, please excuse the announcement. “Anyone who hasn’t picked up their cookie dough at this time, please go over to the caf, thank you.”

“Any cookie dough left behind will be destroyed,” I said. I browsed websites, trying to find a riddle for Stefan, but none of them seemed good enough.

Penelope read a riddle. “There is a boat with a lot of people, but at the same time there is not a single person on the boat. How is this possible?”

“There’s more than one person on the boat!” said Stefan, wagging a finger. “You said there’s not a single person, so there’s more than one person. Is that the answer?”

Penelope shook her head. “They’re all married.”

“It’s a couples cruise,” said Lionel.

“What about the captain, and the crew?” asked Melanie.

“They’re all married to each other. Marriage at sea,” said Lionel.

“It’s almost lunchtime, guys,” said Chris, standing.

I read a joke from Garrison Keillor’s joke book, which I happened to have on my phone. “How many surrealists does it take to change a lightbulb?”

Penelope had found another riddle. “What begins and ends with e, and has only one letter?” The answer was envelope.

“Do you have one for me, Mr. Baker?” said Stefan.

“I started to say it, but I was embarrassed and I moved on.”

“No, say it!” said Stefan.

“How many communists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“How many communists?” said Stefan. “That’s just a messed-up joke.” He had a riddle by heart. “So a man leaves his home in the morning, and kisses his wife goodbye. On his way home from work, he sees a man crashing through a power line. He immediately knows his wife is dead. How does he know this?”

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

“The answer is that THE WIFE WAS ON LIFE SUPPORT,” Stefan said, over the din of departure. “That’s such a messed-up riddle.”

I said, “Have a good lunch, good lunch, good lunch, good lunch.”

—

A HANDFUL OF KIDS ATE their lunch in the room. I took a long drink of water and washed my hands. One honors student, a hairy talker named Nolan, brought out a transparent spherical maze called a Perplexus Epic and gave it to his friend Ramsey to try out.

“Bollocks,” said Ramsey. “It fell down.”

“Roast beef and pepper jack today,” Nolan said, chewing.

Haydon, who had droopy shorts and black sneakers, was looking at the stacked tubs of cookie dough. “Who bought cranberry oatmeal?”

“Ew,” said Ivy.

“That is disgusting,” said Ramsey.

Nolan had a lot to say, and he said it fast. He talked about red wine and chocolate, whether they were good for you or not, and he talked about whether or not North Korea was a threat to the United States. “North Korea is producing a licensed model of the 1946 GAZ M-20,” he said. “That’s what they’re making. There’s the GAZ 69, which is a jeep, and the GAZ M-20, which is a sedan car from the forties. Those are the two mass-produced vehicles in that country.”

“You’ve got to ask why they are at that point,” I said. “It’s because the US bombed them till they were subsisting in caves. The country was devastated. The fact that they’re now able to do anything is kind of a miracle.”

“I think our being there in South Korea is intimidating North Korea,” Nolan said. “Kind of like if you bother a porcupine.”

I asked them why they ate in Mrs. Moran’s room. Was the cafeteria really noisy?

“Yeah, it’s not an enjoyable place,” said Nolan. He was skimming local news stories at the same time he was talking and eating — stories about fires and cops and break-ins.

We sat silently for a while, and then Penelope said to Jill that one of the teachers on the team had been crying on Friday.

I said, “The thing that’s hard — I’m sorry to interrupt you guys, but I’m lonely — the thing that’s hard is that if you’re a regular teacher, you actually have to get the kids to learn something. That’s hard. A substitute can just enjoy it. People say funny things, do amazing projects, and I just take it in.”

“It’s a dream job,” said Jill; Penelope laughed.

Six bongs.

—

HONORS GEOPHYSICAL SCIENCE was a huge class. I admired more models of the atmospheric layers. One used nesting rings, one used glass beads. I said, “Hello, hello, hello. I’m Mr. Baker, I’m filling in for Mrs. Moran, and she is OUT. How are you doing with the layers of the atmosphere, as they radiate upward? Some of them are hot and some of them are cold? You doing well with that? There are some incredible models. I have to say I’m really impressed by all the different ways that people have solved this problem of how to visualize layers of the atmosphere.” A kid with a hot pepper on his shirt was talking. “So — Chili Pepper,” I said.

“Did you just call me a chili pepper?”

“I’m just reading your shirt. All you need to do is focus down. Just give it everything you have. You’re honors, right? Congratulations, let’s have a moment of silence for that.” I told them to work on their projects and to not be loud. “If I can be of assistance to anybody, let me know. That’s it, enjoy. AND I MEAN IT ABOUT THE LOUDNESS!”

The Scotch tape ran out; I found some more in the cupboard. I met the kid, Joel, who did the yellow balloon and told him how much I liked its simplicity — just Magic Marker on a balloon. Grace took attendance for me while several girls made peals of laughter. Nolan said he’d made his atmospheric layers out of Jell-O, but the layers merged, so he now had four weeks’ worth of Jell-O in his fridge. “I’m going to make it again out of cookie dough,” he said. A girl named Mira had made her Earth using rainbow cake mix.

“That is way above and beyond,” I said.

“Oh, why thank you,” Mira said.

Linda, a tall young woman with blue-framed glasses, was tearing red M&M’s and pale blue Necco wafers from the base of her gorgeous candy-themed project. Why the tearing?

“It had to be to scale,” Linda said.

“Is anything to scale in this life?” I said. “No.”

“I’m going to tell Mrs. Moran that,” said Linda. “I’m going to say, Sorry, nothing’s to scale in this life.”

A bored kid, Wilson — the one wearing the hot-pepper T-shirt — was distractingly rolling a roll of masking tape on the desk. “I don’t have my iPad,” he said.

“Who cares about your iPad?” I said. “Do it in cardboard. Look at what people are doing. They’re making works of art. There are pipe cleaners up there.”

The honors students were not quiet and studious, they were flirty and jokey and loud, although they got work done, as April had said they would. There were many playful disputes over the glue gun, and I had to tell them several times to take it down a peg. Nolan talked knowledgeably about storage batteries and solar power and offshore oil drilling and a dozen other topics. A diminutive boy named Darcy said, “I mustache you a question, but I’ll shave it for later.”

“Ow, that hurt, you stabbed me!” said Linda, who was flirting with Joel — Joel was handsome.

Wilson bonked Case on the nose with a rolled-up piece of paper.

I asked Case his opinion of Mrs. Moran.

“She’s really nice to everyone but me,” he said. “She absolutely loves Nolan for no reason, and she absolutely hates me for no reason.”

“You’ve got to win her over,” I said.

“I almost got an ISS for messing with Wilson. Then he put shaving cream on my face twice. I told the teacher and she yelled at me.”

Linda asked Joel, “What temperature did you put for the thermosphere?”

I urged them on, table by table. “All right, now label it! Let the art come bubbling out! All those pent-up feelings that are inside you, let them go.”

“Is it hard being a writer?” asked Linda.

“Yes,” I said. “It never gets any easier.”

Wilson positioned a label on a cloud. “Feng shui,” he said.

Five minutes before class ended a Hokusai wave of noise began. “SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” I said. “Way down, way down, way down. Way down.”

“Lay down?” said Wilson.

“Clean it up, right now,” I said. “All the stuff that isn’t yours. Go above and beyond. Right now. Wilson, I’ve got my eye on you, clean it up. Make me proud.”

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Twelve forty-seven on a Tuesday.

“Have a nice day,” said Linda.

“I broke my wrist the other day,” said Wilson, on his way out. “A Salter-Harris fracture, on the growth plates.”

“Wow, take it easy, man,” I said. Bye. Thank you. Have fun. Good work today. See you.

—

ONE MORE BLOCK of Geophysical Science to go. The first person in the door was the riddler, Stefan. The class was in full-out bonkers mode, just as April had warned me. “Hold him down, punch him,” yelled one of the class clowns. April said, “Can I go down to Ms. Miller at the end of the South Building for this block?”

“Because this class is too loud?”

“Yes!” she said.

I wrote her a permission slip.

A teacher appeared and began waving her arms. “Just go to class! Go to class! Go to class.”

The PA lady: “Please excuse the interruption. All chamber singers and chorus members must be in the auditorium at this time. Thank you.”

“That’s you,” I said, pointing at Vince, a shifty kid in a hunting hat.

Jill, Daisy, and Marcia were whooping and shouting at each other in Southern accents.

“They’re having a girlie fight,” said Stefan.

“Are you happy here?” I said to them, standing over their table. Then I gave my intro. “So you’re DOING SOME WORK. That’s what she wants you to do. Enjoy, have fun, and talk in really nice controlled voices, so we don’t drive each other nuts. Catch up on what you need to do. Okay?”

Jill said, “You look nice and sharp today.”

“Thank you so much, so do you,” I said. I was wearing a linen blazer.

A ruler smacked down. “Line in the sand,” I said. “Violence, things flying through the air, rulers smacking against the tabletop — all that is totally unacceptable. It will NOT be tolerated. I WILL drop the boom. It will NOT happen.”

They all thought “drop the boom” was crazy funny and said it many times — drop the boom, drop the boom.

“Lower the boom,” I said.

Bernard and Bucky were back. “How’s your day been?” Bernard asked, conversationally.

“My day’s been good,” I said. “You’ve been a part of it. You were playing the shark game. Do the sharks eat people, or the people eat sharks?”

“Sharks eat people,” said Bucky.

“So you’re learning about nature,” I said.

Vince offered to go make more copies of the project sheet.

“Vince is on it,” I said. “He’s off to make copies!” I looked around. “What the hay? People are under control here.”

“That’s because we’re cool,” said Jill.

“I know you’re cool,” I said.

“Too cool for you,” said Jill.

“Too cool for school,” said Marcia.

A quiet girl, Nancy, was stuffing a mound of dog-eared homework into her backpack. “That is way too much homework,” I said. “What can you do about that?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy said, sighing. She zipped it away. With her permission, I lifted her backpack, which was ungodly heavy. “I have back problems now,” she said.

The class continued quiet. How did that happen? “I just want to say, I love this level of work and inspired activity — thank you.”

“Have you got a riddle for me?” said Stefan.

No, I didn’t, I said, but I was working on it.

Vince came back with thirty copies of the 3-D model project worksheet. I turned off the lights. “Calmness,” I whispered. Somebody’s phone vibrated. Vince wanted to turn the lights back on so he could see his sheet better. “Let’s try moving you by the window,” I said.

“No, I’ll just deal with the dark,” Vince said.

It was so serenely calm in the room that eventually I got out my computer and typed for a while. After fifteen minutes, Jill suddenly looked up and broke the silence. She said, “Your lipstick’s all over my rim!”

“Wow,” said Daisy.

Jill described a commercial for Orbit gum — Sarah Silverman is pitching a TV show to some executives when her morning coffee cup comes in and calls her babe. She says, “We’re not together.” The coffee cup says, “I have your lipstick all over my rim.” Jill said, “I just got that!”

“We’re happy for you,” said Bucky. Then more quiet working. I whisper-asked someone to open a window. After another ten minutes the talking began, first softly, then in normal voices. Bucky was snickering at a Mr. Bean GIF in an app called iFunny: Mr. Bean exuberantly crossing his legs next to a person in a body cast.

Marcia explained to Daisy how to make the atmospheric layers to scale. “For every ten miles, I did two centimeters,” she said. “And then you put all the facts around it.”

Somebody’s phone made a crystalline ding. Daisy said, “I’m going to the office in ten minutes to do announcements. Wait, is that clock slow?”

“Yeah, she put it five minutes back,” said Stefan.

“So we wouldn’t start to pack up,” said Jill.

“That’s outrageous,” I said. “Then you don’t know what the actual time is.” All day I’d been confused about when classes were beginning and ending: the bongers always seemed to be bonging early. The clock was deliberately set wrong — in science class!

I told Marcia that her project was a marvel. She’d produced little informational flags on toothpicks, mounted in bits of clay, bearing the height and temperature of each layer. Oh, Earth, you are a lucky planet.

“Tootle-ooh, guys,” said Daisy.

Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. Stack and pack.

The chairs went up. A game of tabletop hockey began. “Another day of school,” I said, “bites the dust.”

Daisy came back, disappointed because there hadn’t been any announcements for her to make. She cheered up quickly, however, shouting at Liam, who followed her around as she picked up trash from the floor. “You’re making me uncomfortable before I punch you,” she said. “I’ll beat you up.”

“I’ll fuck you up,” said Jill, in a growly black accent.

“Hey, hey,” said Bernard.

“Fuck you,” said Daisy.

I told Liam to stop following Daisy around and pick trash up in a different part of the room. Vince called Bucky a dickhead.

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

Bye, guys. Thank you. See you. Enjoy.

Bye, Mr. Baker!

I wrote a note for Mrs. Moran: “Thank you for letting me fill in in your classes — the kids were funny, alert, and (at times) focused — but always a pleasure to be around — best regards, Nick Baker.”

I ran into Shelly, the teacher of the how-to-be-a-substitute class, in the parking lot. “How’s it going?” she asked.

“Well, it was an interesting, stimulating day with the ninth-graders,” I said.

“I heard that can be a challenging group,” Shelly said.

“They’re kind of hilarious, though,” I said. “They know how to enjoy life. I’m not sure how interested they really are in the layers of the atmosphere above fifty kilometers.”

“Only if it impacts them,” she said.

“That’s reality,” I said. “But thanks a million, this has really been fun, and I’ve learned a whole lot.”

“Will you stick with it next year?” Shelly asked.

“I may well.”

End of Day Eighteen.