Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY TWENTY-TWO. Monday, May 19, 2014

LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, NUMERACY ROOM

HE PARTICULARLY DOESN’T LIKE THIS PARTICULAR SPOT

MONDAY MORNING’S SKY WAS AN ASTONISHING BLUE, and Beth had me going to the middle school to spend the day in the numeracy room, normally overseen by Mrs. Massey. The numeracy room was a quiet, gray-carpeted interior space with ten iMacs on tables, ten expensive-looking office chairs with fabric cushions and rolling wheels, and a bank of six smoked-glass windows that looked out on the second-floor hallway. If you did remedial time in numeracy, every kid on your team knew it. It was like being in an anthropological display in a museum.

The school district had learned some terrible news over the weekend. Nelson, the ninth-grade boy who’d gone for a walk and disappeared, was found dead, after a weeklong search. He’d fallen while climbing in an abandoned granite quarry.

Mrs. Yates, a math teacher, unlocked the numeracy room and showed me where the blue student folders were, in the top drawer of the hanging file cabinet. “They’re going to ask you if we’re doing Spelling City this week,” Mrs. Yates said. “We are not doing Spelling City, which is math vocab. Mrs. Massey and I decided that we’re going to stop doing that, because we’re getting near the end of school and they have to concentrate on making benchmark. Even though we have sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students, some of them are at fourth-grade level.”

Nobody showed during homeroom. Lunch was a hotdog with crisp potato wedges. Information packets for summer girls’ basketball were available at the office. Talent show practice would be held after school. I squirted sanitizer on my hands, ate some Winnipesaukee chocolate, and waited for someone to talk to. The problem of the day, written on the whiteboard, was 1,870 divided by 34.

Block 1 was Cher, Claire, Serena, Waylon, Hunter, and Roan. Serena’s folder wasn’t in the file drawer. “Waylon’s probably not coming,” said Roan. Serena, tall and black-leotarded, had made a hangman’s noose out of red string that she had cinched around her finger. “I looked up cool knots on YouTube,” she said.

“She’s going to hang her finger,” said Hunter. “It’s kind of weird. My dad found a noose in our basement.”

“Hunter’s dad found a noose in his basement,” I said to the class.

“Creepy,” said Serena.

Waylon appeared, a droopingly cherubic kid with bags under his eyes. “I’m sorry I was late,” he said. “I forgot about it.”

“Can we take the day off pretty much?” asked Hunter.

“Nope, you know what a stickler for detail I am,” I said.

“There’s an Indian burial ground out there, I swear,” said Cher, waving in the direction of the soccer field. She’d untied her noose and was trying to retie it. “I don’t remember how to do this.”

“There’s a lot of mathematics to knots,” I said. “I’m not a math person—”

“Nor am I,” said Cher.

“—but there are whole departments of universities where they study the mathematics of knots. It’s really interesting.”

“I would hate that job,” said Serena. She’d retied the noose bigger and made as if to put it over her head.

“No, no, no, no, please don’t do that,” I said. “That would not be good.”

She put the noose around her wrist.

I asked if everybody had done the Problem of the Day.

“I can do it, I just don’t really want to,” said Hunter.

“Why don’t you want to? It just doesn’t call out to you? If it was divided by thirty-six and not thirty-four would you want to? No?”

“I don’t like division,” said Hunter.

Serena flipped her noose.

“You could hang a troll with that,” Hunter said.

“All you do is ballpark it,” I said, poking at the number 1,870 on the board with the tip of the marker. “Just look at that thing and say, Thirty-four, wow, that’s about halfway between thirty and forty, hm, hm, and I know that five times thirty is one hundred fifty, maybe I could bump it up a notch, maybe not, let’s try five, that kind of thing.”

“Yuh! Spider-Man!” said Serena.

“Did you say ‘Spider-Man’?” said Cher.

“Who’s got a guess for this one?” I said.

“Two,” said Serena

“Six,” said Cher.

“Okay, so you say, I’m going to commit myself to six — temporarily. You try six. You go six times four is—”

Claire chanted, “Six times four is—”

“Twenty-four!” said Serena.

“Good, and then you go six times three is—”

“Eighteen.”

“And then you add the two, and oh no! It’s too high! So you know it’s got to be one down from that. One down from six is—?”

“Five!”

“Now we’re cooking with propane,” I said.

“Burning, really burning,” said Hunter.

We multiplied by five. “Then you draw the line, that beautiful line,” I said. We subtracted. My marker cap fell off. “Then you drop the end of your pen.”

“And then you do five again, so it’s fifty-five,” said Cher.

“Oh my gosh!” I said. “Subtract it out. Zero. Check! Do you feel all limbered up?” I looked over the sub plans. “Let’s do some Fast Math!” FASTT Math, with a second T that people seemed to ignore — the acronym stood for “Fluency and Automaticity through Systematic Teaching with Technology”—was a bundle of remedial math games and exercises sold by Scholastic.

“I don’t do Fast Math here, I don’t think,” said Cher.

“Cher has to finish her test first,” said Serena. She’d put the noose around her tongue and was tightening it so that her tongue muscle formed a dollop of flesh.

“I just saw something I shouldn’t have,” I said. “God. Take that off right now.”

“It’s like a rat, hanging,” said Hunter.

“That’s mean,” said Cher.

“Carry on, guys,” I said. “I want to see real math happening.”

“I feel laughy today,” said Serena.

Waylon and Roan signed into Fast Math on their computers. “Would that be thirty-six?” asked Waylon slowly.

I said four times eight was not thirty-six. “It’s close to thirty-six.”

“Four times eight?” said Roan, listening in. “It’s twenty-eight. No, six and six is twelve. Thirty-two.”

I pointed at him. “Thirty-two!”

I went over to Cher and Serena to get them chuffing on Fast Math. “It looks not too bad,” I said. “It’s just little multiplication stuff.”

Serena pretended to pull up on the tiny noose, flopping her head to the side as if hung. “No, I did not hurt myself,” she said.

“I must report it,” I said. “No.”

“Mrs. Ritter, the nurse, already knows,” Serena said.

“That you tried to hang your finger?” said Hunter.

“That I made this. I’m friends with her. I saw you walking in this morning when I was in her office.”

They keyed in passwords and up came the Fast Math multiplication fact grid.

“Isn’t that a thing of beauty?” I said. “It’s got colors, it’s got numbers.” It did look pretty snazzy.

“That’s going to take me a long time,” said Cher, “because I’m not very good at these.”

“I suck at threes,” said Serena. “I don’t know threes for the life of me. Threes and eights.”

“I started with my zeros,” said Cher.

“Anything times zero is zero,” said Serena.

“I know,” said Cher.

“Threes and eights are tough for you?” I said.

“And sevens,” said Cher.

“Can you do three times seven?” I said.

“Twenty-one.”

I said, “Okay, that’s a good one. That’s like an island. Think of yourself in a kayak, and you know that you can survive on that island. And then there are some other islands that you actually know.”

“My cousin’s a tutor here,” said Serena. “I can’t see how people can be smart in math.”

“It’s a part of your brain that some people have and some people don’t,” I said.

“You know you only use like ten percent of your brain?” said Serena.

“That’s what they say,” I said, “but I don’t believe that. I think we’ve got this complicated brain, and we can’t even comprehend how much it’s doing, so we say we’re only using ten percent.”

“I bet we’re only using ten percent to think, and learn,” said Serena. “The rest of it is feelings and emotions.”

“Your brain has to decide what to forget and what to remember all the time,” I said. “You create little priorities, and you think, I want to blow this off because it’s tiresome. However, I would like to learn how to make a noose.”

“You want to?” said Serena, brightening. “It’s real easy.”

“No, no, I’m saying, as an example.”

She demonstrated with her red cord. “You do this, and then you lay it down, and then this is up here, and then you do like that, and you fold it over, and you bring it under and you wrap it around to the top—”

Hunter looked over. “Why are you teaching the substitute how to make a noose?”

Serena laughed. “And then it just slides.”

I said, “So you’ve got three times seven. That’s your island. You’re in the kayak—”

A jovial bald man, Mr. Fields, opened the door.

“Here’s my noose,” Serena said, holding it up.

“Do you have a moment?” Mr. Fields said to me.

“He was explaining an island concept,” said Serena.

“Beautiful!” said Mr. Fields. “Hopefully you’re listening!” He took me out to the hall, crushed my hand in a handshake, and spoke in hushed tones. “You’ve got a student over there in the orange shirt named Waylon Grant. He has some issues with emotional stability. If he tells you he needs to go to the nurse, you should let him go to the nurse. Because of the audio hallucinations he’s hearing, and the threats that they’re making to him and to others, we should discreetly follow him down to the bottom of the landing, to the bottom of the stairs as he walks his way down to the nurse’s station.”

“Is he under any medication?”

“Oh, YUH. He says right now he’s okay. But the voices are talking to him. He’s able to talk them away, but that doesn’t always work. He has not presented a problem to anybody, other than he gets himself all super anxious. Just wanted to let you know that.”

“Good to know,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

I went back inside. Cher said, “Why do I have to be in here if I only have two wrong on this whole test? Two hundred nineteen times seventy-two! I suck with word problems, and I didn’t even do it.”

“Well, let’s work on some of that,” I said. “But first of all, I’m just telling you that it would be good to know something like three times eight — right?”

“Twenty…” Cher rolled her eyes, puffed out one cheek, and pushed it with a finger. “… four.”

“Yeah! Three times nine?”

“Are you going to be in here tomorrow?” asked Serena.

“I don’t think so.”

“Aw.”

“Twenty-seven,” said Cher. “I just did that one with my fingers.”

“Right. So all this amounts to is making these happen a little more automatically. Right now, you’re doing it, but it’s as if you’re wearing big boots, and the mud is sucking at your boots, and you’re walking slowly up the path. You need to learn it so that it just comes like badoop badoop, and the only way to do that, really, is with flash cards.”

“I have flash cards at home,” said Serena. “They go all the way up to twelves.”

“You should try it. I’m not an advocate of massive math education, necessarily — but the times tables are actually helpful.”

“Lookit, I’ve got no circles on this page,” said Cher, showing her placement test.

Waylon turned in his office chair. “Can you walk me down to the nurse’s?”

“Yes, I certainly can,” I said.

“Did Mr. Fields just tell you?” he said.

“He said that if you wanted to go to the nurse that yes, I would walk you down. Is it something you really want to do? I’d love to have you in the class.”

“I don’t know how long it’ll be,” said Waylon. “It might be really quick.”

I turned to the class. “Guys, my dear friends. You are going to hold the fort totally calmly and responsibly — I’ll be back in two seconds. I’m just walking down.”

“I want to walk down!” said Serena. “Do you work at the high school?”

“I bounce around,” I said. “Sometimes it’s kindergarten, sometimes it’s eleventh grade, you never know. But I’ll be back.”

Waylon and I made our way downstairs. I asked him how his day had been going.

“Good so far,” said Waylon. “I just have to take a minute.”

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“Twelve, good age! What floats your boat these days? What are you interested in?”

“Um, video games. I like Call of Duty and Minecraft.”

The nurse wasn’t in, but the assistant nurse was. “I’m fine now,” said Waylon. His voice was light and soft. “I’ll come back up if I have time.”

“I hope you do. Good to get to know you.”

“Thanks, you too.”

Back in class I told the kids that I’d once had a terrible experience in grade school in a times-table spelling bee. “Total humiliation,” I said. “I went home, and I realized that there were certain times-table moments that I knew, and others that I didn’t. So are there ones that you really know, solidly?”

“Fives!”

“Zeros!”

“Tens!”

“Ones!”

I wrote on the whiteboard. “You know the zeros, the fives, the tens, and the ones. So: five times six?”

Pause. “Thirty.”

“Okay, so thirty has a little hesitation, but zeroes you obviously know because everything always ends up zero, ten you always know, because you just add a zero, one because it’s the same thing. So you can check these off.”

“Oh, and elevens,” said Hunter.

“Eleven times nine is—?”

“Ninety-nine.”

“Okay. Let’s move up in a level of difficulty. Let’s try the fours. What’s six times four?”

Serena started loudly counting by fours; meanwhile Cher said that it was twenty-four, because five times four was twenty.

“What you’re doing is you’re logicking out,” I said. “You’re outsmarting it. What you have to do is get it to be like pitching a ball, throwing a Frisbee, walking down stairs — something that your mind doesn’t have to think about. So you just hear ‘four times six’ and blip, ‘twenty-four.’ If it’s an automatic thing, then everything else is easier.”

Hunter began scooting in his office chair. “He’s gone to the time-out corner,” said Roan.

“This is my diagnosis,” I said. “This is the thing that you could do that would make high school just unbelievably much more easy for you. Get a bunch of flash cards from Hannaford’s, and just do it.”

“They sell them everywhere,” said Roan.

“Mrs. Massey has thousands, but she made them herself,” said Hunter.

Waylon came in. “Hey, good to see you back!” I said.

“I could make them in noose style,” said Serena.

“We’re going to really have a talk about this,” I said. “It’s serious. I mean it. I care about this, and I want you to, too. Actually memorize your times tables. They have to be like music in your mind. We could do it as a rap song. ‘Eight times seven is fifty-six. Add another number and get your kicks. Nine times seven is sixty-three…’”

“How do you know these?” said Serena.

“I swear, all I did was go through the cards.”

“Seven times seven is forty-nine,” said Serena. “I remember because my fifth-grade teacher said, ‘You are not leaving this room without knowing forty-nine!’ The Forty-niners was her favorite team.”

“That is your island,” I said.

Serena and Hunter were doing more chair antics. Hunter said, “My fifth-grade teacher just told me—”

I said, “Can you not drag him around the room, because I would like to hear what you were saying. What were you saying?”

“We couldn’t learn anything,” said Hunter, “because the fifth-grade teacher just left me and Serena to sit. And she was annoying.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Serena, remembering. “She told me, Hunter, and Jocelyn to sit at the little table. We had to just sit there. And Issa. And then Issa went into the advanced!”

“I wasn’t here in fifth grade,” said Claire. “I was in Florida.”

“I might be getting homeschooled next year,” said Cher. “I’ve learned nothing here.”

“You’d learn a lot being homeschooled,” I said. “This school, because there are so many people, is sort of inefficient.”

“I was homeschooled for a little bit,” said Hunter, “I think it was in California, and I didn’t do nothing. Why wouldn’t I do nothing? It’s warmer out there.”

Serena was scooting in her chair now as well.

I said, “Guys, I like talking but what I do not like is bumper cars with the chairs.”

“Californ-I-A!” said Serena, pumping her chair high with a lever. “Watch me shrink.” She sank.

“Let’s get something accomplished in this hour,” I said.

“We can do a happy circle next,” said Hunter.

“Duck duck goose?” said Serena.

“You can all sit around and we can share,” I said. “We’ll share math facts.”

“No,” said Cher. “You lost me at the math facts part.”

“I am being paid,” I said. “You’re not being paid. I know that’s bad. You should be paid to be in this school.” Chair twirling. “Please don’t twirl. We have to talk about math in some way.”

“If you have us again on our team,” said Hunter, “can we get all the teachers outside, and then can we do — what is it called? — wheelchair drag racing? I actually knew a guy who did that on the street, until he got hit by a UPS truck. I pushed him out in front of it.”

“Is he all right?” I said.

“Somewhat,” said Hunter. “It was a year ago.”

“My dad broke three of his ribs in a motorcycle accident,” said Claire.

“I broke both my legs in a motorcycle accident,” said Hunter.

“I got pushed off a cement truck,” said Cher.

Serena said, “My mommy broke her wrist while she was pregnant with me, falling off a hay…”

“Baler?” said Hunter.

“No, a trailer full of hay,” Serena said. “My dad shattered his ankle in a car accident right before I was born.”

“My mom fell off a porch and broke her face,” said Cher, “and I just sat there and stared at her. And my dad was laughing. My dad laughs when bad stuff happens to people.”

“That goes over real well,” I said.

“I’m not joking,” said Cher. “Every time I hurt myself, or one of us hurts ourselves, he just laughs. And then he’ll get mad and bring us to the hospital.”

“He’s crying inside, right?” I said.

“I don’t know. He starts crying when he laughs.”

“My hair’s annoying me,” said Serena.

Cher suddenly remembered something. “Oh, my dad gave a baby a lemon,” she said. “He laughed so hard, I thought he was going to pee his pants.”

“So, guys, what am I going to tell Mrs. Massey?”

“That we worked very, very hard,” said Serena.

“I want to see serious product,” I said. “I want to see output. Seven times seven is forty-nine. All of them have to be like that. I’m giving you a piece of knowledge that will help you.” In high school it would help them, that is. After high school, did it matter? Not so much.

“I finished my Fast Math,” said Roan.

“So you’ve got to go to your folder, right?”

“I don’t have a folder,” said Roan.

Serena laughed.

I found Roan’s folder in the stack. “Roan, Roan.”

Roan laughed. “I didn’t know I had a folder.”

I turned to Waylon. “You made it through Fast Math?” He nodded. We pulled out a worksheet he was supposed to have finished.

“It’s really hard,” he said.

“I WANT SILENCE,” I said. “We’re actually going to be working here.” Waylon and I whisper-worked on a two-digit multiplication problem, while the others murmured. “You start on the far right, right?”

“Mhm,” said Waylon. “Three times one is three. Five times three is fifteen. And then you put a zero. So it would be ten, eleven. One thousand one hundred seventy-three.”

“Wow, your mind is chugging right along.” Waylon and I worked on problems for a little longer, and then Waylon said, “I’m so tired. I woke up last night, really early. It was like one in the morning.”

“What’s interfering with your sleep, my man?” I said.

“I don’t know. I should probably talk to my doctor about it.”

“Do you have any medications that you take that would interfere with your sleep?”

“No,” Waylon said. “Well, I take some medicine, but I’ve been taking it for a long time and my sleep has been good.”

I asked if he’d adjusted the dose recently.

“When I was at the hospital, yes, but that was like two weeks ago, and my sleep has been good. But the last few nights it’s been bad.”

I said, “It’s probably the meds, because it’s been two weeks. It takes a little time. Is it a higher dose?”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s happening is your body has now been filled up to that new level, and that’s why it’s interfering with your sleep, probably. Don’t you think? You’re not getting enough sleep. That’s horrible.”

Waylon sat.

“I sleep so hard,” whispered Serena to Cher, having overheard.

“I’m really tired,” Waylon said.

“I’m sorry, man.” I looked down at his worksheet. “Let’s try this one, it’s simple, and then we can have accomplished something. Five times seven.”

“Five times seven.” He counted on his fingers. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five?”

“Good. So you write that down, and you put the little three up there.”

He yawned. “Yep.” He slowly wrote a little three.

“So you go five times two is ten. Would you add the three to it?”

“Yeah, you would.”

I helped him along. “And then five times four is twenty…”

“Plus one would be twenty-one?”

“Bingo.”

He yawned again. “Sorry, I’m just tired.”

“I hear you. What if you slowly tapered off that stuff, whatever it is?”

“I can’t,” Waylon said. “That would be bad. I need it for my anxiety. Or else I’d be crying all the time.”

“You think so?”

“It’s what happened last year. The first day of school, when I moved back up here, I just was crying all day.”

“It’s partly that you missed your family, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. But I was just crying all the time.”

“So that’s why the doc said take this stuff?”

“Yeah, Paxil,” Waylon said. “Have you heard of that?”

I said I had. “It’s pretty powerful stuff.”

“I’m on thirty milligrams,” he said. “It’s kind of a high dose.”

“Time to go,” Hunter announced.

“We have to leave right now,” said Waylon.

“Okay, hope to see you again,” I said.

“We were supposed to leave like a minute ago!” said Serena.

“Take care, guys, see you around.”

—

JUDE, LORRAINE, AND CRIMSON came in for block 2. I handed Lorraine and Crimson their math folders. “Jude, have you got one of these?”

“No.”

“That’s so sad,” I said. The sub plans said that every student had at least one folder. I looked through the file cabinet. “Yes you do. You’ve got two of them. Extra bonus file.”

“Not funny,” said Jude.

“You never know what you’re going to find in the file drawer,” I said.

I refiled the folders from last block — distended, goiterous dugongs of arithmetical confusion — and squirted sanitizer on my hands, wiggling my fingers to feel the cool as the alcohol dried.

Jude asked for some scrap paper. There was none. “I think she actually ran out yesterday,” Jude said.

“Do you know where the central scrap paper supply would be?”

“No.”

Math class without scrap paper. I tore off a piece of paper from my Moleskine notebook and gave it to him. He was working a Fast Math problem: nine divided by one-third.

“Holy Toledo,” I said. “Do you remember how to do that?”

“Yeah. Can I steal a pencil?”

“Pencil shortage,” I said, and handed him a pencil.

While Crimson slapped away at her keyboard, playing a Fast Math game that involved ladybugs climbing on a vine, Lorraine worked on a math benchmark assessment something-or-other. I sat and stared through the smoked-glass windows at the occasional student in the hall. “Did you get it?” I asked Jude. “Did you bust through to the other side of that fraction thing?”

Jude said, “Yeah, and then I came up with this one that was like five times ten minus six squared plus five. I was like, What the heck? Simplify it. I tried to, but to do it, there has to be a thirty-one up there. So I just guessed on that one.”

Just then a tall expressionless fellow named Phoenix slouched in. “I went down to literacy but they sent me up here,” he said.

“What do you want to do?” I said.

“I don’t know. They just sent me back up here.”

Did he, I asked, prefer literacy or numeracy? He didn’t care. I said, “What people are doing in here is Fast Math, where they fling numbers at you. Does that sound like the right thing to do?”

“Yeah.”

A man from guidance opened the door and stared irritably at Phoenix.

Phoenix said, “I went down to them! They said come back up here.”

“She just called me again, wondering where you were!” said the man from guidance.

The phone rang. It was the literacy teacher. “Is Phoenix Crowder in your room?”

“She’s looking for him,” said the guidance person, leading Phoenix away.

I told the literacy teacher that Phoenix was just leaving numeracy. My four students worked in silence. Blobs of empty time moved slowly through the morning’s digestive tract. I felt my eyelids getting heavy, so I bit off some more of my Winnipesaukee bar. The crinkling of the foil made Lorraine look up. “Busted,” I said, chewing. “It’s coffee chocolate.”

“What is it?” said Lorraine.

“It’s just some coffee chocolate. I’m not just sitting here eating chocolate. That would be bad. It’s coffee chocolate, so it’s good.”

“Must be a lot easier than having to drink coffee,” said Jude.

“I hate having to go off and mix instant coffee and rush back,” I said.

“I notice that any time a teacher leaves, it’s just chaos,” Jude said.

After twenty minutes, Jude left, smiling enigmatically to himself. I looked up the side effects for Paxil, which had a black-box warning about suicidality. It was not supposed to be given to children. Waylon was definitely a child, and he was so drugged that he could barely lift a pencil. Two of the listed side effects were sleeplessness and auditory hallucinations. If a Paxil patient heard voices he was supposed to call his doctor immediately.

Elaine, the secretary, dropped in to ask if I could substitute across the hall for a language arts teacher on Wednesday. Yes I could.

Lorraine and Crimson gathered their belongings and said goodbye. Anita, Susanna, and Sutton were block 3’s fresh arrivals. They didn’t speak to each other, and they looked sheepish as I handed them their folders. Their math worksheets had goofy names, like “Mad Minute” and “Five Minute Frenzy.” I asked them, “Do you think it’s helpful to have a special little room where people come to catch up in math?”

Anita, who was henna-haired and neatly dressed, thought it was. “But it’s kind of weird to say, Oh, we have to leave for numeracy because we don’t know how to do math.”

I could see how that might be awkward, I said. “However, you probably have things that you can do better than other people can. I mean, seriously.”

“I can ride horses better than they can,” said Anita.

“Yeah, put them on a horse and see what happens,” I said.

Anita said she owned a Haflinger, which was a strong horse. When she rode her Haflinger, she had to use a special bit. “My aunt has a shire-draft cross and also an Icelandic,” she said.

The three of them did Fast Math and worksheets for the rest of the hour. Nobody talked. They were smart, undisruptive, compliant students who were no good with figures: having to serve time in a remedial room was a new and mildly mortifying experience for them. They thanked me when they left.

Block 4 was empty, and then I had a half-hour lunch break. I ate a sandwich slowly at my desk and drank a fizzy water, leafing through a history textbook called The American Republic that I’d found in a stack of discards in the teachers’ break room. People glanced in at me through the windows. I felt as if I was myself serving an all-day in-school suspension. Occasionally there was a shout from the hall. The yellow walls of the numeracy room were bare, the corkboard was bare, and the whiteboard was bare except for the problem of the day — there wasn’t even a taxonomy-of-learning poster to jazz up the place. The bald special ed teacher, Mr. Fields, came by to talk about Waylon.

He said, “The word on the grapevine was that shortly after we spoke, he had to leave, right?”

“He did,” I said, “and thank you for alerting me. He talked to me a little bit. I don’t know how much to get into it with you, but…”

“Nobody really knows the answers,” Mr. Fields said.

“He’s taking a lot of Paxil,” I said. “He said, ‘I can’t sleep’—he just volunteered this — which is a side effect. And there’s a side effect where you hear voices. I’m not a doctor, but it seemed to me like an awful lot of Paxil that he’s taking.”

“He particularly doesn’t like this particular spot,” said Mr. Fields, pointing at the floor. “He doesn’t like math. So this happens regularly when he comes to school.”

“He’s a very nice kid,” I said. “I’d be happy to spend time with him. We had a nice chat as we walked down.”

“Oh yeah, he’s always nice. For all these things that he’s hearing, that are always telling him to do something terrible, he’s never done any of that stuff. When you hear it, you go, Wow, that guy? He just doesn’t come across that way.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “I think it’s the side effect of the drug rather than the actual state of his own mind.”

“Well,” he said. He waved.

“Anyway, I appreciate the heads-up,” I said.

Bong, bong, bong.

A thin, smiley eighth-grader, Birdie, came in and shut the door. “Yay, a substitute,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for this.”

Another girl, Corinne, entered and sat.

“There’s a new kid coming, named Lorne,” said Birdie. “This is his first day in this class. I don’t know if he’ll come, because I don’t know if he’ll remember.”

I said, “So what she was thinking you guys should do is Fast Math, and your folders have some stuff in them. Let me know if I can help in any way.”

“Do you want me to like work for five minutes, and then if Lorne hasn’t come here I can go get him?” Birdie said.

Great idea, I said. I asked her if Fast Math helped.

“Yeah, it does,” said Birdie.

“Can I go to the bathroom?” asked Corinne. She started to sign her name on the bathroom sign-out sheet.

“Oh, I don’t think you need to sign that,” I said.

A third girl, Zena, came in. “Sorry I’m late,” she said.

Birdie and Zena started talking about Nelson, the boy who died. “Did you hear about that kid?” Birdie asked me. “They found him dead in the quarry.”

“That’s just horrible,” I said.

“Yeah, he told his mom he was going for a walk,” said Birdie.

“His mom said it was normal,” said Zena. “He always goes on a walk. That one day he never came home.”

“My sister knows him,” said Birdie. “He was in my sister’s grade.”

The poor kid! The poor family! There was nothing more to say. The two girls swiveled in their chairs and did Fast Math for a few minutes. Lorne came in and allowed the door to shut with a click.

“Lorne, how are you?” I said.

“Good.”

“So we’ve got Fast Math,” I said, “and all kinds of happy things.” I was starting to sound like Bill Alexander on The Magic of Oil Painting.

Birdie said, “He doesn’t know how to get on Fast Math.”

“I’ll set him up!” said Zena.

“They’re going to set you up,” I said. Lorne gave me a half smile. He was curly-haired and slow-moving and handsome.

“This seems like a good school,” I said to Birdie. “Good people, anyway.”

Birdie made a skeptical sound.

“You think they’re too strict, piling on the homework?”

“The teachers are horrible about homework,” said Birdie. “They give us way too much. I wish we’d just have work at school, and family time at home.”

“I totally agree,” I said. “As a dad, I watched my kids go through Maine schools, and it was hours every night.”

Birdie said, “My mom gets home at four, so when she comes home I’m still working on homework. The only time I see her is when I say good night.”

“That’s sad,” I said.

“I know. Except for the weekend.”

“This is the one childhood you’ve got,” I said.

Zena said, “Mrs. Massey hasn’t set Lorne up for Fast Math.”

“Oh, no, what will we do?” I said. “Lorne, why don’t you take a look at the riches of this folder.”

“Oh ho,” said Lorne. He opened the folder, which contained a placement test.

“Have fun,” said Birdie to Lorne. “And Lorne, I’m telling you right now, whatever you get wrong, that’s the worksheet you have to do.”

“So do not get it wrong,” I said.

“Do you want to see my folder?” said Birdie. She lifted it up. It weighed about a pound. “So do your test, just saying. I didn’t even try when I took the test, so now I have all this.”

“May I borrow a pen?” said Lorne.

“There’s one right here,” said Birdie.

Zena’s keyboard began clicking as she played a bowling game in Fast Math. Corinne brought up a finished worksheet.

“You’re all done?” I said. “Great. Do you have something you can read?”

“I have other worksheets to do,” she said.

“Endless worksheets in life,” I said.

Zena threw out some gum. “Mrs. McCardle said, ‘Are you still chewing gum in school?’ I go, ‘It’s really tasty, though.’”

“Really tasty,” said Birdie. She noticed an appointment book in a corner that Susanna had left behind. “Her boyfriend is in the next class,” she said.

Zena volunteered to take it to the office with Birdie.

“It sounds like a two-person job,” I said.

“You can trust us,” said Zena. They left.

“Can I go to the bathroom?” said Lorne. “Do I have to sign out?”

“Technically, yes,” I said, “but I’m a substitute, so the normal rules don’t apply.”

Corinne worked quietly. The two girls returned. “We got it to the office, safe and sound,” said Zena.

“Do you know how to do proportions?” Birdie asked me. Her problem concerned two rectangles, one eight feet wide and ten feet high, and the other sixty feet wide and forty-eight feet high — were they proportional? I drew the rectangles for her. I said, “The question is, is sixty over forty-eight the same as ten over eight? Proportional means if you shrunk this one down you could lay it right down on that one.” We turned 60/48 into 15/12 and divided by three to get 5/4. “The point is you can simplify them to the point that you can say, Oh, they’re the same proportions.”

“Why don’t they just say that, then?” said Birdie, going back to her chair.

A big girl named Janet swept in. She looked at the board and said, “What’s going on, Mr. ‘Baker’?”

“Janet, I wrote you a letter,” said Zena.

Janet looked at the letter. “That’s bullshit,” she said, and threw it out.

“Fuck you,” said Zena.

Birdie laughed.

“Hah hah hah!” said Janet to Birdie. “You fucking… Mr. Baker, can we put on some music, as long as it’s quiet, thanks!” said Janet.

“There’s a ton of f-bombing,” I said, “massive amounts of it.”

“He’s saying to watch your language,” said Zena.

“Oh!” said Janet. She mock-tiptoed a few steps. “Okay,” she whispered. “My bad, my bad.” She turned on some hip-hop.

“Too loud,” I said. “I’m sorry, that’s painfully loud.”

“Turn it down!” said Zena.

Janet looked in her folder. “What is this nonsense?” she said.

“Fast Math,” I said.

“I’m doing it,” said Janet. The girls all began whispering and f-bombing about someone named Anna.

“He just said not to swear,” said Zena.

“I said, ‘Freak you, Anna,’” said Janet.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Let’s not be rude, guys,” said Birdie.

“Are you in Ms. Scott’s class?” Janet said to Lorne. Lorne said he was. “That teacher’s hot,” she said. “Those tight jeans? It’s like she has no pants on.”

Birdie went on with her grievances. “My math teacher, Mr. Lambert, he’ll write something on the board and we copy it down, and when we need help he’ll say, ‘Look at your notes.’ And then we’ll say we don’t understand, and he’ll say, ‘Look in the book.’ And we’ll say we don’t understand the book, and he’ll keep telling us to look at our notes.”

“I got two days in ISS from him for asking for an eraser,” said Lorne. “I was like, Hey, can I have an eraser? He was like, No, go to the office. I never got the eraser. That’s what I’m bummed out about.”

I asked if Mrs. Massey was into hip-hop.

Birdie said, “Mrs. Massey is like, ‘I’m into jah-hazz, and classical blues.’ I’m like, No.”

Zena said, “Janet’s watching dirty videos.”

To Corinne, I said, “Thank you for actually doing lots of work.”

Biggie Smalls came on Janet’s iPad, doing “Big Poppa.” When Biggie Smalls said, “Allow me to lace these lyrical douches in your bushes,” Janet said, “Uh, I didn’t—” and turned it down. She switched to Justin Bieber’s “Stuck in the Moment” and the girls sang along tunefully, closing their eyes: “It’s all fun and games till someone gets hurt.”

“So cool,” said Janet.

“Natasha is all about her tan,” said Birdie.

“Natasha,” said Janet with distaste. “Don’t rub it in my face.”

“It’s not fair,” said Birdie. “I’m pale.”

“I have to go to spray tan,” Janet said. “I don’t tan. I just burn.”

Zena looked up at the clock. “All right,” she announced. “Class is over.”

“Thank you for contributing,” I said.

They were gone. I played “You Dropped a Bomb on Me,” by the Gap Band at full volume. Nobody could hear me. When the door opened, I clicked it off.

—

BLOCK 5 WAS JUST A HANDFUL OF KIDS, three girls and two boys. “Are we doing Fast Math?” Erica asked.

“Is there a question of the day?” asked Jacqueline.

“There was a question of the day, but I mistakenly erased it,” I said. “Should I put it up again?”

“No, it’s fine,” said Jacqueline.

“You shouldn’t,” said Sloan.

“We don’t need it,” said Jeannie.

I said, “I don’t think you need it. You’ve got a lot of questions of the day. What is the meaning of life? All that kind of thing.”

“What is the meaning of life?” said Erica. “Infinity pi!”

“It was a simple division question,” I said. “And the answer was fifty-five. In Fast Math that bowling game looked pretty good.”

“I like the ladybug one,” said Deke. “I haven’t done any other one this year. It’s like a movie.”

“Do we have to do Fast Math?” asked Erica.

“Absolutely must,” I said. “There’s no choice. You’re in here. I’m in here. It’s probably hypocritical for me to be saying you have to do Fast Math when I— GUYS, NO, NO, NO. No bumper cars, nothing like that.”

“She lets us move around like this,” said Jacqueline, scooting.

“If we need a pencil sharpened,” said Deke, “we can just be like shooooo.”

“It’s funny,” I said. “I think to myself, I don’t care. And then I think, What would the teacher do? So then I drop the — lower the boom, and I fuss, and it’s always about the wrong thing.”

“BOOM, shaka laka laka BOOM,” said Sloan.

“Do we still get our Jolly Ranchers?” asked Jacqueline.

“We need them right now,” said Erica.

“I don’t know where they are,” I said.

“No, they’re for Friday,” said Jeannie.

“Ah, no, you see,” I said. “They’re for Friday.”

“We almost got one,” said Jacqueline.

Erica got an error message: “Unfortunately FASTT Math could not save your work. You will have to repeat today’s lesson next time you log in.”

I said, “You can just tell her that you did Fast Math today, but it didn’t save your work. Try that. Saved by technology.”

“Holy crap, I have a lot of work to do,” said Jacqueline.

“I only have ten more assignments,” said Deke.

“I might not be here tomorrow,” said Erica.

I asked her why.

“ISS,” said Erica. “I did something bad.”

What was the ISS room like?

“I don’t know, I’ve never been in there,” said Erica.

“My brother’s been in there twice,” said Sloan.

“I got mad,” said Erica, “and my friend was telling me to say it. I called a teacher the B-word.”

“Bad friend,” said Jeannie.

“She’s not that bad a friend,” said Erica. “I have no idea how to do this. Just look at all this I have to do.” She made a whimper of despair.

We took a look. Her first problem had to do with the order of operations — i.e., Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. “Can I write that on the board?” She wrote it on the board. “I don’t remember what an exponent is.”

“Like squared, cubed,” I said. “One of those little numbers up on top.” I wrote some exponents on the board.

“Can I go get a drink?” asked Jacqueline.

Sloan’s paper had problems circled that he was supposed to do over. They involved something called the “least common multiple.” Back in the day, it was called the “least common denominator,” but times change.

Jacqueline sharpened a tiny stub of a pencil. “This is the funnest numeracy room ever,” she said. “I think you should give us Jolly Ranchers.”

“I do not,” said Jeannie.

Erica was making another go at the first order-of-operations question.

“What’s eight times seven?” I asked her.

“Thirty-seven!” said Erica. “What’s eight times seven, people? Deke?”

“Forty-two,” said Deke. “No, fifty-four!”

I made my little times-table speech again. “I just want to cut through all the underbrush, and give you a word of wisdom from a survivor. There are a lot of things that they’re going to teach you in high school—”

“It’s going to be junk,” said Jeannie.

“A lot of it you’re going to forget,” I said. “One thing that will be useful to you your whole life is the basic times tables.”

“You can always do a lattice,” said Jacqueline.

“But you don’t always want to draw a grid,” I said. “All you have to do is go to Staples or Hannaford’s—”

“Are you a survivor?” asked Erica.

“I am a survivor. I remember standing in front of a class in grade school, and they were doing one of those spelling bees except it was for multiplication, and I didn’t know the answer, and I was humiliated. I got some flash cards, went through them, over and over again — and now, look at me. I’m a substitute teacher.”

“Good story,” said Jacqueline. “Makes me want to cry tears.”

“So really, if you guys learn one thing today, learn eight times seven is fifty-six. I heard four different answers to eight times seven.”

“It’s fifty-six,” said Jeannie.

“There you go.”

“Seven times eight is fifty-six,” said Jeannie.

I turned to Deke. “What is eight times seven?”

“Fifty-six,” said Deke. “BOOM!”

“Did you know that eight times seven is fifty-six?” said Erica.

Deke began singing “Happy.”

“What’s two divided by four?” asked Erica. I did it on the board for her.

“Wait,” Jeannie said, “if you do five take away ten you’re going to get a negative, right?”

“Yes.”

“Drop the pencil!” said Deke to Sloan. “Drop the pencil!”

“Guys, I want to see focused focus,” I said. “Hyperfocus.”

Erica said, “He has a pencil in his armpit.”

Sloan dropped the pencil from his armpit.

“Deke, how’s it going, man?” I asked.

“Delicious,” he said.

“You’ve got your name down, good. This is the formula. Circumference equals two pi r. The radius is there.”

“So you do two times three point one four times fourteen?”

“Exactly! So just do it. Have you got a calculator?”

“No.” He went off in search of a calculator, and then he sneezed messily.

“That’s nasty,” said Jacqueline.

“I sneezed and it went out before I got my arm up,” Deke said. “It was like, schwooo!”

“Disgusting,” said Jacqueline.

“I didn’t mean to,” said Deke.

Jeannie shook her head. “This calculator is saying that two times seven is four.”

“That’s not right,” I said.

“The one is faded,” said Sloan.

“Then I need a new calculator,” said Jeannie. “Deke!”

“What should I do?” Sloan asked, handing in his worksheet.

I said he should probably invent a new kind of internal combustion engine.

“Okay,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Learn the sevens times tables today. It only takes about twenty minutes. You know when a fly flies in front of a toad? The tongue shoots out and grabs the fly. The toad doesn’t even have to think about it. What you have to be with that seven times eight is you have to be like the toad’s tongue. It’s got to be automatic.”

“Say ‘elephant juice,’” said Jacqueline to Deke.

“Elephant juice,” said Deke.

“Say it to the person next to you.”

Deke twirled in his chair to face Erica. “ELEPHANT JUICE,” he said. Jacqueline laughed. Supposedly when you say “elephant juice” it looks like you’re saying “I love you.”

“I want to listen to music,” said Jeannie. “But I can’t.”

I asked her what song she would choose to listen to.

“‘You Only Live Once,’ by Suicide Silence,” Jeannie said. She said the first lines, leaving out the profanity. “‘You only live once, so just go — nuts.’”

Meanwhile there was trouble at the whiteboard. “Stop,” said Deke. “She’s writing the F-word.”

“No I’m not,” said Jacqueline.

“Nine times seven is what?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Jacqueline.

“Just learn that.”

“Why?”

“Because if you learned one math fact a day, you would be in much better shape. Let me explain to you what’s happening. They’re loading wave after wave of stuff on top of this structure, and the structure that you’ve got is not helping you, because it doesn’t exist. If you knew the nine-times-seven layer, it could hold the rest of it up.”

“Sixty-three,” said Jacqueline.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Can I clean the whiteboard, please?” said Erica. She erased the bad tiny words that Jacqueline had written.

Deke brought up his completed pi worksheet.

“Look at that!” I said. “Deke, nice job!”

“I know! Thank you.”

“Can we play games?” said Sloan.

“Can we go for a walk in the hall?” asked Jacqueline.

“We’ve got four minutes left,” said Deke. He lifted my green mug. “Hey, is this your cup? How did you do that?”

“It came in the store that way,” I said. “It’s called a crackle finish. At a certain moment, in the furnace, the glaze cracks and then changes color.”

“It’s cool,” said Deke.

“Thanks,” I said. I tried to make another speech but coughed instead. “I’m starting to really cough and hack, but I think you’ve done a wonderful job. I know I’m a bore, and I don’t actually care about math personally, but I am the substitute math teacher, and I’m telling you, once you get those sevens down, the world is an easier place. Nine times seven.”

“Thirty-six,” said Jacqueline.

“Flip them around.”

“It’s time to go,” said Deke.

I said, “You’ve got one and a half minutes to chat, share stories. How was your weekend?”

“I was sick all weekend,” said Erica. “I had the flu.”

“You seem healthy now.”

“I saw her over the weekend,” said Sloan, pointing to Jacqueline. “At Walmart. I almost bought candy, but I didn’t.”

They handed in their papers. “Well, that went just about as well as can be expected,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Jacqueline. “Have a wonderful day.”

“You, too.”

I tried to open the drawer to pull out the next set of folders, but it was locked.

I poked my head out in the hall. “Guys! Somebody locked the freaking drawer on me.”

“Not me,” said Jacqueline.

“Did Deke do it?” said Jacqueline. “He was over there.”

“If you see Deke, will you send him to me?”

I struggled with the locked file drawer for a while. “Fucking torture chamber,” I muttered. In the back of the top drawer I found a tiny key that fit the lock. Good. I got through ten seconds of “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” before the first of the last set of students slumped in. Block 6, block 6, block 6. The first girl was Livia. “I have a team meeting today, so I have to leave early,” she said. “Can I have a cap eraser?” She found a stash of erasers in a lower drawer of Mrs. Massey’s desk and took one.

Kent came in. “Remember, I called you Rocket?” he said.

I found Astrid’s folder.

“Okay, I’m logged in,” said Kent.

“Logged in to the matrix,” I said. “What have you got? A fact grid. That’s a joyous sight.”

“Dude, I’m a master at this stuff,” said Kent. “I’m so good, they call me the Monster. When they call you Rocket, they call me the Monster. I’m working on the twelve times table, and eight times four. Eight times four, thirty-two. Twelve times four, thirty-six. I’m a beast!”

“I’m almost done,” said Jarrod. “I’ve just got a couple more papers.”

“You’re not almost out of here,” said Rebecca. “Just kidding.”

“I’m the closest,” said Jarrod.

“Didn’t you say you played Call of Duty?” said Kent.

“I don’t want to talk about that now,” I said.

They began slapping at their keyboards, doing their times tables. “You suck, Kent,” said Jarrod.

More mad keyboarding. “Done!” said Kent. “First one done! One time, I was on fire. They had to call 911, I was so hot. I’m dead serious.”

Jarrod began a geometry sheet. I read him the instructions in a Dr. Strangelove accent: “Describe each triangle below by both its sides and its angles. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jarrod said.

“Whose pencil is this?” Kent said. “It’s my pencil now.” He, too, embarked on a geometry sheet, which asked him to discriminate between equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangles. I couldn’t remember what a scalene triangle was, having never taken geometry in high school. “Scalene has no equal sides,” Kent explained.

I pointed to a triangle. “That one has seriously equal sides,” I said. “So I would hesitate before you write ‘scalene.’” To give him a hint, I sang, “Isoscelee-hees, but I did not shoot the deputy.”

“Can I go to the bathroom?” Astrid asked.

A kid named Bode brought up a placement test he’d taken. “What do I do now?” he said.

“I think you’re done,” I said. “You did Fast Math and you did this thing. I think you can read something, or check in with life, daydream. Is that permitted?”

“I guess so,” Bode said.

“Can I check this?” said Kent. I showed him how to look up the answer key to sheet F-51 in the answer book. He wanted to know if I’d played Call of Duty on a PS3 or an Xbox. Livia needed help figuring out which were composite numbers in a long list. Seven was prime, but twenty-one and seventy-nine were composite.

Astrid returned from the bathroom and began talking quietly to Jarrod about whether a certain girl liked him. “She likes me as a friend,” said Jarrod.

Kent said, “I play PlayStation Three, and I play Black Ops Two, or GTA Five, or I play Minecraft. And I have a YouTube channel. My name is hummertime. And I have a live stream, it’s like an hour video I do of gameplays.”

“Sounds like you take this very seriously,” I said.

“This summer,” said Kent, “I’m going to set up this thing where every view I get on my video I get a penny. If I get really popular and I get a million subscribers, that’s kind of a little bit of money. Just from making videos.”

“Pumping the traffic,” I said.

“Do you know Adam Larousse, in eighth grade? I game with him and his brother. Me and him make Minecraft videos and crap.”

“Minecrap?” I said.

“Never heard of that,” Kent said. “Do you like my new kicks?” He showed me his Hyperdunk Nikes. “I got them customized, blue and black. Do you know the Dallas Mavs basketball team?”

“Can I have an eraser?” said Astrid.

I pulled out the bag of eraser caps from the drawer and made one disappear with the Chinese egg drop.

“I’m going to show you a magic trick,” said Kent. “I’m going to make this eraser dissolve in my hand.”

“With stomach acid?” I said.

“No, it’s going to go through my skin, into my blood.” He started rubbing the eraser cap vigorously against the palm of his hand.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” I said. “Looks like there’s a little bit of a red mark.”

“It happens.” He rubbed and rubbed. “It’s going to take a little while.” He palmed the eraser and pretended to scrub it against his palm some more. Then he pulled the eraser out of his neck.

Bong, bong, bong.

When everyone was gone, and I’d written a note for Mrs. Massey, I went to the nurse’s office, to tell someone in authority that I didn’t think Waylon should be taking thirty milligrams of Paxil every day. Nurse Ritter was smiley and kind-faced, absorbed in braiding a girl’s long beautiful red hair. “At some point I’d like to talk to you about Waylon,” I said.

“Will you be in tomorrow?” she said.

I said I’d be in Wednesday.

“Let’s talk then.”

I drove home thinking about the dark circles under Waylon’s eyes, and the soft, faintly despairing way he spoke. He’d seemed like a normal, articulate, polite kid going through his life in a Paxil trance, not sleeping and hearing voices. Why? Because he’d cried about having to go to school. Math made him anxious. Did Waylon need all this arithmetic in his life? Of course not.

Day Twenty-two was a wrap.