Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY TWENTY-THREE. Wednesday, May 21, 2014

LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, LITERACY ROOM

HOW DO YOU SPELL JUICY?

MRS. WALLACE’S SIXTH-GRADE literacy intervention room was brightly lit, windowless, airless, and hot. I spent a long Wednesday there, goading “struggling readers” to work on a complicated assignment involving a book called Esperanza Rising, by Pam Muñoz Ryan, about a girl who leaves Mexico to make a new life in the United States. Each chapter of the book was named after the Spanish word for a fruit, a vegetable, or a nut, and the students’ task that day was to pick one of these chapter titles and make a Keynote presentation about it on their iPads. They had to come up with at least five slides about, say, las uvas (grapes), and each slide had to contain at least three sentences. The first slide was to be an introduction, which described the qualities of the grape, employing words taken from a list of about a hundred and thirty food-related adjectives. The second slide was the “Why?” slide, about why people like grapes and what they make with grapes and what health benefits were derived from eating grapes. The third slide was the “Where?” slide, in which was revealed where grapes were grown and related information; the fourth slide was the “When?” slide, wherein you discussed the growing season of the grape and whether grapes were available year-round in Maine and how much they cost; and the fifth slide was the conclusion, which was supposed to be in two parts: What did you learn that you hoped others learned about your fruit/vegetable/nut? and Do you think that you will try anything new that you learned about your topic? In bold at the top of the sheet was a command, complete with typo: MUST HAVE CORRECT SPELLING, PUNCTUATION, AND CAPTILIZATION.

In the first block, a smart, funny struggling reader with braces named Kayley dozed off. “I’m so tired,” she said. “And I’m hurt. I was on my bike. There was this girl and she was hogging the whole road. I went so fast down the road I had no control, trying to get a bug out of my ear. One hand on the bike, one hand trying to get the bug out of my ear, and then I fell. I slid.” She showed the bandage on her hand. “And I slid on my hip, too.”

Kayley eventually made an informational slide about papayas and gave me her student IEP log to sign. Had she been organized, focused, and respectful? I checked off the yes boxes and signed it.

When the next class came in, I asked them what happens to Esperanza in the book.

“She gets eaten by her undead father,” said Aspen, another supposedly struggling reader. She managed, by the end of the hour, to create two slides about papayas.

Carson, who liked to make blubbling, blithering sounds, was in my third class of the day. “Puh-puh-puh-puh PAYA!” he said, in a goofy cartoon stutter.

“Let’s pick one,” I said, holding flat the list of chapter titles for Carson to look at. “Do you like nuts, berries, carrots? What do you like?”

“Carson, do you like nuts?” said Jeb.

Carson made a raspberry sound and giggled.

I pointed to las papas. “Do you like potatoes, Carson?” I asked. “Do you like french fries?”

“I love french fries,” he said, in a normal voice. “I throw them out the window to give to the squirrels.”

We broke for lunch; when Carson returned he began by making faux spastic noises. “GUHNEEP! MEEEEEP! MIGGA MIGGA NIGGA NIGGA!” He laughed explosively.

“You’re having some trouble, man,” I said. “Do you get sent down a lot?”

“No,” he said, in his real voice. Then, giggling, he pulled out a handful of broken french fries from his pocket and stuffed them in his mouth.

“Ew, yucky, gross!” said Whit.

“I’m going to puke!” said Bronson.

“Sit yourself right down here,” I said to Carson. “I want to hear how you read.”

“I’m a potato,” said Carson. “I don’t read that book.”

“Just start,” I said. “Do what you can. The first word.”

“Ethperantha!” he said, in what sounded like a saliva-rich Sylvester-the-cat accent.

“Okay, but do it in an American accent,” I said. “Esperanza…”

He continued to read in his Sylvester accent: “… almotht never left Mama’s side. She thponged her…”

“So you actually know how to read,” I said.

“SpongeBob!” he said.

“She sponged…”

“… her wiff cool watta.” He read another line, and I realized he was imitating a disabled kid with a severe speech disorder.

“Peaches are awesome, yay,” said Noelle, who was trying to concentrate.

Carson cleared his throat noisily, turned to Noelle, and then said, in a Southern accent, “Tryin’ to read here, ma’am.”

I asked Carson how old he was.

“Fifty-eight,” said Carson.

I asked him again.

“Twelve,” said Carson.

“Why are you so keyed-up?”

“BLIP!” He read a little more, using his disabled-kid accent. He was a good sight reader: he didn’t hesitate when he came to the phrase extra layers of newspaper. I told him to read in an even, pleasant voice.

“Okay, then I’ll talk in French,” he said. “Jigga jugga bigga bugga. Vitta, vutta.”

“Can we turn off the lights?” said Noelle.

I didn’t answer; Carson had begun crawling under the desks. “UH UUUUUUUH!” he bellowed.

“Carson, do your work,” said Jeb.

I told Noelle to have a look at her slides. “I’ve already done five slides,” she said, which wasn’t true.

“Then get your book out and read a page.”

“I can’t read that book,” Noelle said. “All it is is gibberish! Half the words are gibberish.”

I said, “If you know the word gibberish you can probably read the book no problem.”

“It’s Spanish,” said Jeb.

Carson switched to making dog-panting noises and snorts. Finally I lowered the boom. “Take the book, find a page, read it, and don’t make a sound,” I said. “If you make another sound in the next five minutes, I’m going to send you directly downstairs. Just pull it together. You obviously can read. All of this is just an explosion of ridiculousness, right?”

“Yes,” Carson said, nodding.

“Five minutes of silence,” I said. “Otherwise you’ll go downstairs, and that’s no fun. People will fuss at you and you’ll have notes written on your log, and everybody’s unhappy.”

“So, kind of like this?” said Carson. “YOU SUCK YOU SUCK YOU SUCK YOU SUCK YOU SUCK.”

Enough. I stood. “All right, you’re going down,” I said.

“I’m going to read a book,” said Carson, in his normal voice, picking up a random book.

“No, you’re not,” I said, “you’re coming down with me. I said do it, and you didn’t do it. Let’s go.”

“Whenever a substitute’s here he’s always like this,” said Noelle.

Carson and I walked together down the long hall to the stairway. “Tell me everything,” I said to him. “Are you messing up like this because you enjoy getting in trouble?”

“I have ADHD,” Carson said, in his normal voice.

I said, “Whether or not you have ADHD, it’s something you have to control.”

Carson began walking downstairs backward, very slowly. “Bloomp, bloomp, bloomp, bloomp,” he said with each step down.

“GET DOWN THE STAIRS,” I said, pissed. “You’re in some serious hot water.” It made me nervous to have left the class unattended.

“Some serious what?”

“Hot water. Come on down.”

He finally reached the first floor. “I’ll just go back up in five minutes,” he said calmly. His one goal seemed to be to make the substitute teacher mad. Well, he’d succeeded.

I walked down the hall. “Stay with me,” I said.

“You’re walking too fast for me,” he said, dragging.

I swatted a copy of Esperanza Rising against my leg. “You STAY with me! You are sad, man. You are sad.”

We arrived in the doorway of the guidance office, where two aides were talking and laughing. “You can leave Carson right here,” one of them said. I loped back to my class. They’d all been sitting quietly.

“How do you spell juicy?” said Whit.

“You give it the J, give it the U—”

Noelle interrupted. “J-U-I–C-Y,” she said loudly.

“Shhh, we’re having calm,” I whispered. “Peacefulness now.” I wrote juicy on the board.

“Can we turn the lights off?” said Noelle.

“Yes,” I whispered, “I love it when the lights are off.”

The iPads glowed in the murk of the room, and there was silent Keynoting and reading for fifteen minutes. Because I’d walked Carson downstairs, my power over the class had increased. But I felt trembly and ashamed of myself for having lost my temper with him. If there was ever a person who needed a different setup, it was Carson. He needed a sympathetic tutor at home for an hour a day, paid for with public money if necessary. In a few years, his brain would calm down and he’d be fine. All middle school offered him was the giggly rapture of disruptiveness, the brief adrenaline surge of seeing which accents and forms of noise from his proven toolbox of chaos would drive a given teacher over the edge.

When Noelle and Whit began feuding, I had everyone in the class read aloud a few sentences each from Esperanza Rising. They all read surprisingly well — all except Margo, who refused to read anything because she was embarrassed. Sometimes they stumbled over a word like clinging or temporary. At the end of the hour, Carson returned to get his backpack. He held out his behavioral log sheets. “Sign these,” he said, in his real voice.

I got a pencil. “Respectful. How respectful were you? A one?”

“Two,” he said.

I checked two. “You had supplies, you had homework? You had a positive attitude? I think that’s a two. You used appropriate language? Not so good, right?”

“I spoke French and English, yeah, that was fine,” he said.

“No, I mean anytime people were trying to say anything, you were making all kinds of weird sounds, right?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

“No.”

I signed his sheets. “I’m sorry I had to send you down. I want to get to know you and I want things to go better.”

“You know me,” Carson said.

“I want to know the real you,” I said.

“That was the real me!” he said, and left. He really just needed a tutor for an hour a day. Middle school was destroying him. I was part of the machine of his destruction.

Next class, Emily P. and Emily R. both chose to write about peaches, and Frankie chose the onion. It turned out that all but one of the kids in the class lived on Russell Lake.

“Russell Lake is trashy,” said Frankie, looking up pictures of onions on Google.

“There’s too many people, the houses are way too close,” said Emily P.

“There’s crazy people around Russell Lake,” said Emily R.

“I’m the only person in here from Mossfield,” said Rosabelle.

I asked her what Mossfield was like.

“Eh,” said Rosabelle. “My neighborhood’s trashy.”

“How do you spell tasty?” asked Emily P. I wrote it on the board.

Peaches are so sweet and juicy, Emily P. wrote. There yellow red and orange there round tasty and very soft the middle of the peach has a big pit. Frankie lost his temper while trying to move a photograph of an onion into a Keynote slide. “I DON’T like doing this stuff!” he said. Over his laboriously pasted-in onion picture, he wrote: Onions give you protein. They have amazing flavors.

The Keynote app had just had an upgrade, and the resizing of text boxes worked slightly differently than it had, which made for some confusion. I thought of how many clouds of unknowing were enveloping these students during a single hour of a Wednesday afternoon at school: they didn’t know how to spell, didn’t know how to skim through search results in Google, didn’t know how to pan for gold in a Wikipedia article, didn’t know whether peaches had pits, didn’t know what varieties meant in the context of fruits and vegetables, didn’t know the difference between they’re and there, didn’t know how to use the updated version of the Keynote app, didn’t know why Mrs. Wallace wanted them to make a Keynote presentation based on one of the foodstuffs mentioned in the chapter titles of Esperanza Rising, didn’t know any of the Spanish words that were sprinkled throughout Esperanza Rising, didn’t know what I as a substitute would or wouldn’t allow them to do, and didn’t know whether their being sent to a remedial literacy class meant that they were stupid. They had nothing but music to hold on to — music, and video games, and sports, and pictures of their dogs.

“I want to get a boxer,” said Emily P. to Emily R.

“Can we have free time now?” asked Emily R.

I nodded.

“Thank you.”

Rosabelle told me about a Wii activity she liked called Mii, where you make random people. “I’ve made myself,” she said, “I’ve made Emily P., I’ve made my family.” We talked about various iPhone disasters. “My brother had his iPhone, with all his pictures, in his pocket and he went into the lake,” said Emily P. “He put it in rice but it still didn’t work.”

And then suddenly their iPads were zipped away and I watched my Russell Lake and Mossfield friends walk out the door. For the last block of the day I had only one student, Jacob. He was supposed to put on his headphones and use a piece of instructional software called System 44. “Please have him work quietly,” said the sub plans. “He will try to chat.” Jacob was a porcupine hunter, he told me, and a skeet shooter; he shot hundreds of clays every weekend, and he had to pay for his clays, which got expensive. “I’m on the Maine state team,” he said. “Most of the time I get twenty-five out of twenty-five. My parents own a hundred and thirty acres in Wallingford, so I shoot a lot.” He used a Beretta semiautomatic shotgun. “It’s not like a normal shotgun — there’s no kickback on it at all. It’s my first year on the team.”

“Impressive,” I said. “Sounds like it makes you happy.”

“Yep. Can I go to the bathroom?”

Two minutes later he was back. “Somebody in the bathroom wrote tons of swears on the door,” he said. “Would you like me to go down to the office to tell the custodians?”

“You might want to wait till the end of the day,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen now.”

Jacob put on his headphones and let the jokey software man from System 44 teach him how to read better. After twenty minutes, he packed up to go. “Have you been living in Maine your whole life?” he said.

I said, “We moved to Maine about fifteen years ago — thank you for asking — when my kids were small. I was born in New York City and grew up in upstate New York.”

“I don’t know how you can live in New York City, with all the people,” he said. “It feels so claustrophobic.” Jacob was off to another literacy class, he said, where they read aloud to each other. “Have a good day. Are you going to be in here again?”

Maybe, I said. “I’ll see you around.”

“Bye,” he said.

I sat for ten minutes, waiting for the day to end. When the dismissal bongers bonged and first wave was announced, I went to Nurse Ritter’s office. She was out, but Waylon was there to drop off his chart. I asked him if he was feeling better.

“Yep,” he said, with a cheerful note in his voice, but he looked sluggish and heavy-lidded. He walked slowly off down the hall. Nurse Ritter returned.

“I just wanted to briefly mention Waylon’s situation,” I said to her. “Waylon volunteered that he’s taking thirty milligrams of Paxil. He seemed catatonic.”

“Yes,” said Nurse Ritter.

“Mr. Fields said take him down to the nurse when he’s hearing voices. Well, that’s one of the side effects of Paxil, as I’m sure you know. It seems like a hell of a lot of drug to be in his system.”

“That’s not all, either,” said Nurse Ritter.

“He just seems like a guy who’s seriously struggling with overmedication,” I said.

“You and I do not disagree on that topic.”

“I’m so glad to hear that,” I said.

A girl with a knee injury came in to get her shoes. “I’m having a private conversation,” said Nurse Ritter.

“My feet smell,” said the girl. She left.

“I’m just thinking that there are long-term effects,” I said. “And he seems like a wonderful kid, a really nice kid. He got sad when he started middle school, so he’s been taking this monstrous thing ever since. I know you know this.”

“I do,” the nurse said. She spoke hesitantly, not wanting to say too much. “It’s not like it’s one provider. Unfortunately it’s a societal and a cultural thing. We want that quick fix, and we think that it comes in a pill. And it’s also very much about individual family culture. Sometimes this is a very strong current running through the family culture. As a school nurse, the best I can do is take every opportunity to offer suggestions to a family, and to try to educate a child. But ultimately I can only offer what I can offer. And I do offer!”

“I just thought, Wow, that’s a lot of Paxil.”

“Right, and if only that was all, but it’s not. It’s a sad story. The overmedication of children, and for that matter of adults, is problematic in our society. The prevalence is ever on the rise.”

“Is it still on the rise?” I asked. “I thought maybe it had peaked out.”

“No, it hasn’t,” Nurse Ritter said. She seemed as if she wanted to tell me more but thought better of it. “I appreciate your feedback. Just know that I’m very attentive to this issue. I’m working very closely with the providers to come to some terms. It’s crazy. It’s a lot, lot, lot of pills. We just don’t know what to do with our feelings.”

“Thanks so much,” I said. “I’ll see you again.”

Part of the track team was out in the hall, shouting. I handed in my ID tag and waved goodbye to the secretaries.

Farewell, Day Twenty-three.