Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY TWENTY-FIVE. Thursday, May 29, 2014

LASSWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, FOURTH GRADE

HIGH ON SUMMERTIME

THE NEXT MORNING I was in one of the modular classrooms at Lasswell Elementary in place of Mr. Seaborg, who was, judging by the newspaper headlines taped to his door, a huge Red Sox fan. His fourth-grade sub plans were handwritten on yellow legal paper. First there was music class, and then a math packet to do, then lots of other things. The last paragraph said: “If you have ANY issues with Micky, please send him to the office.”

A girl named Stacy sipped iced tea and asked me if I’d substituted at Lasswell before. I said I had. “I’ve never done fourth grade, though. This is a whole new world for me.”

Peter had a T-shirt on that said “Don’t Fear My Awesomeness.” A rowdy boy, Vance, came in with a fake mustache stuck to his upper lip.

“He has a whole package of them,” said Colt.

After the pledge, they chanted a class chant: “WE THE STUDENTS IN MR. SEABORG’S AWESOME FOURTH-GRADE CLASS WILL LISTEN AND FOLLOW DIRECTIONS, BE SAFE, AND ACT RESPONSIBLY. WE WILL HAVE A SENSATIONAL FOURTH-GRADE YEAR. YEE HAW!”

While the class was off at music, I skimmed through Hatchet, the book Mr. Seaborg was reading to them. It was about a boy trying to survive in the wilderness after an airplane crash, and it looked good.

“Mr. Baker, look at my tattoo,” said Juniper, a small bright girl with a ponytail. She had a flower on her arm.

“Classy,” I said.

“I have to get another mustache,” said Vance, retrieving a baggie from his desk.

For the rest of the morning, they did various math packets. There was a page of clock questions (How much time has elapsed between 11:45 and 2:15?) and a page of geometry questions (Describe the difference between a rhombus and a parallelogram), and they had to fill out a bar graph about Carla’s international coin collection. Carla had thirteen coins from China, fifteen coins from Japan, four from Vietnam, and ten from India. How many more coins does Carla have from China than Vietnam? They also had calendar problems — Amanda was born two weeks after St. Patrick’s Day, what date was she born on?

Mattie came up to have her packet corrected. “How’s it going?” I asked her.

“Good,” she said. “Actually, bad.”

I looked at her paper, which had equations with small blank boxes in them representing variables. “What are you doing algebra for?”

“Because I’m smart,” she said. But it was too hard for her. She couldn’t get her mind around − 10 = 5 and 16 + = 74.

I went over three elapsed-time clock problems with Micky, and he seemed to get it, finally. Using plastic coins, Vance and I practiced making change for a fifty-three-cent plate of buttermilk pancakes.

Everything they were learning so far was worth knowing, I thought: how to read a bar graph, how to make change, how to round up a number, how to go forward by weeks in a calendar and by hours in a clock. It wasn’t easy for them, but it got them closer to somewhere they would eventually need to go.

The class started lining up. Micky and Juniper squabbled in line. “You look like one of those scientists in movies,” said Vance.

Just as we left for the cafeteria, Micky doubled over, with something in his eye. “Don’t scrub your eye,” I said. “Grab your upper eyelash and pull it down over your lower eyelash. It’ll make some more tears and it’ll flush it out.”

“It’s gone,” said Micky.

I had lunch duty, meaning that I walked around the tables saying hello and smiling at kids I recognized. Stacy showed me her plum and waved. After fifteen minutes, a teacher raised her hand. Everyone in the cafeteria raised hands and the teacher made a speech about how it was too loud. When she lowered her hand, the noise immediately resumed. Five minutes passed. “VOICES ARE WAY TOO LOUD,” said the teacher. “AT THIS POINT YOUR HANDS SHOULD BE UP AND YOUR VOICES SHOULD BE OFF. IT IS MUCH TOO LOUD IN HERE TODAY, FOLKS. WE ARE BEGINNING TO EMPTY AND CLEAN TABLES. THAT DOES NOT REQUIRE TALKING.”

Another two minutes passed, with noise again at full redline level. The teacher said, “OKAY, FROM THIS POINT ON THERE IS NO TALKING. IF I HEAR VOICES, YOU — OWE — RECESS!”

What a blessed deliverance to escape from the cafeteria — a giant sonic meatloaf. Twenty-five minutes a day of this torture would be enough to make any slightly jiggy person hyperactive. Yet most of them took it in stride.

Silent reading was up next. Carly opened her paperback of A Wrinkle in Time. I wrote a quotation from Samuel Johnson on the whiteboard. Nobody said anything for twenty-five minutes. The sound of pages turning was like distant cars passing on the road. I hated for it to end, but the sub plans said, “12:00 to 12:20—read aloud from Hatchet.”

Emery told me where Mr. Seaborg usually sat when he read aloud — near the whiteboard. “Chapter sixteen of Hatchet,” I said, “by Mr. Gary Paulsen. And now he stood at the end of the long part of the lake, and was not the same — would not be the same again.” I read for a page, and then, while our hero was hunting a bird, Micky hopped up to go to the bathroom. Vance and Isaiah got up to follow him. “We have to go with him,” said Vance, “because he makes bad choices in there.”

I followed Micky and his monitors to the bathroom and waited by the door. “You’re not supposed to wait,” Micky said.

“Just go to the bathroom!” I said.

The bathroom break completed, we got back in our places. I pointed to the Samuel Johnson quotation on the board. “Can anyone read this sentence to me?”

They read: “The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.”

“You guys are good readers,” I said. I told them a few things about Samuel Johnson — that he’d written the first really good dictionary of English, and that he was kind of twitchy.

“He had tics?” said Emery.

“Yes, he had all these tics. He was brilliant, but when he would walk down the street he would just be sort of—” I did an imitation of Samuel Johnson twitching and lurching. “He was a genius. And this is one of the sentences that he wrote that I really like. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope. Does anyone have an idea what that might mean?”

Juniper raised her hand. “Is it about people that are different and stuff?”

I said, “When you want something really badly, you hope to get something. You’re desperate to see the TV show. You want to go to a movie. You want popcorn at the movie.”

“We’re not talking, everybody,” said Peter to the class.

“Now, what happens when you get that thing?” I said.

“You get pleasure,” said Emery.

“You get some pleasure — but how long does it last?”

“Not long,” said Emery.

“And hope lasts a while,” said Carly.

“That’s it,” I said. “You really, really want to be first in line. Or you really, really want to be done with school. Whatever it is. And when you get that thing, it’s almost as if all of that wanting that you do just goes up in a puff of smoke. And you start wanting another thing. So what he’s saying is that the most natural state of being is not a state of being where you’re enjoying the thing you’re doing, it’s when you’re hoping for the next thing. And that’s kind of true, I think. Don’t you?”

Yep!

Yes!

Isaiah raised his hand. “Kind of like if you want something, you hope for it, that hope always stays with you, but you might not get what you want.”

I said, “So what he’s trying to do is telling you something about human nature in one sentence, and I think he does it.” Then I went back to reading to them from Hatchet. After Brian, the hero, kills the bird, a moose appears and starts bludgeoning him with her head. Brian crawls to the safety of a tree, ribs and shoulder aching. When the moose moves on, he retrieves the dead bird and hobbles to his hut, grateful to be alive. “Such an insane attack, for no reason, and he fell asleep with his mind trying to make the moose have reason. Space break!” I slapped the book closed. Now they were supposed to write something.

I read to the class from the sub plans. “Brian experienced many things for the first time during his experience in the woods. Describe one of these experiences with details from the story.” A nice, simple assignment. Isaiah asked how many sentences long it had to be. There was no good answer to that, I said; they could write short sentences, middle-sized sentences, or even one long snakelike sentence that filled a page. “Just say to yourself, I’m going to write the best bunch of sentences I can, and I’m going to go pretty fast, because I have fifteen minutes to do it. Make them cry, make them laugh, make them weep.”

“Just chunk it out, everyone!” said Isaiah, and he began writing.

Odette raised her hand. “I need to know how you spell hatchet.”

I printed hatchet on the board.

They put their fourth-grade heads down and wrote and wrote. I read many paragraphs about Brian in the woods, Brian in the cockpit, Brian in the mud with the moose.

Odette wrote hers in neat cursive. Peter handed in his paper. “I didn’t do too well,” he said. “I did terrible.”

I told him not to worry, and then I read aloud from the paragraph handed in by a quiet kid named Locke. “I like the part when it was pitch-black out, and Brian was in the cave. Then a porcupine came in and Brian threw the hatchet, missed, and hit the rock on the face of the rock, and sparks exploded everywhere, and lit up the room, and so Brian saw the porcupine. He was spiked several times in the leg and had to pull out each one in agonizing pain.” I told them they’d all done good work, and they clomped out for recess while I ate a sandwich in class. Somebody else had recess duty.

Twenty-five minutes later, everyone was back. Juniper sat her tiny self down at her desk and began to cry. She and Micky had been fighting. “He was bullying me outside,” she said.

“He was bullying her,” said Emery.

“He was,” said Carly.

“I was NOT,” called Micky from the back of the classroom.

The class was quiet enough that I could hear Juniper sobbing into her fists. I crossed the room to loom over Micky.

“I wouldn’t let her play a game with me,” he said, “because she’s been mean to me all day.”

“Micky,” I said.

“IT’S NOT BULLYING,” he shouted. “JUST BECAUSE I DISINCLUDE HER FROM THE GAME!”

“Do not talk in a loud voice to me,” I said. “Sit right here. We’re going to talk quietly for a second. Do I need to send you to the office?”

“No,” said Micky. “She’s been mean to me all day.”

“Kiddo,” I said. “I’ve seen the two of you. I’ll tell you something that you’ll really profit from. A lot of the trouble you get into you’re causing yourself, because you get wild.”

“I just don’t want Juniper playing with me,” said Micky. “It’s not a big deal.”

“I won’t send you to the office if you’ll go over there right now and find one thing nice to tell her, and say you’re sorry if she thought you were mean to her.”

“I don’t really know anything nice about her,” Micky said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “She’s an incredibly nice kid. So are you.” (Not strictly true.) “You just, for some reason, don’t like each other.”

“Since third grade, she’s been mean to me. We were in the same class in third grade.”

“Why can’t you start fresh today?”

“She’s never been this mean to me since third grade. It’s usually when there’s a substitute. And I’m tired of it. She distracts me from my work.”

“You distract a lot of people,” I said. “You’ve got a thing about getting a little wild. I want you to go over and say, ‘I’m sorry you think I was bullying you.’”

“I have ADHD,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter whether you have ADHD,” I said. “You can control it. I see you’re smart. You can write. You can do stuff.”

“Okay, I’ll go say I’m sorry.” He marched over and said, “Juniper, I’m sorry you thought that I was mean to you.” He marched back and sat down.

“Thank you,” I said.

To Juniper, I said, “I know that doesn’t make it better, but at least it’s a start. Okay?”

Juniper nodded.

“I’m hoping today could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” I said, then chuckled at the remoteness of that possibility. Juniper laughed and wiped her face.

The sub plans said it was time for “Enrichment.” An ed tech arrived with a cart full of laptops. She took Micky off to a Title I class. Juniper went to a reading class. Isaiah gave me a story of his to read. “It may be a little gross,” he said. He’d read it aloud to the class a few weeks ago.

I read Isaiah’s story aloud softly: “I split my nose open one time when I was doing flipflops on my bed.” He hit the metal frame, he wrote, and blood came out like water from a squirt gun. This was when he was six. “My brother ran around the room freaking out. It looked like a crime scene. Blood was on the floor, and my nose was hanging. My dad picked me up and scurried to the phone.” At the hospital they put three needles in Isaiah’s face. “They shot them in my nose to keep it from falling off.”

I moaned at the horror of it. “You’re a survivor. Put it there, man.” I shook hands with him.

“I still have a scar and it’s kind of disformed a little bit,” said Isaiah, holding his nose. I could see no sign of injury.

“It looks good,” I said. “They did a good job — you’re back together.”

“Mr. Baker?” said Camille. “When I was five, a light fixture fell on my face, and I had a eighty stitches right here.” She pointed to a scar at her hairline.

“No kidding, and you look perfect,” I said. “You guys are amazing survivors.”

Isaiah put his story away. Mattie gave Lewis an eraser cap.

“Whoa, this is a good class,” I said. “Enrichment. Who’s enriching their minds?”

“I don’t know,” said Stacy. “But I have to go to the bathroom.”

With Micky out of the class, I didn’t have to tell anyone to be quiet. Some added to their essays about Brian’s adventures in Hatchet. Some pulled out their unfinished math packets. Odette showed me a division problem, 3,315 divided by 22, and we did it together. There was something soothing about doing one arithmetic problem slowly and carefully — just one. Emma and Hallie worked on their Wordly Wise notebooks. They quizzed each other, imitating the voice of the woman on the Wordly Wise website, on the meaning of shun, furious, coax, clutch, caress, and prefer. “You’re building some serious vocabulary there,” I said. Emma said that the reason Micky was in Mr. Seaborg’s class was that Mr. Seaborg could control him, and they had a love of baseball in common. Mr. Seaborg was crazy about the Red Sox. “If you say Yankees in this class,” said Hallie, “it’s a swear.”

Soon a troupe of fifth-graders arrived for a laptop software session, and many of my fourth-graders left — it felt like a whole new class. I rebooted an unresponsive laptop and handed a boy a box of tissues. Suddenly it was perfectly still.

“It’s so quiet,” I whispered. “It’s wonderful.”

“It’s never like this,” Stacy whispered back.

“Did you cast a spell over them?”

The fifth-graders were doing advanced math on IXL, and they were having trouble. Evan needed help finding the height of a cube whose volume was 729. We trial-and-errored it. Megan wasn’t able to figure the height of a rectangular prism with a volume of 560 yards, a height of 8 yards, and a width of 10 yards. We got that one, too. Then Phil came up, wanting to know the length of a side-leaning shaded triangular area of 49 square inches and a height of 7 inches. I stared at the illustration for a long time. My mind ceased to function.

“She might know,” Phil said, pointing to a small blond girl with a pointy mouth.

“Are you super good at triangles?” I said.

“I can try,” she said.

“Mr. Baker, can I go get a damp paper towel?” asked Sierra. Yes.

I gave the blond girl, Tracy, the triangle worksheet. “Oh,” she said promptly. “I would imagine that you would have to divide forty-nine by fourteen.” I didn’t believe her, but she was right: the answer was 3.5. A green checkmark appeared on Phil’s laptop’s IXL screen.

Phil put a fist in the air. “She’s one of the smartest kids in our class.”

“You’re light-years ahead of me,” I said.

The room’s back forty became loud and jokey, so I went over there and asked them about their whispering skills.

“I don’t have whispering skills,” said a boy. “I have football skills.”

“Can you play whisper football?” I said.

“Blue forty-two,” he whispered, “hut, hut, hike.”

“I got it right!” said Megan, across the room.

“Praise the lord,” I said.

“I don’t like math,” she said.

The laptops went back in the cart, each with a dangling MagSafe charging cord, as a logjam of my fourth-graders returned. I asked Juniper what Micky had been doing during recess to bully her. “He wouldn’t let me play the game that everyone else was,” she said. “And he kept saying, ‘Guys, everybody, Juniper doesn’t know how to talk.’ I don’t really know how. I say aminal and emeny.”

“That’s so cruel, and so silly,” I said.

“Mr. Seaborg says he’s just trying to get a action out of me. A ride. I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know how to say a lot of words.”

“You seem to be doing pretty well,” I said. “I’ve noticed good words coming out.”

The computer cart was closed and its padlock twirled. Vance’s mustache bag reappeared. With five minutes to go, I put on “Imagine.”

“Why are you playing music?” asked Juniper.

“Because it’s been a long day,” I said.

Isaiah said he liked country music — he liked Luke Bryan, doing “That’s My Kind of Night.” I’d never heard of Luke Bryan, but I found the song on YouTube and played it.

“This is my favorite song,” said Isaiah.

“This is my mom’s favorite song!” said Odette.

They sang along with Luke Bryan: “I got that real good feel good stuff, up under the seat of my big black jacked-up truck.”

“This is my sister’s favorite song!” said Mattie.

A bell rang and a grandmother in a flowered muumuu appeared at the door to pick up Aiden. We switched to Luke Bryan doing “Drunk on You.” Four kids, crouching around my laptop and dipping their knees, knew the lyrics: “I’m a little drunk on you, and high on summertime.”

The four-note gong sounded, calling kids for first-wave buses. Bye, I said. Lewis told me he liked a Christian song called “Do Something” by Matthew West. When I put it on, three kids knew it. “It’s not enough to do nothing,” they sang. “It’s time for us to do something.” Second wave was announced and in a fingersnap they all were gone.

“You survived another day with us!” said the secretary. “We’re thankful.”

Heck, I thought, I love this.

End of Day Twenty-five.