Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY TWENTY-SIX. Wednesday, June 4, 2014

LASSWELL MIDDLE SCHOOL, ED TECH

I KIND OF BREAK MY OWN SPIRIT SOMETIMES

BETH SAID I HAD A CHOICE: I could either teach first grade at Lasswell, or be a roving ed tech at the middle school. I slapped together some sandwiches and hissed northward through a rainy mist to the middle school — past a striped VW Beetle for sale, past a pile of stripped logs at a lumberyard, past a dead lump of a porcupine on the road.

“Everybody’s out today,” said Pam. I reported to room 232, special ed math, where a girl was eating a bagel. Mr. Fields, the bustling gent who had first told me about the voices in Waylon’s head, was my dispatcher. I was going to do a tech block first, with Mr. Walsh, he said. “So, Nick, you’re kind of tall. How tall are you?”

“Six four and change,” I said.

“You were probably six five and change in your younger days,” Mr. Fields said. “You haven’t shrunk yet? You’re over forty, aren’t you? Heh heh.”

“I’m fifty-seven,” I said.

“Oh, you’re a puppy!” Mr. Fields said. “Did you play basketball in high school?”

Actually, I said, there was no basketball team at my high school.

“Cut it out!” said Mr. Fields, amazed.

Cheryl, in the corner, asked for tissues, but the box was empty. Mr. Fields said, “You can use a paper towel, Cheryl, and when you come back we’ll have tissues, so you don’t have to report us to the tissue police. See that look? Cheryl always gives you that look when she doesn’t like what you said. Judy, beside her, is always a gentle soul. Beside her is Kelly, another gentle soul. Tyna, over there in the corner, is a very gentle soul, and Glenn, beside her, is something of a Mexican jumping bean. Over here we have the quiet duo of Billy and Gene, who are just enrapt in their video games. Hey, fellas, it’s coming up on seven thirty-five, you know you should be off those contraptions. Thank you.”

The principal came on the PA system. “Can I have your attention, please?”

“Yes you can, boss!” said Mr. Fields. “Hey, Gene, you should have that thing away. You can break the spell, do it!”

The class pledged its allegiance. Lunch was a hot meatball sub with shredded cheese. Band would meet from 9:55 to 10:40. A pair of glasses were found outside by the buses. The seventh-grade boys’ lacrosse team had made a good effort as they faced the Falmouth Yachtsmen the night before. All library books were due back by June 10. “Please check your lockers, your closets at home, your bedroom, all other places where those library books may be hiding.” Two students came on to announce a Team Orinoco dance, with special guest DJ Blake Burnside. “Enter to win an iTunes fifteen-dollar gift card and party like it’s 1999 at our beach party, with drinks, food, and a lot of fun tattoos and leis.” That concluded the announcements.

Bong, bong, bong. I followed Judy down to tech class. “WALK ON THAT STAIRWAY, BOYS,” said an ed tech. “THAT’S VERY DANGEROUS.”

Mr. Walsh, a compact baldie with a mustache, shook my hand and said I was supposed to work with Dana, who wore hearing aids. “He pretends he doesn’t hear a lot.”

Mr. Walsh called out names for attendance and I sat on a stool in the hot, bright room. There were a dozen educational robots arranged on a table. “Dana’s not here,” said Mr. Walsh to me. I said I’d just float around.

Mr. Walsh addressed the class. “OKAY! What we did yesterday was we did the Yucca Mountain sheet, explained the controls, gave you an opportunity to work a robotic arm.” He had the loudest voice I’d heard yet in school. “We’ll have a little competition today, to see who does it the quickest. We’ll do that first, and after that we’ll do the Fryeburg Fair.”

“Caca or Yucca?” asked Jackie.

“Yucca,” said Mr. Walsh. He turned to the whiteboard, which said CACA MOUNTAIN ACTIVITY. “Somebody changed that on me.”

The class paired up, and each team of two picked out a robot arm and two “casks”—cylindrical wooden blocks meant to represent sealed containers of nuclear waste. The robot arms were black and yellow, and they made a high, revving, whining sound when they moved, like tiny chain saws. “I’ll give you two minutes to practice,” said Mr. Walsh, “and then we’ll start the competition.”

I read the Yucca Mountain activity sheet, which was professionally laid out, with copy furnished, so it seemed, by some sort of a pro-nuclear lobbying group. Maine’s nuclear power plant, Maine Yankee, was closed in 1996, said the sheet, after 26 successful years of electrical generation—not mentioning that the plant was shut down by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because it had falsified safety records. Nuclear waste was held in crash-resistant casks, the sheet explained, specially designed to hold radioactive materials safely. It briefly told the story of Yucca Mountain, the underground site in Nevada where American nuclear waste was supposed to go. As of 2008, construction was stalled and at this time, it appears as though the depository under Yucca Mountain will never be built and millions of dollars will be wasted. A callout offered reassurance: You would have to live near a nuclear power plant for over 2,000 years to get the same amount of radiation exposure that you get from a single diagnostic medical x-ray. I wondered what the residents of Fukushima would say about this activity sheet.

“I’d like to have everybody put their shoulder up to start with,” Mr. Walsh said — meaning the robot’s shoulder. “SHOULDER UP, ELBOW OUT.” The students worked their controllers with their thumbs. “If you should drop a cask, you need to put it back on the circle.” He checked his stopwatch. “READY. SET. GO.”

The clumsy machines swiveled and joggled and eventually took hold of their dangerous spent-fission cargoes, while their operators cursed and laughed. The object was for each team to lift two casks and place them into a plastic box and close the lid. Several casks fell on their sides.

“Be nice to James, he’s special,” said Forrest.

“You do it, I can’t!” said Anna.

One cask rolled off the table onto the floor. “You just exploded the Earth,” said Tucker.

The winning time was one minute, fifty-one seconds. “ALL RIGHT, WE ARE GOING TO MOVE ON TO THE NEXT ACTIVITY,” said Mr. Walsh. I liked Mr. Walsh, who had discovered that the only way he could survive as a middle school tech teacher was to develop a voice like a union activist’s and shout all talkers down.

“How many people have been to the Fryeburg Fair?” he asked, handing out an activity sheet. Many hands went up. He read to us from the sheet: the fair was the largest in Maine, with oxen pulls and wood-chopping contests and pigs and chickens and rows of porta-potties. “ALL RIGHT,” said Mr. Walsh. “YOUR TASK. In this activity, you are an employee at Blow Brothers and your boss has told you to load four porta-potties into the back of the truck body. These are going to be your porta-potties, right here.” He held up a handful of gray plastic cylinders, narrower than the wooden nuclear waste cylinders.

“Those are really skinny porta-potties,” said Vicky.

“WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO DO — is you’re going to have to put them in one of the five holes,” Mr. Walsh said. The holes were drilled in wooden blocks, representing the porta-potty trucks. “You need to be careful. They’re kind of difficult to stand up. And if I see anybody tipping the table, or shaking it, you’ll be going somewhere. So don’t be shaking the table. ALL RIGHT?”

He gave the class a few minutes to practice, and then the race began. Robots clenched and whined and dropped porta-potties here and there. “I just spilled my bucket of pee all over you guys,” said Tucker. “She’s covered with it.”

“I’m done, because I don’t want to do any more,” said Anna.

“Gavin cheated,” said Jackie. The winning time, by a two-girl team, was two minutes, thirty-five seconds.

“LISTEN UP, WE’RE GOING TO STOP,” Mr. Walsh said. “Bring the porta-potties up to me, put the robots in the middle of the table, and take your sheets with you.” Tomorrow, he said, they would be doing robotic heart transplants, pretending to be cardiac surgeons at Maine Medical Center. When everything was put away, ready for Mr. Walsh’s next group of roboticists, he said, “ALL RIGHT! I guess you guys can go. HAVE A GOOD DAY.”

Back at math special ed headquarters, Mr. Fields described some of the students I might be asked to help that day. “Diane wears kind of like a red fleece and pulls her hair back, very plain girl — nice kid, works hard. Bobby Bowman is this big solid kid—”

“Kind of crew-cutty,” said Ms. Quinn, one of the other ed techs.

“Crew cut, dark-rimmed glasses,” said Mr. Fields. “He’s a nice kid. He can do everything fine — he just kind of like daydreams a lot. He needs a little bit of ‘Hey, hey!’” He banged a file cabinet with his fist. “‘Are you in there? Anybody home?’”

“Don’t hit him, though,” said Ms. Quinn.

“No, he’s very gentle, he doesn’t take much of a prod. Another guy, Frank Wood. He’s a shorter guy, about yea big and about twelve pounds. Tends to wear T-shirts, short brown hair, kind of goes in every direction.”

“I thought it was reddish,” said Ms. Quinn.

“Brownish blond, strawberry blond, something like that. Nice kid, very quiet, but he’s not a real good reader, or a good writer, so he might need some help.”

I had a free block, and I went out to the car and ate a sandwich until it was time to check in with Mr. Fields. He told me about more special ed students I might encounter. “There’s one girl named Katy, or it could be her friend Lynda,” he said. “We call the two of them the Katy-Lynda, because they’re basically alike. Little kiddy girls. There might be a guy named Adam, and there’s a guy named Shawn — he’s a blond-headed kid. They might need help with the writing. Adam can do pretty much everything, he’s just got to have a nudge. The girls are kind of helpless. But they can do more than they predict.”

Health class was my next destination, taught by a long-fingered, tough-but-kind woman named Mrs. Fitzgerald. “Just hang out,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said to me. I sat down at a table on the side of the room, near Katy and Lynda and the pencil sharpener.

“Today is your day to talk to me about big things that you read in your alcohol article,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said to the class. “Your job is to teach the class, so I can just sit back and fall asleep.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” said Renee.

“Doesn’t it?” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “So say Marjorie starts first. She’s going to talk about something that’s a big thing to her that she learned about alcohol. And if I call on Ray next, Ray has two choices. He can make a connection to what Marjorie said, or he can come up with a whole new alcohol fact. Got it? This is what they do in college.”

“Lots of fun,” said Ray quietly.

“In some colleges, anyway,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “Sometimes you’re in a class of a hundred and fifty and they just lecture to you for eighty minutes. But sometimes there are discussion classes. You’re expected to come prepared for class and you’re expected to discuss. It’s a big responsibility. So who would like to go first?”

Randy, in Top-Siders, raised his hand. He said, “I picked out from the article that you’re actually more likely to hurt yourself and others and commit more crimes, and go to jail.”

“Can anyone make a connection to that and explain why?”

Toby said, “It messes with your nervous system and your brain. You could think that something is completely normal and fine, when your real conscience knows it’s wrong.”

“So it affects thinking skills,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “It’s really hard to stop and think when you’re under the influence of alcohol. How many of you have seen someone who has had too much alcohol, but they think they’re just fine?”

Hands went up.

“Look around the room, that’s your evidence,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “When people drink alcohol, they think they’re fine, because their brain is under the influence of what?”

Alcohol.

“Of what?”

Alcohol.

“And alcohol is a what?”

A depressant.

“A depressant, nice job. So I’m under the influence of a depressant, and I think I’m doing just fine. There’s absolutely no reason I can’t teach, there’s absolutely no reason I can’t drive. If your brain is not under the influence of a depressant, then you would look at me and say, I don’t know what’s wrong with her, but there’s something way different about her. She can’t even walk straight. She’s mumbling and she’s not making any sense. But my brain is telling me I’m just fine, because I’m under the influence of a depressant. Is it okay that people either love the Yankees or they love the Red Sox?”

Yes.

“Is it okay if you’re friends with somebody who likes the opposite team? Can you tolerate that normally? Do you like it? Not particularly. I don’t particularly like it when someone’s a real Yankees fan, but I can still be friends with them, and I don’t have to fight them. I don’t have to argue with them, and I don’t have to beat them up, and I don’t have to kill them over it. But that’s what people do when they’ve been drinking. There have been people at Fenway Park and at Yankee Stadium that have died because they have worn the opposite team’s jersey. Emotions escalate, and people end up being shot or killed or seriously injured — over what? When we boil it all down, it was over what?”

A team.

“They liked a team that I don’t like. Deal with it! Deal with it. But it’s not easy to deal with it when you’re putting a chemical in your body that changes the way you perceive things.”

A tall floor-mounted fan sent a breeze of coolness over the drowsy class as we learned more about the horrors of alcohol. Melanie raised her hand to say that what she’d learned from the article was that alcohol is made by fermenting certain fruits. Mrs. Fitzgerald dismissed that fact as irrelevant. Alcohol was a poison, she said. Our liver filters out poisons, and alcohol is filtered out by your liver, therefore we know that alcohol is a poison. It couldn’t help you get better grades, and it couldn’t help you decrease the stress you feel from school. “We don’t want to be drinking to decrease stress. Are you serious? You want to put a poison in your body to decrease stress? It’s not a strategy to help you with stress. When you look at the reasons why teenagers use, I just want to tell you, they look like a bunch of excuses to me. You guys are too smart to use those as excuses. You guys are too smart to think that alcohol’s going to relax you. You know better than that.” What we needed were healthy relaxation techniques, she said. “Think of something that you personally do that decreases your stress, that makes you relaxed, that would be considered healthy.”

“Play sports,” said Randy.

Mrs. Fitzgerald nodded. “That’s a healthy redirecting activity.”

“Sit on my horse?” said Anita, who kept eyeing Randy.

“I draw,” said Marjorie.

Mrs. Fitzgerald said, “What’s the end result if I draw, or I walk my dog, or I lay across on my bed for a little while and just relax? Or I do yoga, or slow breathing, or I doodle, or I read or write?”

“It decreases stress?” said Marjorie.

“When I read, how does it decrease stress?” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “For those of you that love to read, when you get yourself into a good book, how does that decrease stress?”

“You get distracted by it,” Cary said.

“You get distracted by it,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “If it’s a good character, or a good plot, it kind of takes you away. When I get done reading, I don’t feel sick, I don’t have a really bad headache, I’m not vomiting in the toilet, I haven’t said something or done something to somebody that I didn’t mean to do. How about when you draw? What do you notice? You get better at it. When you drink, you get better at drinking, because your body gets more dependent on it, and it needs more to get the same feeling. People that practice drinking get very good at it. People that practice their drawing get very good at it. Which very-good-at-it would you like to do? You guys don’t need alcohol. Am I going to feel better about myself if I feel sick? Am I going to feel better about myself if somebody shows me on their phone that they took a video of me doing really stupid things, and now it’s viral?” Alcohol, she said, will not help you fit in at school. “Who are you going to fit in with when you’re acting like an idiot? Other idiots. Is that who you want to fit in with?”

Mrs. Fitzgerald moved on to the dangers of driving while under the influence. “Think about your brain as like an iPad that has too many apps open on it. What happens to your iPad?”

It goes slow.

“It goes real slow. So under the influence of a depressant, my brain goes really slowly, and I have a hard time multitasking.” That’s what led to car accidents, and snowmobile accidents. She wrote “FETAL ALCOHOL SYNDROME” on the whiteboard and told us about it. “The baby’s born addicted to alcohol,” she said. “It has physical deformities, and/or emotional and mental disabilities.” A boy raised his hand to ask how to spell deformities. “Women aren’t using to hurt their babies, they’re using because they’re addicted to alcohol. They made a personal choice to go down the road of addiction. The alcohol is making the decisions for them.”

It sounded like Mrs. Fitzgerald was a total prohibitionist, but in fact she wasn’t. After about age twenty-four, you could drink. “If we could keep alcohol out of your hands, and out of your bodies, until your prefrontal cortex is fully developed, there wouldn’t be as big an issue with alcohol in our country.”

I walked — faintly querulous, wanting a cold beer — to the next class, which was taught by Mr. Fields. He handed a bag filled with empty candy wrappers to a girl named Paloma, who wore a blue plaid bucket hat. “Would it wake you up if you were to go up to the board and count out how many of M&M wrappers are in here?”

“Probably not,” said Paloma. “The entire class is math.”

He handed the bag to Bobby instead. “There’s no food in there,” Mr. Fields said. “We took the food out and fed it to other people.”

“There’s just two,” said Bobby. He wrote a two next to “M&M” on the board.

He gave the bag to Paloma.

“Is it the hat that makes you so sleepy, or is it something else?” said Mr. Fields.

“I’m stuffy,” said the girl. “Can’t… breathe… through… nose.” She counted out two Fruit Roll-Up wrappers and wrote a two on the board.

Roxanne counted one Three Musketeers wrapper. Whitney counted four Snickers wrappers. Bobby, up again, counted two Milky Way wrappers.

“Mr. Baker, can I leave you in charge of the bag of candy wrappers, so that Paloma doesn’t wake up and start to go through it to see if there’s a piece of candy left in there?”

Then Mr. Fields handed around another plastic bag, this one filled with arithmetic problems on slips of paper. Each student fished out four problems.

“Do you want to pick four as well, Mr. Baker?”

I said that I’d be honored.

“This is all about going over division by five and six,” Mr. Fields said.

Bobby did his problems aloud: ten divided by five is two, thirty-five divided by five is seven, twenty divided by five is four, and eighteen divided by six is three.

Paloma was next. She spread out her four division problems. “I would really love to breathe,” she said. Thirty divided by five is six. Thirty-five divided by five is seven. Forty divided by five is eight. Twenty-four divided by six is four.

“Do you notice anything about these?” Mr. Fields asked.

“Five and six seem to reoccur,” said Paloma.

“Okay, anything else that you notice? Do you have any prime numbers as an answer?”

“I don’t know,” said Paloma.

“She has eight, four, seven, and six, are any of those prime numbers?”

“No,” said Bobby.

“Seven is,” said Mr. Fields.

They went around the class doing simple division.

“And Mr. Baker, what did you get?”

“I got fifteen divided by five equals three,” I said. “Twenty divided by five is four, twelve divided by six is two, and ten divided by five is two.”

“And what do you notice about your answers, if anything?” Mr. Fields said.

“I’ve got a prime number in there, three.”

Mr. Fields tooted a large old-fashioned automobile horn and handed it to me. “Whenever you feel the urge, do that, and that means we have to go around and get another pick-four from people, and see what they remember. Any time you want.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Do a practice one.”

I honked the horn.

“Do it a little louder so that it wakes up Whitney.”

Honk!

Whitney screeched.

“That is loud,” I said.

“Do it often,” said Mr. Fields.

“Don’t do it, it irritates me,” said Whitney.

Mr. Fields shook the bag of candy wrappers. “Probability is the topic here,” he said. “What does probability mean, Jaden, in your own words?”

“The possibility of it getting done?”

“The possibility of getting something done,” said Mr. Fields. He wrote a capital P on the board. “That P just stands for ‘probability.’ Last week the big capital P on the board stood for what measurement, Paloma?”

“That if you put some more letters in there it would be my name,” said Paloma.

“Thank you.”

I honked the horn.

“Hey, okay!” said Mr. Fields. “There we go. Paloma, quickly. Eighteen divided by six?”

“Three.”

“Thirty divided by six?”

“Not five,” said Paloma.

“It is a five!” said Mr. Fields. “Twenty-four divided by six?”

“Gahhh!” said Paloma. “Four.”

“Nice guess,” said Mr. Fields, turning. “Bobby, ten divided by five. Don’t be insulted. You’ve just got to know these things.”

“Five! No. Two.”

“Of course it is,” said Mr. Fields. “You’re just messing with us. All right, Mr. Baker. You should probably go and visit Mrs. Christian.”

“Can I do it?” said Whitney, meaning toot the horn.

“I don’t like giving the students control of this,” said Mr. Fields, hugging the horn. “Chaos is sometimes good, but not today.”

I went downstairs to Team Nile, where Mrs. Christian’s seventh-grade science class was in the midst of a cell biology project. She briefed me on it. “They’ve all picked a system, whether it’s a school, or a factory, or a sports team, and they’re trying to figure out, like, what the nucleus would be in the school, or what the nucleus would be on a sports team.” She pointed out several kids who might need help, warning me that some might not want help. I went over to Gabrielle, who was sitting and thinking her thoughts. She had a packet in front of her about parts of the cell. I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I did anyway. “Can I check in?” I said. “What’s your analogy?”

“What?” she said. She had a kind, despondent face.

“What’s your comparison?”

“A farm.”

“Great idea! So the nucleus is the place that everything is directed from? That’s a tough one. What did you come up with?”

She paged through the cell packet. “I couldn’t find anything.”

I pulled up a chair. “What place on the farm is where everything gets made, and is sort of the center of the farm?”

“The barn.”

“The barn, interesting,” I said. “Not the farmhouse, the barn, I see that.”

Gabrielle said nothing. Her packet was filled with words like mitochondria, cytoplasm, ribosomes, and vacuole, and she didn’t know how to pronounce them, or what any of them meant.

“Mitochondria,” I said. “What are those? Those are the squiggly things, right?”

She was silent.

“I don’t know what that would be on a farm. Do you have any rivers, or creeks, or irrigation ditches?”

She looked up at me and smiled slowly, waiting for me to go on to someone else, which I did.

Matthew had chosen a movie theater as his analogy. He’d drawn the plan of a movie theater on a blank piece of paper.

“Great idea!” I said. “Did you come up with that?”

“No,” he said.

“So what would the projection booth be? Hm, interesting.”

He stared at the page, waiting for me to move on. I swiveled and talked to a kid behind me, Cooper. “What’s happening, man? Good stuff?”

He shrugged. “Yeah.” He’d just written a definition for endoplasmic reticulum.

“That’s a word, eh?” I said. “Good god, you sometimes wonder why scientists don’t come up with simpler words. So what are you comparing yours to?”

Cooper looked up at me. “Jail,” he said.

“Nice. So what equals a nucleus in a jail?”

“The warden?” Cooper said.

“Ah,” I said. “Good one. And the endoplasmic reticulum? What does that do? I don’t remember.”

He’d written, Moves stuff around. Made up of complex membranes. “The guards?” he said.

“The guards, yeah,” I said. “They push around those carts. Good choice. This is a pretty interesting assignment.” I waited. Cooper didn’t want me there. I was pretty much poison in this class. “Good luck,” I said, and greeted Dawson.

“I’m doing the Boston Red Sox,” Dawson said.

“I’m doing a grocery store,” said Egan, the boy next to him. “It took me ten minutes to write all this stuff down.”

I asked Egan what the nucleus was in a grocery store.

“The manager, because in a grocery store the manager is in charge.”

“Good point,” I said. “Do the bathrooms at a grocery store count? What would they be equivalent to? Or the cash registers? That’s hard. This is a hard assignment. I kind of like it, though.”

“Yeah, I can’t remember what those things are called that get rid of waste,” Egan said.

“Is it the mitochondria?” I said. “Or is it the endoplasmic reticulum?”

“The endoplasmic reticulum stores proteins,” said Egan. “Maybe it’s the mitochondria. The mitochondria gives energy.”

“I’ve got a question for you,” I said. “What would money be?”

“Money would be the protein,” Egan said. “Because money goes into the store, and the endoplasmic reticulum stores it.”

I said, “Then maybe the endoplasmic reticulum would be the cash register? Or the safe?”

“Yeah,” Egan said, not entirely convinced.

I turned back to Dawson. “So the Red Sox,” I said. “What would be the batting cage?”

“I don’t know,” said Dawson.

“I don’t know either,” I said.

“I think the proteins would be the food stands,” said Dawson.

“I think the ribosomes would be the food stands,” said Booker, who sat next to Egan. “Because ribosomes make protein, and food is protein. Depending on what you have in the food.”

I read Dawson’s definition of the nucleus: holds the genetic information of the cell.

“That’s the coach,” said Dawson. “John Farrell.”

“The man,” I said. “Good luck, dudes.”

I crossed the class to a couple sitting together. “What’s happening here?” I said to Fletcher, who swiped something away on his iPad.

“I’m trying to be stupid is all,” Fletcher said.

“That’s top priority,” I said. “Are you doing one of these comparisons?”

“Huh?” said the girl, Vanessa.

“Are you doing one of these comparisons with the cell?”

“I already did that,” said Fletcher.

“We already finished that,” said Vanessa.

“I compared mine to a school,” said Fletcher.

“Mine was the mall,” said Vanessa.

“I like that,” I said. “So what’s the nucleus of a mall?”

“I don’t remember,” said Vanessa.

“I said mine was the principal,” said Fletcher.

“Because the principal’s office holds the genetic information?” I said.

“He controls the building,” said Vanessa.

“And then what are the bathrooms?”

“Nothing,” said Fletcher.

I sat in a chair on the side of the room for a while, waiting to find out how I could be useful. The class, I was happy to notice, was loud and shouty.

“Getting a little noisy in here,” said Mrs. Christian.

I asked Matthew what he generally bought to eat when he went to the movies.

“I usually get candy and soda,” he said.

“So at a movie theater, what is the ribosome?”

He pointed to the projector in his drawing. “That,” he said. He’d written, In a movie, you press play. A ribosome acts just like a projector.

“Fascinating,” I said. “How did you figure that out?”

“Mrs. Craig helped me.” Mrs. Craig was the ed tech for whom I was substituting.

“Did you do any Golgi bodies?”

Matthew pointed to the ticket counter, which in his drawing corresponded to the Golgi apparatus.

“Holy crap,” I said.

“I like my arrow,” Matthew said. He’d drawn a fancy green arrow.

I was boggled by too many partial analogies. “It kind of scrambles your brain a little bit,” I said.

“Sexual reproduction!” said Zoe loudly.

Back to Gabrielle. She had drawn a barn and some farmers. The farmers were the Golgi bodies in her comparison.

She pointed to vacuole. “I can’t find that one,” she said.

I flipped around in a textbook. “I think the vacuoles are more important in plant cells,” I said. “You’ve got an animal cell. Maybe you can move on.”

She needed to know what corresponded with mitochondria. I showed her a page of the textbook, which said that the mitochondria acted like a digestive system, breaking down nutrients. “So on the farm, what breaks things down? The soil, the insects in the soil? No, let’s see. The tractor?”

“Animals?” said Gabrielle.

“The animals chew the grass and digest it,” I said. “That’s a good one. No comparison is exact.”

“What is that one?” she asked, pointing to the words endoplasmic reticulum.

“I thought you’d never ask,” I said, flipping around in the textbook. “It’s a series of folding membranes in which materials can be processed and moved around inside the cell. What moves things around in a barn? A wheelbarrow?”

“A grain tub?” said Gabrielle.

“A grain tub. Do you know about farms?”

She nodded. She lived on a farm. We kept going. Ribosomes make stuff, I said.

“The cows?” she said.

“Cows make milk,” I said, nodding. Cytoplasm was the next term she needed to analogize. I said, “It’s a gloopy substance that’s all around the cell. What’s all around you on the farm? People breathe it, and animals breathe it, and plants breathe it.”

“Oxygen?”

“Yes, air. Air’s like cytoplasm, isn’t it? What do you have to do now?”

“I have to put it into a Keynote,” Gabrielle said.

“Oh, wow.” I felt despair. The kids were supposed to half learn the definitions of the microscopic components of a cell, then half compare these definitions inexactly to another complex system that existed on a human scale, and then put their garbled comparisons into Keynote slides. And yet some of them were having fun with it. Some actual learning was happening.

“GUYS, START CLEANING UP, PLEASE,” said Mrs. Christian.

As the classes changed over, Waylon, my overmedicated friend, showed up. “Hey, how are you?” I said.

“Not so good,” said Waylon. “I’m having the same problems I had last time.”

I asked him if he was still not sleeping.

“Last night I had a Benadryl,” he said, “so I had a pretty good night’s sleep.”

Had he talked to his parents about cutting back on the Paxil?

“Yeah,” he said. “They put me on Benadryl.”

“They don’t want to cut back on the dose?”

“We did.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “Is it easier to concentrate?”

He nodded.

“It’s great to see you,” I said. “I’m sorry it’s still a problem, but I hope it goes better. Catch you on the flipflop.”

“All right, bye.”

I hotfooted it out to the car to get my day’s schedule, which I’d left there by mistake when I ate a sandwich, and on my way back I saw Shane, my old nemesis from science class, on his knees on the grass, planting some flowers near the school entrance while a teacher looked on, her arms folded.

“We’re putting in a memorial garden for Nelson,” said the teacher. “Nelson was one of my students last year.”

“That was really a sad thing,” I said.

—

IN MR. FIELDS’S MATH CLASS, a new set of students were doing division problems taken from the arithmetic bag, and now there was another ed tech in the room as well, a young man named Mr. J. The kids had more energy than the last group, and Lynda, Katy, and Adam were interrupting each other.

“If you want to go to lunch on time,” Mr. Fields said, “I suggest you be quiet now. If you want to be talking now, they’ll go to lunch, you’ll still be sitting here. Who’s screwing who? Come on, get real, will you?”

After another round of division Mr. Fields brought the horn out and gave it to me. “When Mr. Baker blows the horn, we’ll have to stop what we’re doing and go around again.”

He pulled out his bag of candy wrappers. “The candies have been removed to protect the innocent from the effects of calories.” Again the students counted how many Twix wrappers, how many Snickers wrappers, how many etc. There were thirteen wrappers in all. “What we’re talking about now is a thing called probability. What do you remember about probability?”

“It’s everything added up,” said Adam.

Mr. Fields asked Katy what she remembered about probability.

“It sounds like probably.”

“And what does probably mean, in your world?” asked Mr. Fields.

“Yes, no, maybe,” said Katy.

Adam said that probability was that maybe a car was going to break down.

“It’s the chance that something’s going to happen,” Mr. Fields said. He wrote a capital P on the board, followed by a blank set of parentheses. “Last week, Adam, when we were doing area and perimeter, what did the capital P mean at that time?”

“Perimeter,” said Adam.

“Thank you very much.”

“Mr. Fields?” said Lynda. “You should write ‘Pb.’”

“I’m not going to write ‘Pb,’” Mr. Fields said, “because it’s always written P parentheses, and that would confuse you.” He pointed at me. “What do you say there, Mr. Baker?”

I booped the horn once and the ed tech, Mr. J., called out division problems. Thirty divided by five. Ten divided by five. Twenty-five divided by five. Three divided by six. The class got most of them right.

Then Lynda was asked to close her eyes and decide which candy wrapper she wanted to pull from the bag. “Twix,” she said.

“So you’ve got two chances out of thirteen,” said Mr. Fields. “The probability, out of that thirteen, in one pick, is two out of the thirteen. Mr. Baker, can I ask you to come over here and be the official eye-watcher on Lynda, and make sure she is not peeking?”

“I trust her,” I said.

Lynda reached in, eyes closed, and pulled out a Twix wrapper.

“Dang it!” said Mr. Fields.

“You must know the feel of a Twix wrapper, texturally,” said Mr. J.

“I hate it when I have to pay off a debt,” said Mr. Fields. He arranged a display of mints for her to pick from. “Just so you know, I haven’t washed my hands in a week or two.” Lynda took a mint. “Give the winner a hand.”

“Boo,” said Adam.

Adam reached in, hoping for an M&M wrapper, of which there were two. “Mr. Baker’s got his eyes on your eyes,” said Mr. Fields. “Adam knows he’s a cheat.”

Adam tried to sneak a peek.

“No, no, no, no,” said Mr. Fields.

“Just look toward me,” I said.

Adam pulled out an M&M wrapper. “I got it!” he said.

“He also only had two chances out of thirteen,” said Mr. Fields.

After several more reachings in, it was time for lunch, and he passed out more mints. “When you come back, we’re going to play a little game that has to do with flipping dimes.”

The class was filled with the sound of chewing. “What you guys don’t need is sugar,” said Mr. J.

“I NEED SUGAR,” said Adam.

To get out the door, each student had to do more division. “You have to get at least two of these right,” said Mr. Fields. “Ten divided by five!”

“Ten divided by five is… five,” said Adam.

Mr. Fields shook his head. “Twenty-five divided by five?”

“Five!”

“That’s rolling!”

“I don’t understand why they didn’t teach them the times tables,” said Mr. J. to me, in an undertone, while the class called out wrong answers at the door. “They completely took the rigorous memorization out of it. They do this lattice stuff, have you seen that? It’s insane. It’s the most classic case of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” He left.

“Forty divided by five is?” said Mr. Fields to Lynda.

“Nine.”

“Try that again.”

“Eight.”

“Thank you very much. Thirty divided by six?”

“Two.”

“Try this one. You’ve got to get it right to get out of the door. Twelve divided by six.”

She didn’t know.

“How about this one? Forty-five divided by five?”

“Nine!”

“There you go,” said Mr. Fields. “You’re out the door, bye-bye.”

When everyone was gone, I said, “You really make it fun.”

“Next class I won’t be that good,” Mr. Fields said. “I’ll be tired.”

I told him I’d just been talking to Mr. J. about the times tables. “He was saying that kids didn’t learn their times tables in elementary school. Which does seem to be true. But I’ve been substituting in the elementary schools, and they’re much better at it now. They can really spit it out.”

“Good,” Mr. Fields said. “Otherwise they get up here and, come on, it takes them five seconds to maybe pull it out?” He gathered up his candy wrappers. “And my next class will be even slower.” He seemed wiped out.

In the teachers’ lounge, two teachers were comparing notes. “So he gets up and throws his essay in the trash,” said one of them. I ate an apple and, when it was time, went to the cafeteria to do lunch duty. Another substitute, an old-timer, had a pocket full of lemon drops. That was his secret to getting kids to volunteer as table-washers, he said: “I bribe them with candy.”

One more class to go: seventh-grade biology with Mrs. Painter in Team Orinoco. “Yesterday you finished diagramming mitosis and meiosis, and comparing and contrasting the two,” Mrs. Painter said to the class. She sounded flat-voiced and tired. “That should be done by now. If it’s not done, you need to do it at home, or before you start your capacity matrix. Today, as a whole class, we’re going to watch a video on how plants reproduce. We’re going to talk about the video. Afterward, I’m going to give you your last capacity matrix. It has every assignment on it that you’ll have to do from now until the last week of school.”

Howard, a little jumpy kid, raised his hand. “Do we work through the last week of school?”

“If we’re not done,” said Mrs. Painter.

“What if everything’s done, then what?” asked Whitney.

“We’ll deal with that when we get there — if we get there,” said Mrs. Painter. She reviewed asexual and sexual reproduction. “How many parent cells are in mitosis?”

One!

“How many parent cells are in meiosis?”

Two!

She called us to the front of the room and turned on the YouTube movie. “Today’s topic is the exciting process of plant reproduction in angiosperms,” said an animated amoeboid female-voiced blob named Pinky. “A fruit develops from the ovary of a plant, which doesn’t exactly sound appetizing. Pumpkins, green beans, tomatoes, squash — these all developed from the ovary of a flowering plant.”

Mrs. Painter stopped the video. “Who knew plants had ovaries? Raise your hand.”

“What are ovaries?” said Whitney.

“Female baby-making parts,” said Maureen.

“Oh, I know all about that,” said Whitney.

The video resumed — and Pinky began bombing us with vocabulary. We heard about stamens, filaments, anthers, and pollen, which was the sperm of the plant. Then the female parts: the pistil, the stigma, the style, and the ovary. Next came the sepals and physical pollination, effected by a bee. More words from Pinky followed at a brisk trot: Pollen grains held two kinds of cells, a tube cell and a generative cell. The tube cell grew down into the tube nucleus, and the generative cell traveled down the tube cell into the ovary, where it divided into two sperm cells, both of which sought out a component of the ovary called an ovule. Each ovule had an egg cell and two polar nuclei. One sperm cell fertilized the egg cell, while the other sperm cell joined up with the two polar nuclei to form a triploid cell that would develop into the endosperm, in a process called double fertilization. Pinky’s cheery voice made me sleepy, and by the time we got to the two polar nuclei my head started to droop. I think Mrs. Painter saw me dozing off, and I felt bad about that.

“Okay, this is what we’re going to do,” said Mrs. Painter. I straightened up in my chair. “Before you work on your Keynote, I’m going to give you a sticky note and have you write one thing you learned about plant reproduction, and one question that you have. Based on what you guys put down, I’m going to make a mini-lesson for tomorrow, so we can get the missing parts. Back to your seats.”

Paloma and Bobby, from Mr. Fields’s class, sat at a table near me by the windows. I waved at them. “What’s up back here?” I said.

“NOW YOU ARE TRANSITIONING BACK TO YOUR TABLES,” said Mrs. Painter. “THIS IS A REDIRECT I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO BE MAKING.”

She passed out sticky notes. Paloma said something softly to me I didn’t hear.

“I’m what?”

“You’re the quietest teacher I’ve ever known,” Paloma said.

“Oh, no, I’m very talkative,” I whispered, “it’s just that when I’m an ed tech I don’t like to disrupt the class. When I’m actually a teacher up there I flail around and talk loudly.”

“What do you teach?” asked Bobby.

“Anything they want me to,” I said.

“You’re like a go-to?” Bobby said.

“I’m a sub, so science, English, whatever.”

“That’s what my mom was,” Paloma said. “Now she’s studying to be a nurse.”

“How’s it going for her?” I asked.

“Pretty good. She’s in the middle of classes.”

Bobby said, “My mom was thinking of going back to college. Then she found out that the people in the program who’d graduated couldn’t get a job anywhere. So she’s not.”

I said, “A lot of people are starting to think that it costs too much to go to college. There’s a lot you can do without it.”

“I wanted to go to college to be a psychologist,” said Bobby. “Then I thought about that, and now I want to be a firefighter. I’m fourteen, and I can start now.”

“At fourteen you can be a firefighter?” I said.

“Well, you can be a junior firefighter. Not a Grade A real firefighter, but they train you to be a firefighter.”

“I’M READY WHEN YOU ARE,” said Mrs. Painter. “HOLD ON TO YOUR STICKY NOTES. I’m going to collect them after we go over our matrix. On your capacity matrix, you need to put your name on it, and date started, which would be today. So six four twenty-fourteen. This is what you’re going to be working on from now to the last day of school. All of the assignments that you have for the rest of the year are right on this paper, front side, back side.”

I studied the capacity matrix, which was a sideways chart filled with boxes. Down the left side were learning targets and “Baby Steps,” and a box that said Knows key terms. To the right were levels of achievement — Emerging, Partially Proficient, Proficient, and Advanced — and lists of activities: BrainPOPs, quizzes, and projects, including an interesting-sounding “Build a Beast Project.” On the far right were boxes where Mrs. Painter could sign to show that each learning target and Baby Step had been successfully completed. To score a 4, the highest possible score, a student had to demonstrate a higher order of thinking from Marzano’s Taxonomy—Robert Marzano being the Colorado-based educational consultant who was the source of the neo-Aristotelian learning poster that was up in almost every classroom.

“Since you guys are losing your iPads next week,” Mrs. Painter went on, “I am going to give you the time today to finish your BrainPOPs and the vocab. I’m going to save the mini-lesson that we were going to do today until Monday. WHAT ARE OUR LAST TWO LEARNING TARGETS? Someone raise your hand and read one of them. Maddy. Whitney, find your paper and point to them. Learning target one and learning target two. Understands how variations in the behavior and traits of an offspring may permit some of them to survive a changing environment.”

“Wha?” said a voice.

“What does that mean?” said Mrs. Painter. “What are we asking, what do we need to know? Alton?”

“Like possible adaptions, physically and mentally, adaptions to get along with their surroundings and circumstances.”

“Exactly. Did you hear that, Whitney?”

“Yes,” said Whitney.

“What did he say?”

Whitney said nothing.

Mrs. Painter turned to Alton. “Repeat it, because you said it very well.”

“Like mental and physical adaptions to be able to cope with surroundings and circumstances.”

“Exactly. So we’re looking at how animals or plants have adapted to allow them to be able to survive in a changing environment. The next learning target is Understands the physical and behavioral features of plants and animals that help them live in different environments. So what do you think we’re going to look at there? What do you know about biomes, different biomes? What were you going to say, Anne?”

“I was going to say it’s about what an invasive species needs to invade a new space.”

“Yes, you can talk about what an invasive species needs in order to be invasive. Or what else, Roy?”

“It’s how the animal or plant adapts to the environment, such as a woolly mammoth had a fur coat to survive in the Arctic.”

“Right, we talked about a polar bear versus a black bear. We talked about why you might not find a black bear in a polar region, and then we talked about the characteristics of a polar bear and of a black bear, and why they have those physical traits for their environment. For the ‘I Will Survive’ activity, we’re going to talk a lot more about that sort of thing. So basically we’re going to be talking about adap — adaption, and physical and behavioral features that allow plants and animals to survive in a particular environment. This will be your last set of key terms for the whole year. Are you excited?”

“Woo-hoo,” said a boy.

“IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR CELL KEY TERMS, you need to make sure you do that. IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR MITOSIS/MEIOSIS DIAGRAM, you need to do that. IF YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED YOUR COMPARE AND CONTRAST, you need to do that. Don’t worry about plant reproduction, because we’re covering that as a mini-lesson. Today you should be at your new key terms, starting them or finishing them, and then moving on to your BrainPOPs. Remember, you’re not going to be having your iPads after next Tuesday, so you need to be working hard so you can get those BrainPOPs done. Otherwise you’re going to have hard copies of those quizzes.”

“Uh-oh,” said Howard.

“Yeah, not fun,” said Mrs. Painter. She pointed to the whiteboard. “Your BrainPOP list is right here. It tells you exactly what to do. We’ll go over the matrix further tomorrow. When you’re done with them—”

The class began to talk and boisterize.

“ALL EYES ON ME FOR ONE SECOND. If you finish a task on your matrix, I will need the evidence of it and your matrix. So if you finish your key terms, bring me your key terms and evidence, so I can sign off. If I sign off on it, that means you got maximum points. I’m not going to write the grade on your actual assignment. I’m going to collect these at the end of the class and then put it on Educate, so it will be right there.”

I watched the class resignedly dig through backpacks and pull out iPads and find pencils and get to work. Key terms: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase, identical daughter cells, heterozygous, and homozygous.

“It just goes on, doesn’t it?” I said. “It just keeps going on.”

“Long, long, long, long, long day,” said Paloma.

Bobby showed me a drawing he’d made of a man in a camouflage outfit, with a gas mask.

“Are you going to be here tomorrow?” said Paloma.

“No, I’m sorry to say, because I like this school,” I said.

“You don’t seem like someone who’d teach at Lasswell High School,” she said.

“How do you know that?” I said.

“I don’t,” she said.

I said, “Have you heard bad things about Lasswell? I’ve taught there. It’s not that bad. It’s not that great, but it’s not that bad.”

“One of my brothers goes there,” Paloma said. “All the teachers there, except for two teachers, all of them hate him. He got suspended for four days because he broke two rulers.”

I misheard. “What rules did he break?”

“They were metal, and he broke them and bent them into a duck. They thought he was making a gun, so they sent him to the office.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“I know, right? It was this round-bellied thing, and the other ruler went up like wings. He was making a duck.”

Bobby paged through his notebook of drawings for me to see. “Beautiful,” I said. “So you’ve got this all done, the meiosis and mitosis aspect of life?”

“Uh,” said Bobby.

I leaned toward a third kid, Cedric, who was absorbed in fitting a metal spring to the top of his pencil. “How’s it going?” I said.

“Terribly good,” he said.

I looked at his mitosis and meiosis sheet, which was half done. “You’re on it,” I said. “All these vocab words.”

Mrs. Painter caught my eye and pointed toward a quiet kid with a peach-fuzz mustache named Melvyn, who needed help. Melvyn was comparing and contrasting mitosis and meiosis. He had written sexual and asexual in the correct boxes.

Suddenly there was a tiny incident. “I’m going to walk out of this classroom,” said Howard. “Can Asa help me?”

“Howard, you don’t need help,” said Asa.

“I’m stupid,” said Howard.

“Howard, last call,” said Mrs. Painter.

“I need help, because I’m stupid,” said Howard.

“Lazy?” said Mrs. Painter.

“No, I’m stupid. I am stupid.”

“Well, I’ll help you,” said Mrs. Painter, “but you do not need help.”

Meanwhile I found a page in a textbook that gave the steps of mitosis. “It’s kind of a dance,” I said. “Have you ever seen a movie of it?”

Melvyn shook his head.

“You see the chromosomes waggling around, like square dancers, and they go off on two sides of the cell. And then the cell pinches off, and boom. Here’s how they explain it. They use fancy vocabulary, but basically, the chromatids move to opposite ends of the cell, and then they form a whole new nucleus, and then it starts to pinch, like a balloon with a string tightened around it, and then they’re divided, by gumbo. And off they go.”

Melvyn needed to write down one more fact about mitosis. I read some more of the textbook. “Mitosis is happening all the time in your body, right?” I said.

“Mhm,” said Melvyn.

“Your cells get old and they die and you’ve got to get more cells.” I read from the textbook: “Cell division allows growth and replaces worn out or damaged cells. It’s the basic way you keep fresh. It’s different than meiosis. With meiosis, you get an egg and a sperm and you end up with a whole new baby. You’re not replacing anything, you’re starting from scratch.” Oh, these words! Who were the cruel authors of incertitude who came up with such similar-sounding, hard-to-remember, Greek-rooted terms for processes that, in humans at least, had such different aims and frequencies of occurrence? Mitosis happens hundreds of billions of times a day, throughout our bodies; meiosis happens only in ovaries and testicles. Melvyn wrote Replaces dead cells.

Once Melvyn had written the ways in which mitosis and meiosis were different from each other, he then was supposed to list the ways they were similar. Finally he had to make a Venn diagram, referring to both lists. He had trouble keeping the two words distinct in his mind, and my increasingly clumsy attempts to explain just confused him. Finally he went off to get help from Mrs. Painter.

“Crap, I better do the BrainPOP,” said Paloma.

I said, “You better do that BrainPOP, because if you don’t do that BrainPOP—”

“There won’t be any BrainPOP left,” she said.

“Paloma, are you done?” called Mrs. Painter from across the room.

“Yep!” said Paloma. Then, in an undertone, “Nope.”

“Are you on the first one or the second one?” asked Bobby, who was drawing the hand of his cartoon soldier.

“The second one.” Paloma began playing part of a BrainPOP on the life cycle of the cell, but she forgot to plug in her earbuds. The BrainPOP narrator’s voice filled the room: “Prior to mitosis or meiosis—” She turned the volume down.

“Whee!” said a girl.

Bobby asked Paloma the answer to a question about the life cycle of the cell.

“They live, and die,” said Paloma.

“There’s a funny song by the Cruisers, I think,” Bobby whispered. He whisper-sang, “‘Life sucks, and then you die.’”

“That’s the worst song ever,” said Paloma.

“It’s kind of depressing,” I said.

“It’s not a dark song, it’s a funny song!” said Bobby. (It’s by the Fools.)

“Mrs. Painter,” said a smart kid. “On the BrainPOP, I just finished doing natural selection and evolution, but whenever I hit save it always—”

“I know,” said Mrs. Painter. “That happened to Eva, too. Just screenshot it. Not a big deal. You don’t have to redo it, I trust you.” She checked the clock. “THREE MINUTES, so if you’re working on BrainPOP, make sure you either pause where you are, or don’t start a new quiz if you haven’t.”

I watched the class begin its end-of-class routine. This is what they did five or so times a day: snatches of work saved on BrainPOP or IXL or somewhere on the network, papers handed in for grades or signatures or stuffed away, pencils stowed or abandoned, iPads zipped, backpacks shouldered, hair floofed, shirts pulled down in back where they’d ridden up. And at the same time, small heaps of key terms began to smolder and self-immolate in their minds.

“ALL RIGHT, THIS IS WHAT I NEED FROM YOU,” said Mrs. Painter. “I need you to close your iPad. Leave on your desk your evidence, if you have any, and your capacity matrix. I’m coming around. If I need to sign off on an area, you need to let me know. HOLD ON TO YOUR STICKY NOTES, AND WRITE YOUR INDIVIDUAL SOP ON THE BOTTOM.”

“Obviously, we’re all stupid,” said Paloma.

“We’re not stupid,” said Bobby. “Just under-intelligent.”

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” I said. “Seems like you’ve got a lot on the ball to me.”

Mrs. Painter collected Paloma’s capacity matrix. When she was gone, Paloma showed me two anime drawings she’d made in colored pencil — both of short-haired youths in jumpsuits with multicolored hair. “This one is a boy, but he totally looks like a girl,” she said.

“Wow,” I said, “these are nice. When did you do these?”

“This one I did last night, and this one I did two nights ago.”

I said how good they were — they were good. “I love the hair.”

The principal’s voice came over the PA system. “Your attention, please, for the end-of-day announcements.” He began talking about the girls’ soccer team.

“VOICES OFF,” said Mrs. Painter, but everyone kept talking.

“Don’t let them break your spirit,” I said to Paloma, quietly.

“No,” said Paloma. “I kind of break my own spirit sometimes. I stopped drawing once my dad died. That was a year ago.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“I just got back into it,” she said.

“Attention, girls’ lacrosse players,” said the principal, “practice has been canceled today. Attention, students, we will be collecting iPads next Monday and Tuesday. Please bring in all the equipment that was issued to you at the beginning of the school year.” Sports physicals for next year were available for free on June 17 with the school nurse, he said. “And that’s going to conclude the announcements for this afternoon. Have a great evening, everybody.”

“Thanks for your help,” said Mrs. Painter, holding a handful of sticky notes.

“It’s a pleasure,” I said. To Paloma I said, “Good luck with your art.”

“Bye,” she said.

On the way out I ran into the potter from February’s substitute training class. She’d done some time at Hackett Elementary and at the high school; now she was a long-term sub at the middle school, teaching math.

“Lordy,” I said.

“It’s easy,” she said.

“Oh, it’s a piece of cake,” I said. “I’m glad you’re on the job.”

“You, too.”

I sighed and unlocked my car — all set with Day Twenty-six.