Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY TWENTY-SEVEN. Tuesday, June 10, 2014

WALLINGFORD ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, THIRD GRADE

THAT’S JUST THE WAY SCHOOL IS

I WAS SITTING in Mrs. Compton’s third-grade class at Wallingford Elementary at eight-thirty in the morning when Mrs. Hulbert, the teacher next door, came by to let me know that the school was going to be having a lockdown drill that morning in the cafeteria, just after snack time.

I had a substitute ed tech in the class, Ms. Lamarche. “This class can be pretty chatty,” she warned me.

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“My hair used to be long,” said a boy named Andrew, rubbing his head. “Yesterday I got a haircut.”

“It looks good,” I said. “Summer’s here.”

“I’ve been in this room quite a bit,” Ms. Lamarche said, “so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.” When more kids began arriving, she took charge of the lunch count. “MAKE SURE YOU GUYS MAKE YOUR LUNCH COUNT ON THE BOARD, NOT ON THE IPADS, OKAY? And Marshall, we’ll be watching you today.”

Mrs. Compton’s sub plans said that a student, Colleen, had selective mutism and spoke to nobody. “If it is necessary for her to respond to you, have her use a whiteboard.” I was supposed to write, and I did write, the following things on the board:

— Make your lunch choice

— Hand in library books

— Finish Lulu packet

— Check Showbie Morning Business for 5 worksheets!

— Read on your Kindle if finished

Most kids chose “brunch for lunch”—French toast sticks with syrup, a sausage patty, a hash brown patty, and oven-baked beans. Andrew went around letting his classmates feel his shorn head. “Everyone on the bus made fun of me,” he said.

Mrs. Compton was a great believer in the digital future — so much so that she had the children learning penmanship not with pencils or pens in hand, but with iPads flat on desks: the kids had to trace, with unsteady fingertips, over the dotted image of cursive letters on their screens. That morning they were learning to handwrite the letters p and g on their iPads. Book reading happened on Kindles, and Mrs. Compton was a follower of the CAFE method of reading — Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanded vocabulary — which she itemized in a wall chart with a green polka-dot background. Comprehension was especially taxing and meta-cognitive: “I make and confirm my predictions. I check for understanding. I determine the author’s purpose. I retell the story. I find cause-and-effect relationships. I distinguish between fact, opinion, and propaganda. I make connections text-to-text and text-to-self.” Below the green polka dots was a display of reading comprehension strategies that Mrs. Compton had found somewhere online, each personified by a cartoon animal. Digger the Dog determined important ideas. Kit-Kat Connector activated background knowledge. Jabber the Reteller, a toucan, synthesized and retold. Questioning Owl asked questions before, during, and after reading. Iggy the Inferring Iguana made inferences and predictions. Another wall poster offered writing advice: “Choose a strong idea. A strong idea is clear and exact. Narrow down general topics. Each paragraph should have a topic sentence. It will tell the reader what the paragraph is mainly about.” There was a tip sheet on how to stretch a sentence:

Who? My cute puppy.

What? My cute puppy curls up.

Where? My cute puppy curls up on the rug.

When? My cute puppy curls up on the rug each night.

Why? My cute puppy curls up on the rug each night to chew his bone.

Math required a math vocabulary wall chart, which included factor, product, median, mean, mode, and range—the last four defined with the help of a poem:

Hey diddle, diddle,

The median’s the middle;

You add and divide for the mean.

The mode is the one that appears the most,

And the range is the difference between.

The word average, one of the few math words employed in everyday speech, had apparently been scrubbed from the arithmetical lexicon.

Near the windows and the large, loud turbo-fan — which I kept turning off, because it was loud, and Ms. Lamarche kept turning back on, because the room was hot — there was another wall chart for common problems. “I have to go to the bathroom.” “I have to go to the bathroom, but somebody is already out and it’s an emergency.” “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.” “I don’t know what this word is.” “I don’t know what the directions are or mean.” “I finished my Math Menu and already signed up to take the assessment, now what?” “I finished my Literacy Menu and already signed up to take the assessment — now what?” No answers or solutions were given: instead, there were square barcodes that children could scan with their iPads using a scanner app in order to summon an official, digitally delivered response.

Marshall, in a red T-shirt and black basketball shorts, was the difficult kid, and Ms. Lamarche bossed him around and shouted at the class to focus; I tried to be Zen-like about her fussing because she knew the class well and wanted to be in charge. After fifteen minutes of cursive iPad practice and arithmetic and miscellaneous Showbie Morning Business — Showbie is a “paperless classroom” iPad app — we went to Care Time in the cafeteria to recite the school rules and pledge the pledge. When we had all reassembled in class, I talked about why cursive had been invented, and then I timed them, to see if they wrote five letter Ps in a row faster when they printed or when they wrote in script. I told them to have a close look at the beautiful cursive General Mills G on the Cheerios box.

We lined up to go to the library to hear the librarian, a gravel-voiced gent named Mr. Merlier, read from Whistle in the Graveyard, a book of ghost stories. “This is a free time for you,” said the sub plans. I spent it buying an ebook of Lulu and the Brontosaurus—the class was in the middle of reading it on their Kindles — and chanting, “‘Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the pit from pole to pole.’”

In the library at 10:20 a.m., Mr. Merlier was finishing a story about a pirate who swore an oath to guard some buried treasure in Bonavista Bay, on the coast of Newfoundland. “You know pirates,” Mr. Merlier said. “An oath like that is a blood oath.”

“Can you show us the picture?” said Philip.

“You’re looking at the only picture there is,” he said.

“There is another picture!” said Philip.

“Where are you talking about?”

Philip paged through and found a picture of a pirate’s head.

“Please have a seat,” said Mr. Merlier. “You watch too much television and too much video, obviously. You need a picture for everything. Try your imaginations. Had you been born in the time when there was just radio, maybe your imaginations would be stronger. You need to work on that. Be quiet.” He read, “THEY LEFT ONE MAN — they left one man on the beach who had taken a solemn oath never to leave the treasure unguarded.”

The pirate band never returned, Mr. Merlier continued. Years went by, and the treasure-guarding pirate grew old and died and became a ghost, who still haunts Bonavista Bay. Once some men tried to dig for the treasure, but they were so terrified they went mad. Nowadays, though, Mr. Merlier said, the ghost is tired of his guard duty. One night, not so long ago, the ghost stopped a fisherman and told him to return alone at midnight and drip some blood on the ground; if he did, he would possess the treasure. The blood could be from a chicken, the ghost said, or perhaps from a cut in the fisherman’s wrist. The fisherman was terrified and ran away. “Everybody knows that the ghost is honor-bound,” Mr. Merlier read. “He took an oath to scare off people, even though he really wants somebody brave enough to come along and dig up the treasure. OKAY, GUYS, I want to wish you a good summer.”

“That book is awesome,” said Rianna.

Cormac wanted to know where, exactly, the treasure was.

“We don’t know the specifics,” said Mr. Merlier, “but it’s on Bonavista Bay. You need to find out where Newfoundland is first. And then you’ll need to find the bay. And then you’ll need to do a little digging, to find out where from the locals, maybe send a letter or two, or an email.”

We chuffed back to class. Because of the lockdown drill, snack had to happen quickly.

“SHHHHH!” said Demi.

“Whoa, that was a power shush,” I said.

Ms. Lamarche said, “All right, everyone, listen! WE HAVE A FIVE-MINUTE SNACK. SO EAT UP QUICKLY, PLEASE.”

“Why do we only have five minutes?” asked Sabrina. She’d brought out a bag of Keebler Bug Bites — graham cracker cookies in the shape of dragonflies, caterpillars, and ladybugs.

I told them we had to practice a lockdown soon. “CHOW DOWN,” I said. “Snack it up.”

In a back corner of the room, Marshall, Devin, and Jonas were crouched over their juice boxes.

“This is the man cave,” said Jonas. Colleen walked over.

“Get out of the man cave,” said Marshall to Colleen.

“No, I didn’t hear that,” I said. “You say, Welcome to the man cave. Come on in.”

“Hah hah hah, you can’t come in,” said Marshall.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“It’s called a man cave,” said Devin.

“It can be a man cave that has guests,” I said.

“We are the guests,” said Jonas.

I asked if there was a woman cave. Evidently there was. I took a bite of a sandwich.

“LET’S FINISH UP OUR SNACKS!” called Ms. Lamarche.

“Stop chewing,” I said. “Just keep it in your mouth. No, finish chewing. We’re going to get ready for the lockdown procedure.”

“What lockdown procedure?” said Imogen, eating a Fruit Roll-Up.

Mrs. Hulbert came to the door. “MRS. COMPTON’S CLASS. We should be lining up, putting our snacks away. We’re going to be practicing in the cafeteria, and then outside at recess.”

I said, “You’ve got to be focused, thoughtful—”

Ms. Lamarche blasted over me: “YOU GUYS, I WANT TO SEE A LINE, PLEASE.”

“Mr. Baker,” said Porter. “Devin and Marshall are sharing their food.”

“I think your name is funny,” said Jonas.

“I’M GOING TO START MY TIMER,” said Ms. Lamarche. “WHATEVER IT TAKES YOU GUYS TO LINE UP AND BE QUIET IS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO DURING RECESS. Caroline! I WANT A STRAIGHT, QUIET LINE, PLEASE. YOU GUYS KNOW THE RULES.” She roared so loudly this time she made herself cough.

The cafeteria was three-quarters full and even louder than during lunch. Mrs. Shorter, one of the teachers, shouted the crowd down. “BOYS AND GIRLS. IF WE HAVE A LOCKDOWN IN THE CAFETERIA, WE ALL NEED TO GO INTO THE KITCHEN. In the kitchen there are places that we go. We have the office, which is the first room. We have the storage closet, which has food in it, the second room. We have the back room. And we have the chemical room. Also, we have the refrigerator, the walk-in cooler. Your hands cannot touch anything in any of those rooms!” The day before, Mrs. Shorter said, when they’d done a similar drill, there were a couple of issues. It got crowded in some of the rooms, especially in the chemical room, and it was impossible to close the door. Also, there might not be an adult in the room with you. “You need to be responsible for NO TALKING in that room. YOU ARE NOT LOOKING FOR YOUR FRIENDS. YOU ARE NOT CHOOSING THE ROOM YOU GO INTO. You’re going to a space as a space! IF YOU WALK INTO THE REFRIGERATOR, yes, it’s going to be cold, but you will not freeze. In the refrigerator, there’s a second door. That’s the freezer. We’re not going into the freezer.”

“We will freeze!” said a boy.

“No, we will not,” said Mrs. Shorter. “Yesterday, our best time was a minute and ten seconds. Our goal is to somehow get it under a minute. Remember, your first job is to get yourself to a safe place. Okay! PLEASE SECURE THE BUILDING!”

A hundred children pushed and shuffled as quickly as they could into the kitchen and found a space to stand in the cooler, the chemical room, the storage room, the back room, or the office. All five doors were shut.

“We’re still not getting through this doorway fast enough,” said Mrs. Shorter.

Everyone flushed back out to the cafeteria. “I smell hotdogs,” said Devin.

Mrs. Shorter gave some pointers about moving deeper into the kitchen faster, being silent, and not holding hands. “We also noticed room hopping,” she said. “If you’re in a room, it’s not who you’re with, it’s the fact that you’ve gotten yourself to a safe place. Remember, this is for your safety! Okay, PLEASE SECURE THE BUILDING!”

The second trial did not begin well and Mrs. Shorter stopped it partway through. “That was horrendous,” she said. She started them again. I timed them on my phone. One minute, thirteen seconds.

“Nice job, guys,” I said.

“You’re tall,” said a boy.

We went outside to practice another lockdown on the playground. Wayne brought along the red emergency bag, which held a key and a whistle and a walkie-talkie.

Mr. Stowe, the teacher who’d won a spa ticket, was master of ceremonies for this drill. He wasn’t a shouter; I liked him right away. “Three loud whistle-blows tells you secure the building,” he said to the group. “When you hear the three whistles, it is your job, as quickly as you can, to rush behind the basketball hoop and down to the trail. It’s kind of muddy, so our feet might get a little dirty, but that’s okay. We are going to walk down the trail. If it were a real emergency—”

“You would run,” said Rianna.

“You would be going as quickly as you can, and you would continue on that trail, all the way to the center of Wallingford to make sure that help was on the way. Today, we are just going to walk probably fifty yards or so down the trail. It needs to be silent. Right now you’re just going to be playing.”

The kids sprinted off to play.

“Do you want to be in charge of the whistle?” Mr. Stowe asked me.

“No, I don’t want to be in charge of the whistle!” I said.

Mr. Stowe inspected the whistle dubiously. “Lisa was the one who used it yesterday, and now she’s out today. Hm.” He wiped the whistle off thoroughly with a shirttail and blew it three times.

The children racewalked down a narrow trail through woods. Marshall and his confederates shot off at top speed. Mr. Stowe yelled and I tongue-whistled to call them back.

“Oh my gosh, look how far they ran,” said Myra.

We walked back to the building and lined up.

“I was running like never before,” said Clayton, who was winded and hot.

When my class had lined up, I said, “Excellent emergency management training activities. Nice going.”

“I ran all the way down the trail,” said Marshall.

Mr. Stowe reviewed the drill — what went well, what didn’t go well. Everyone had moved quickly, and hadn’t tried to stick with their friends. “In a real emergency, continuing to run like that is the best thing you can do. For today, I would say that some of you went a bit farther than fifty yards. And we could have been a little bit more quiet. I know it’s exciting, we’re running off into the woods, but we need to be as quiet as we can.”

“We went like seventy yards,” said Cecil, back in class.

“We went like seventy thousand yards,” said Marshall.

“We went like ninety yards,” said Cormac.

“EVERYBODY SIT IN THEIR SEATS, PLEASE,” said Ms. Lamarche.

Each kid had a Math Menu on his or her iPad and was supposed to do what it said for forty minutes. Every time a student tapped in the correct answer, the iPad chirped like a smoke detector with a low battery. I went around asking what nine times seven was. Half knew, half guessed or looked it up on the matrix taped to their desks. The sub plans said they were supposed to be working quietly, so I bellowed, “EVERYBODY BE QUIET, RIGHT NOW. You simply cannot concentrate if everybody’s talking this loudly.”

The intercom came on. “Is Imogen Reynolds there today?”

Yes! said the class.

“Okay, thank you.”

Imogen had a bad cough and went to the nurse. Ms. Lamarche turned the fan on — gosh, it was loud. Wayne wanted help with a word problem: The amazing upside-down carnival is coming to town, and they need help filling out their brochure. Can you fill in the missing information? He had to find the perimeter of the roller coaster and several other rides in a chart, but he’d forgotten what perimeter was. We worked out the answer, which was eighteen feet. Why was the roller coaster so small? Why was a third-grader doing perimeter problems on his iPad when he still hadn’t mastered addition or subtraction, or his times tables?

“What’s nine times seven?” I asked Cecil.

“I’m past my nines, I don’t remember them that good.”

“For today, just remember that one. What’s nine times seven?”

“Sixty-three,” he said.

Every time I helped somebody with some higher-level problem, I asked him or her what nine times seven was. Some couldn’t learn it, some could. “Burn it into your brain,” I said. It didn’t matter, except in school.

“Burn it, burn it, burn it,” said Jonas.

“My brain’s going to be illegal!” said Clayton.

A few kids were doing clock problems, but most were struggling with perimeter measurement. Demi showed me her screen: The perimeter of a square family room is 36. How long is each side? After five minutes of coaching and drawing pictures and counting out wooden blocks, she got the answer. It was obviously too hard for her. Because so much happened on iPad screens, the class was out of the habit of using scrap paper to draw shapes and lengths.

“Mr. Baker, I don’t get it,” said Elijah. “The perimeter of a square piece of tissue paper is one hundred twenty centimeters. How long is each side?” In order to answer the question, Elijah had to remember that a square was made up of four equal sides, and then, after sketching the square, he had to construct a proto-algebraic equation in his head:

+ + + equals 120 centimeters

This expression, he had then to understand, was the same as

times 4 equals 120 centimeters

Then he had to remember how to divide 120 by 4, which relied on his knowing that 12 divided by 4 is 3. His iPad finally chirped with the right answer, but Elijah, I’m sorry to say, was lost.

I swerved back to tutor Wayne, who’d been hit with an even harder problem: The perimeter of an air hockey table is 26 feet. It’s four feet wide. How long is it? After five minutes of drawing pictures and thinking about the nature of rectangles, Wayne got the answer, and his iPad chirped. He sat back, smiling and relieved. Along the way he’d tried to multiply 26 by 4, and he’d insisted that half of 18 was 8. Perimeter problems could wait. The quick, cute iPad lessons were luring these third-graders out to sea in little rowboats and leaving them there to sink.

Many intelligent, successful grownups, I happen to know, never memorized their times tables. Life doesn’t need you to know them — but middle school does, and high school does. Otherwise you end up in special ed classes playing Fast Math bowling games or in Mr. Fields’s room, guessing quotients whenever a substitute teacher honks a horn. I looked up at the class. “ALL RIGHT, IT’S GETTING A LITTLE NOISY, MY FRIENDS,” I said. “WHAT IS NINE TIMES SEVEN?”

SIXTY-THREE.

“Good.”

Imogen came back from the nurse with a note. “Imogen has wheezing in lungs. Called home and left message. She states she feels better — please send her back with any difficulty breathing. Marianne (nurse).”

“I have allergies and it’s making my lungs hurt when I breathe,” said Imogen.

“I’m sorry, that’s a bad feeling,” I said.

Kirstin, one of the smart girls, came up. “Mr. Baker, I forgot what it’s called when you’re doing multiplication and you’re adding it.”

“Repeated addition!” said Wayne and Porter simultaneously. “JINX.”

“Double jinx,” said Porter.

“Triple jinx,” said Wayne.

“Okay, okay,” I said.

“You can’t do that,” said Caroline to Jonas. Jonas was taking pictures with his iPad.

“You called me a toilet,” said Jonas.

“What’s nine times seven?” I asked Caroline.

“Sixty-three,” said Caroline.

“You are good,” I said. I turned to Jonas. “What’s nine times seven?”

“Eighteen?”

“Mrs. Compton says we’re not allowed to take pictures,” said Caroline.

“Don’t take pictures, for gosh sakes! And don’t worry about it!”

“Mr. Baker, how do you spell repeated?” said Kirstin.

I spelled it for her. Marshall, tipping, fell off his chair.

“You all right?” I said to him.

He nodded.

“Mr. Baker, look,” Porter said. His iPad said that he’d mastered three skills.

“You mastered three schools, good. Skulls? Skills. What’s nine times seven?”

“Um — sixty-three?”

“I love the sound of that.” The clock said noon. I did a Frank Sinatra imitation, “It’s time — to go to recess!”

Rianna sang, “Get rid — of all the kids.”

“I don’t want you to go,” I said. “I miss you guys.”

“I wouldn’t miss Marshall, if I were you,” Rianna said.

“He’s all right,” I said. “I can handle him.”

“I can’t,” said Rianna. “He’s annoying.”

“He always fools us and makes us mad,” said Sabrina.

“CLEAN UP,” said Demi.

“CLEAN IT UP,” I said. “WHAT’S NINE TIMES SEVEN?”

“SIXTY-THREE!”

“Oh, yes! I want that achievement in your heads today.”

“Mr. Baker, can I use the bathroom?” said Cormac.

“Use it or lose it,” I said. “ALL RIGHT, SHH! I HEARD A SUDDEN CLASHING OF LOUD VOICES. It’s like swords clashing together, and it hurts everybody’s ears. The exciting news is that recess is on. I’m going to be out there, watching you like a hawk, hoping you have fun. Let’s line up.”

We went outside. Imogen had a clipboard and a pencil with her to work on math, because she’d been in the nurse’s office. “You’re not watching me like a hawk,” said Porter.

Mrs. Hulbert announced that there was no kickball for the rest of the week. I asked her what happened.

“We’ve had fights.”

“Nobody can agree on the rules,” said Mr. Stowe. “I’ve been recommending all year just a list of rules that are laminated and posted, so we all can agree.”

“Certainly makes sense to me,” I said.

This was Mr. Stowe’s first year at the school. “First year anywhere, I guess,” he said. He’d gotten a philosophy degree at U. Maine Orono, and then he’d worked as a substitute for a while, and then as an ed tech, and then he got his teaching certificate.

“They’re lucky to have you,” I said. “You have a good way with the kids.”

“I’m trying,” he said. “It doesn’t always work.”

I watched some basketball happening for a while. Imogen came up to ask what we were doing in the afternoon. I looked at the plans. Lunch, silent reading, and literacy worksheets, I said.

“Oh, no,” said Imogen. “I don’t like worksheets.”

“I don’t either,” I said. “I just like talking to people.”

She pointed at the ground. “That’s a bunch of ants,” she said.

“They work all the time,” I said. “After a rain they have to dig.”

“Dig the little hole that they fall through,” said Imogen.

“They have to take out the little grains of sand,” I said. “It’s a lot of work to be an ant.”

“Especially when you’re so small,” said Imogen. “When I was living where my dad is living now, we used to have carpenter ants chewing our wall. All the time.”

“We have them, too,” I said. “After a while the wood turns to powder.”

“Especially when you have a little brother that likes poking holes in the wall.”

Imogen sat under a tree and worked on her clipboard for a while. Then she coughed and said, “Ow.”

“Ouch,” I said. “That’s deep in there.”

She showed me what she’d written on her clipboard: “Dear, Mr. B, Today the class was grate!! Love Imogen.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “Let me ask you this, and answer me honestly. Does it drive you crazy that the teachers are always telling people to be silent, to be quiet? They’re always saying, ‘I hear people talking!’ Does that drive you nuts, or is that just the way school is?”

“That’s just the way school is,” Imogen said, smiling.

“It sometimes hurts me when a teacher suddenly says, ‘You will give me five minutes of recess!’”

Imogen said, “Yeah, I saw you like blinking a couple times.”

“Did you catch that? I didn’t know anyone caught that. Anyway, it’s all good, right?”

“Mm,” she said.

We looked out at the playground for a while. “Will you be happy when it’s summertime?”

“Yes!”

“LINE UUUUUUUP!” called Devin, Sabrina, and Demi.

Balls went into wire baskets. Lines formed and went quiet. At Mr. Stowe’s signal, we snaked inside, with chosen door-holders holding the doors. It was time for lunch. “QUIET IN THE LINE,” I said. My class walked off to the cafeteria.

Ten minutes later, three girls, Myra, Rianna, and Sabrina, returned carrying their brunch-for-lunch lunches and their lunches from home. “Can we sit in here?” said Rianna.

“Everybody keeps barging into all of our fights,” said Myra.

“We need to talk,” said Sabrina.

“Yeah, we need to talk and work things out,” said Rianna.

They pulled up chairs around a table near me and, using several colors of Sharpie, began making behavioral charts for each other, and for several other students who weren’t there, with boxes to check yes or no.

“Do you need to talk in private?” I said, eating a sandwich at Mrs. Compton’s desk, under the American flag. “I can move.”

“No, it’s okay,” said Sabrina.

“We have to work this out ASAP,” said Rianna.

“If we keep yelling at each other, Mrs. Compton will have to move us.”

They talked seriously, at times formally, coloring in their charts, drawing lines with rulers — almost as if they were playing house or having a tea party. They were playing guidance counselor. Myra wrote, “No fighting, no bullying,” at the top of her paper. “That’s just a reminder,” she said. The problem, I gathered, had to do with secrets told to two of the boys and withheld from some of the girls. There was a fair amount of giggling.

“Sabrina, eat over your tray,” said Myra.

“Whenever we get in a fight, we write yes, and each box is for each day,” said Sabrina.

“How about we have a Y for yes, and an N for no, since we have such tiny boxes?” said Rianna. She wrote an abbreviation key. “Y equals Y-E-S. N equals N-O.”

They ate for a while.

“I’d say we worked everything out pretty good,” said Rianna.

“For today, should we put yes or no?” asked Myra.

“It should be no, because we’re working it out.”

They wrote “N” in the today boxes, and “talk” in the boxes for how they’d resolved their disagreement.

Cecil came in. “What are you guys doing?”

“We’re talking about our privates,” said Myra.

Wild laughter. “Ew!”

I stood. “It’s after one o’clock. It is SILENT READING. SHHHH.” I turned the lights off.

“Can we keep going?” said Myra.

I whispered, “No, it’s absolutely silent reading. You’re going to have to continue this meeting tomorrow. I like what you’re doing, but you’ve got to table it now.”

A specials teacher came to take away several students.

I turned off the fan. Merciful joy of no fan. “Marshall, sit down!” I hiss-whispered.

“WHOO-HOO, WELCOME BACK!” said someone’s iPad reading app.

“Turn all the sounds off, and just use your eyeballs to read the words,” I said. “Eyes, words — no sounds.”

“Use your eyeballs,” said Demi.

The room became hot. I inspected the fan, which turned out to have a low setting. It had been on high the whole time. I moved it closer to the window and turned it on low. Marshall said that Mrs. Compton allowed some kids to listen to books with headphones. Fine.

“Oh, thank you, Your Majesty!” said an iPad.

Finally the parachute of silence spread over the class. All we could hear was the now tolerable fan and Mrs. Hulbert in the next room yelling to her class to line up.

Marshall continued to fidget. “Marshall!” said Ms. Lamarche. She coughed loudly and talked nonstop to the kids in the back of the class. She seemed to be physically incapable of whispering.

When the half hour was over, I said, “Okay, it’s Showbie time. Get your iPads out, get them warmed up, get them revved up. There should be worksheets for you to do.”

“God, there are three of them in there!” said Jonas.

“Ugh,” said Devin.

Marshall, meanwhile, had left for an alternate space-time continuum. “Flip around in your chair, Mr. Sir,” I said. “With your feet on the floor.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Marshall.

“And your mind in your head.”

I glanced at an iPad to see what the first worksheet was. It was about idioms. “Does anybody know what an idiom is?” They didn’t seem to know. “It’s a way of saying something without actually saying it. Be quiet, please. So if you say, ‘It is hot as a bee’s bananas outside,’ which I don’t think means all that much—”

“It just means that it’s really hot,” said Elijah.

“Right. So here it says, Casey is always on time. She is always…” Jonas was talking to Marshall. “Dudes? What is happening? Why don’t you stand up and read this one for us, please. Right now.”

“Okay,” said Jonas. “Casey is always on time. She is always on the dot.”

“What does ‘on the dot’ mean?” I said.

“Um, they’re early?”

“Right on time. It’s an example of something called an idiom. I liked the way you read it in a loud voice. Why don’t you try another? Jonas’s going to read this one in an even louder, ringinger voice.”

“The pizza was selling like hotcakes!”

Another ed tech arrived. She began having a chat with Ms. Lamarche, while I tried to explain the meaning of “chip on your shoulder.” I asked whether “Who let the dogs out?” was an idiom, not knowing the answer myself. The class ignored me.

“Can I tell you a joke?” said Clayton. “What do bananas always say when they’re having fun?”

“What?”

“Go bananas!”

“Good one,” I said. “What about ‘shake a leg’?”

“What about ‘break a leg’?” asked Myra.

“‘Break a leg’ means do really well, ‘shake a leg’ means get going.”

The second Showbie worksheet was about a dentist. I turned off the fan and read it to them, with the two ed techs chatting in the back. The heck with them, I thought, I’ll just be like the robotics teacher and roar over them. “DAVE WAS A DENTIST,” I read. “However, he was a very special dentist. He was very, very tiny. In fact, he was smaller than a toothbrush.” Dave has a new patient, a lion, who is in terrible pain and can’t eat. Dave goes into the lion’s mouth, which smells very bad, and, taking stock of the situation while standing on the lion’s tongue, he spots a bad cavity in one of the lion’s back teeth. He fixes the cavity and the lion is happy. “However, the next time Dave saw the zookeeper coming, he hid in his closet. The end.” They had to answer detailed reading comprehension questions about the story: What was so special about Dave? What was the first thing he noticed when he stepped into the lion’s mouth? Etc. The worksheet seemed to be loosely based on William Steig’s Doctor De Soto, but without charm.

“What was the smell like?” I said.

“Smelled like raw poop,” said Cecil.

“Lions eat a lot of meat, so it probably smelled like bad meat,” I said.

Imogen coughed horribly. Elijah sneezed. “Bless you,” I said.

Ms. Lamarche turned the fan on high.

“How do you spell roar?” said Devin.

Their last Showbie assignment was to write an alternative ending to Judith Viorst’s Lulu and the Brontosaurus, about a spoiled girl who wants a pet brontosaurus. It was an unusual book because it already had three endings, one sad, one happy, one mixed. “Write your own ending, and make it good,” I said. “Make the sentences rich. Lots of description. MY FRIENDS, IT’S TOO LOUD. Marshall, sit down. SIT DOWN. When you’ve written your end, bring it up to me, I’ll look it over, and then you can type it.”

Kirsten brought her alternative ending up: every week, Lulu and the brontosaurus went ice-skating together. Good. I pointed to where she needed to capitalize and punctuate and she was off to type it on her iPad. In Caroline’s ending Lulu tricked the brontosaurus by inviting him over for cake and asking him to close his eyes; while the dinosaur’s eyes were trustingly closed, Lulu quickly built a wall around her house so he could never escape. Jonas’s ending was not a happy one: Lulu called the brontosaurus a hag and the brontosaurus farted in Lulu’s face and said he hated her. Cormac had Lulu inviting the brontosaurus to Thanksgiving dinner, whereupon she dressed him as a clown and played football with him — and the brontosaurus dropped all the passes. In Wayne’s wrap-up, Lulu invited the brontosaurus over to play on a pogo stick; while bouncing on the pogo, the brontosaurus went to the bathroom and fell into his own poop.

“Right,” I said. “I want to hear more about how a brontosaurus can go on a pogo stick.”

“He has really tiny feet?” said Wayne.

“That’s quite an achievement. If you want to write about poop, that’s up to you, man. I think it would be better if you wrote about not-poop, but who am I to say?”

“Sorry,” he said, chortling. “I already typed mine in. What do I do now?”

I referred to the sub plans, and made an announcement. “IF YOU’VE FINISHED YOUR LULU ENDING, YOU CAN DO PICTURE OF THE DAY, FLUENCY CENTER, OR SHUFFLE CENTER, whatever that is.”

“I’ll do Picture of the Day,” said Wayne.

Sabrina said that Lulu and the brontosaurus didn’t end up living together, but they did schedule a playdate. Colleen, the selectively mute girl, wrote: Lulu asked the brontosaurus to be her pet, and she would give him leaves all the time, and would let him stay in the back yard. The end.

“Nice going, Colleen,” I said.

Rianna had filled a page with red printing. Lulu, she said, packed a pickle sandwich in her backpack and went for a walk in the woods, where she encountered a huge spider, who told her to give him something. Lulu took out her sandwich and gave the spider her backpack, and she kept walking till she got to the brontosaurus’s house. He gave her a snack and a new backpack; she hugged him and returned home.

“Wow,” I said. “I like the pickle sandwich and the backpack. Only thing is huged—just add a g there. Excellent. How old are you?”

“Eight.”

Elijah had a happy ending: Lulu wished the brontosaurus a great brontosaurusy life and carried him home on her back. “At least, that’s the most I know of his life,” he said.

“Excellent job, man,” I said.

I went over to Jonas and Marshall. “Dudes, you’re pushing your hips together in the same chair. That’s bizarre and ridiculous. Marshall, sit over here.”

Porter’s ending was that Lulu invited the brontosaurus over for Christmas. The brontosaurus got a Great Dane as a present, and Lulu got a stuffed animal.

Porter said, “Mrs. Baker — I mean Mr. Baker — what do I do now?”

“Now just give it up,” I said. “You’re done. You’re so far done that you’re done beyond done.”

“What do I do?”

“Well, you’ve got Picture of the Day, Fluency Center, or Shuffle Center. What is Shuffle Center anyway?”

“It’s what Colleen’s doing, see her?” said Porter, pointing across the room. “So I do one of those three? What happens if I do all three?”

“Then you’ll just be in the stratosphere,” I said. “Get a whole book and read it and memorize it and say it to me backwards.”

Clayton said that when the brontosaurus came to eat strawberry three-layer cake he experienced a sugar rush and cracked his head open. Lulu brought him to the doctor and he was so happy that he tossed Lulu up in the air and she hit Jupiter. She came down stupider.

“Mr. Baker,” he said, “Devin is on the app store and he’s not supposed to be on the app store.”

“Should we bring in the app police?” I said.

Clayton made a siren sound and we strolled toward Devin, who got out of the app store at high speed.

“Quickly changed it, did you?” I said to Devin. “Do you remember the story about Lulu and the brontosaurus?”

“No.”

“You do not? Where the heck have you been all my life? They’ve been reading it aloud in this class.”

“I forget,” said Devin.

Imogen, whose desk was near Devin, had put her head down, feeling terrible. She sat up, coughed, turned on her Kindle, and summarized one of the endings of Lulu, in which the brontosaurus had cake and went home.

“I don’t like that story,” said Devin. “The girl has a big fat head.” It was true, in the illustrations she had a very large head. I told him to read some of the book.

Marshall had written about the dinosaur smashing his head on a lot of trees until Lulu smacked him in the face.

“Looks like you are done,” I said. “You can do Shuffleboard, Fluency Center, this and that.”

Colleen silently brought up the work she’d done in the Shuffle Center. an octopus is a boneless creature, she’d written. octopuses can grow at night. they can live for six months to a couple of years.

“Excellent,” I said. “I know you know this, but I’m just calling it to your attention. When you start a sentence, you want to start it with a capital, right?”

She nodded.

“You are in business,” I said. “Thank you very much for doing it. You are hot stuff.”

“Colleen’s hot stuff,” said Cecil. He’d written that the brontosaurus ate ten thousand cookies at Lulu’s party, then excused himself to go to the bathroom: when he came out he felt much better. Cecil’s deskmate Elijah was beside himself with hysterics over Cecil’s story.

“I’M LIKING THESE ENDINGS, FOLKS!” I said. “A LOT OF GOOD WORK HAPPENED TODAY.”

“Who did the longest one?” asked Myra.

“The longest one was by Rianna,” I said. “Very long and very detailed, and it involved a pickle sandwich. I saw ones that involved ten thousand cookies, ones that involved bathrooms, I saw ones that involved cake, celebrations, Christmases.”

Rianna, Myra, and Sabrina asked to go to the library.

I said, “You are very quiet workers, so I think you can go to the library, yes.” I gestured toward the back of the class, where Marshall was raising hell. “Look at this pandemonium. Pandemonium means ‘wild chaos.’ You are calm. Thank you.”

The intercom came on. “Mr. Baker? Can you please dismiss Jonas?”

Everyone said goodbye. Bye, Jonas, bye, Jonas, bye, Jonas!

“Good work today, Jonas,” I said.

Devin was whispering into the fan. Had he read any of the book? He had. “How did it seem?” I said.

“I can’t remember it. I don’t have a good memory.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “That’s cool.”

We were entering the horrific end-of-day limbo time. I thought maybe it would be a good idea to have some music, but while I was talking to Kirstin about what to play, things went wrong in the back. Wayne and Devin were making an iPad action movie in which Devin pretended to stab Wayne with a pair of children’s scissors. Ms. Lamarche saw it happen and pushed herself up out of her chair. “ALL BOYS BACK THERE, I WANT YOU IN YOUR SEAT,” she said.

“Absolutely right,” I said.

“THAT WAS NOT SAFE,” said Ms. Lamarche.

“What did I do?” said Devin.

“What did you do?” said Ms. Lamarche. “You stood over him with a pair of scissors, doing like this to his head. THAT IS NOT OKAY.”

“It seems like toward the end of the day,” I said, “people begin to fall apart.”

“Oh, we do,” said Cecil.

“Especially him and him and him,” said Elijah, pointing to Marshall, Devin, and Wayne.

“I can fall apart,” said Marshall. He pretended to lose an arm.

I said, “So what can you do to keep it together?”

“We can eat golden apples,” said Wayne. (Golden apples are restorative in Minecraft.)

“Elastic bands!” said Marshall. “Glue? Staples?”

“Staple yourself together,” said Wayne. “Make all kinds of butts on you. Butt, butt, butt, butt, butt, butt.”

I said, “Your mission, and you don’t have a choice about whether or not to accept it, is to stand up, go over there, get a book, and read three pages in it, right this second.”

Colleen brought another piece of work up. She’d read a story about the Mayflower and drawn a picture of two of the people who died on the ship.

“Excellent. You’ve really been working hard this afternoon. Do you work this hard every day at school?”

Colleen nodded.

“Good.”

I looked at a book with Marshall and we found a picture of a large land animal. “So what is this thing?” I said.

“A bison?” said Marshall.

“A musk ox, for god’s sake. Can you believe it?”

“Have you ever seen a shaved yak?” asked Wayne. “I want to see a shaved yak. Shaved yak, shaved yak, shaved yak, shaved yak.”

I shushed him. “I haven’t seen you read a single page,” I said.

“Shaved yak, shaved yak,” echoed Marshall, more slowly.

“What are we supposed to be doing?” asked Porter.

“We’re supposed to be enriching our minds with education,” I said.

“I read three pages,” said Wayne.

I looked at him dubiously.

“What?” said Wayne. “I read fast.” He danced around, talking baby talk.

“Wayne, you’re off the chain,” I said.

Ms. Lamarche stood up. “OKAY, LET’S START PUTTING IPADS AWAY, PLEASE, AND START PICKING UP. FLOOR PEOPLE, PLEASE START PICKING UP. TECHNOLOGY PEOPLE, PLEASE MAKE SURE IPADS ARE PLUGGED IN.”

I put on Lennon’s “Imagine.”

“That’s so beautiful,” said Rianna.

“MAKE SURE YOUR ROW IS STRAIGHT,” said Ms. Lamarche. “CHARLIE! STUFF OFF THE FLOOR, PLEASE.”

I stopped the song.

“The day’s almost over,” I said to Imogen, who was looking sicker than ever.

“Good,” said Imogen.

“You’ll feel better tomorrow,” I said.

Ms. Lamarche was in motion. “HOW’S THE LIBRARY LOOK OVER THERE? CLAYTON!”

I went around with Clayton picking things up off the floor. “Who straightens up the rows, guys, let’s straighten up the rows,” I said.

Ms. Lamarche said, “IMOGEN, YOUR SEAT IS OVER THERE. WHY ARE YOU BACK HERE?”

Colleen brought up her Picture of the Day, a drawing of a happy swimmer. Her description said, She’s swimming. The girl is wet. There’s waves. There’s splashes. Brown hair. Mouth open. Blue bathing suit. Red cheeks. Blue water. Daytime.

“That’s a really beautiful thing,” I said.

“Can I use the bathroom?” said Colleen. She could speak!

“Of course you can use the bathroom,” I said.

Clayton showed me the ideal way to straighten a desk. “Keep them a little separate, but not too separate,” he said.

“You’ve done good work today,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “I want to tell you a fantasy joke. What does the iPad say to the other iPad?”

“What?”

“Go to the app store and you’ll get some more iPads!”

I laughed. “Do you make these up?”

Clayton nodded.

“What kind of music do you like?” I asked him.

“WHO IS IPAD FOUR?” said Ms. Lamarche. “ALL RIGHT, EVERYBODY, VOICES ARE OFF, PLEASE. IF I SEE YOU TALKING, YOUR NAME GOES ON THE BOARD, AND WE’LL START WITH RECESS TOMORROW. Marshall, you want to be the first one?”

“No.”

“THEN GO SIT DOWN. Whose iPad is number four?”

“Myra,” said the class.

“And she’s not here, right?”

I put on Lennon again and sang along.

“LET’S PACK AND STACK, PLEASE!” said Ms. Lamarche. “Elijah, can you stack Colleen’s chair, please. Philip, can you stack your chair, please? Devin, come clean off your desk! Devin! VOICES ARE OFF AND LISTENING, PLEASE. WHO’S TALKING?”

The secretary came on the PA system to read off an endless list of dismissals.

“All right, guys,” I said. “WHAT’S NINE TIMES SEVEN?”

“SIXTY-THREE?”

“I love it,” I said. They lined up. “Thank you very much for being in this class.”

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

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Take it easy, guys.”

“You have to go with them to the bus,” said Ms. Lamarche.

“No, he doesn’t,” said Cecil.

“Yeah, he does,” said Ms. Lamarche.

I walked down the hallways, humming “God Bless America” for some reason, and I watched the children leap onto the buses like reverse paratroopers. I waved at the faces in the bus windows and went inside, drank greedily at the water fountain, and said, to the empty classroom, “That just about does it.” I put on “Imagine” and picked up stray scraps from the floor.

Day Twenty-seven was a wrap.