Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY TWO. Monday, March 17, 2014

LASSWELL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, SECOND GRADE

MYSTERY PICTURE

THE PHONE PLINKED AT 5:40 A.M. on Monday, St. Patrick’s Day. Lasswell Elementary School needed someone to teach second grade, said Beth, the sub caller. “I’ll do it, thanks,” I said.

On the way there I bought two glazed donuts and two medium Turbo cups of coffee — one cup for later. The elementary school, a few miles away from Lasswell High School, was a low brick building in the middle of a wooded patch, with a playground out back: swingsets and a climbing structure sitting in a white field of ice. A jolly, pink-cheeked secretary signed me in and gave me a badge that said STAFF, which I clipped to my jacket pocket. The room was warm; I was already beginning to sweat.

In room 7, Mrs. Heber, the teacher who’d called in sick, was sitting at her desk, under garlands made of looped construction paper. She had a bad cold and looked as if she hadn’t slept well; even so, she’d come in before school started to write up her sub plans and print out some worksheets. “You look like you have some experience under your belt,” Mrs. Heber said. “Have you been a teacher?” I told her it was my first time teaching at the elementary level, but both my children had been through Maine schools.

“Well, there you go,” she said. She stapled some pages together and handed them to me. I read a sentence: “Have the kids add ‘I Found a Four Leaf Clover’ to their fluency binder’s table of contents.” Mrs. Heber showed me the math activity worksheet, a grid of squares with an accompanying color key. “This is a little confusing,” she said. “The kids won’t have seen this before but it’s really fun. As long as you get it, they’ll get it.”

“I hope you feel better,” I said. “Thanks for preparing everything so well.”

“Good group of kids,” Mrs. Heber said. “I haven’t told you about my little handfuls. My two handfuls are Parker and Benjamin. Keep an eye on those two — they’ll try to get silly.” She wished me good luck and left.

I drew up a seating chart to try to learn the children’s names beforehand, gave up, and looked around, trying to get my bearings. The desks, made of wood-grain Formica, were tiny, arranged in a large square, with handwritten names taped to the tops — I’d forgotten how small second-graders were. The chairs were made of maroon plastic and they were stacked around the edges of the room, which had gray carpeting. The walls were crowded with a bewilderment of sights — calendars, headphones on hooks, yellow cardboard clocks with movable hands, a number strip that went around the ceiling, letter diagrams, a cartoon of parts of the body, a poster saying “How Do You Feel Today?” with pictures of children in various states of emotion, hand-crayoned figures of “ROOM HELPERS” mounted in plastic pouches against an electric-orange background. There was a bright yellow bookcase stuffed with a kaleidoscope of kids’ books, and a green chalk blackboard superimposed with pastel Post-its and charts with primary-colored stickers going down the side. Behind Mrs. Heber’s desk hung an intricate “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,” colored pink, aqua blue, pale green, and violet, with sub-objectives spelled out in rectangles. Under “ANALYZING KNOWLEDGE” was a box that said:

Analyzing Errors

in Reasoning

Identify logical

or factual errors

• Question the validity of

• Listen to insure

• Assess

• Expose fallacies in

Listen to insure? I started to get nervous — I couldn’t take it all in, and I didn’t know where anything was. Just then the teacher next door popped in to say good morning. “If you need anything let me know,” she said. “They’re a good group of kids, but they’re very social. They love to talk.”

“If you hear an uproar coming from this room,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, you’ll hear me, too,” she said, which made me feel better.

A bell rang — an old-fashioned bell with a real clapper — and children began arriving in ones and twos. I said hi and they shyly said hi. Backpacks were hung on hooks, snowpants were removed, chairs were unstacked and distributed. “You guys really know what you’re doing,” I said.

“You’re really tall,” said one tiny girl, Anastasia — she was wearing several strings of green plastic beads in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. Bryce, a tiny freckled boy, pulled out a chapter book from his backpack and told me he’d finished it last night—The Lightning Thief. I congratulated him. I’d forgotten that kids could have freckles. I found a stub of chalk and wrote “Mr. Baker” on the board.

I asked Anastasia if now was the time when I should pass out the four-leaf-clover poem for their fluency binders. “You have to ask the paper passer,” she said. I asked who the paper passer was. “Tessa, but she isn’t here yet.”

Some children’s voices came over the PA system, reading the date and the weather forecast in singsong unison. They told a knock-knock joke that I couldn’t make out. The principal came on to announce several birthdays and to congratulate a team of Lasswell Elementary students who’d won an Odyssey of the Mind tournament over the weekend. Nobody in the class listened. Then, on cue, everyone grew quiet and serious and put their hands on their chests, and we said the Pledge of Allegiance together.

“Hi, everybody, I’m Mr. Baker, I’m the substitute,” I said. “Is the paper passer here?” Tessa dashed over and began passing out the poem. A minor problem arose: normally poems destined for the fluency binder were copied onto three-hole paper, but this time, as several children told me, they lacked holes. “Oh, no,” I said.

“I know where the hole puncher is!” said Anastasia. She rummaged on a side table covered with heaps of art supplies until she found it. The hole puncher began traveling around the room, punching holes in the four-leaf-clover poem, leaving a flutterment of paper dots on the carpet. A boy asked me for a Band-Aid — he had a red patch on his leg where he’d fallen on a snowdrift. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I think if you just let it air-dry and don’t mess with it, probably that’s the best thing you can do.”

A plump girl with a kind face and pink shoes, Cerise, helped me take attendance — five students were sick that day, and two were there but were in a remedial math class. Another girl helped me take the lunch count — how many kids were getting a hot lunch, how many were getting SunButter and jelly, how many had brought their own lunch. When everyone had written the title of the poem in their table of contents and clicked their three-ring binders closed, it was time, according to the sub plans, to line up to go to Monday morning assembly.

Carter, who was smart and officious, told me the rule: silence in the hallways.

“The boys are always less good in the hall,” said Ellie, who was also smart and officious. We processed, fairly silently, in a line to the cafeteria, where a murmuring crowd of children sat on the floor. The teachers stood against the wall; at a certain moment all of them raised their hands, holding up two fingers, and the assembly went quiet. In the front, a woman used a bucket and some milk cartons to show how many quarts were in a gallon and how many pints were in a quart. “Now, how many pints in a gallon?” she asked.

Two!

Eight!

Four!

A reading enrichment teacher read a poem by Natasha Wing, based on “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” It was about some children who catch a leprechaun in their house on the night before St. Patrick’s Day: “They set all the traps round the room with great care / In hopes a wee Irishman soon would be theirs.” The children stare at the captive leprechaun so that he won’t disappear, and they demand that he tell them where he’s hidden the gold. He tells them that it’s buried under a rock in the back yard. But the leprechaun is a trickster: no gold for the children. End of poem.

“Now close your eyes and put your hands on your head,” said the reading enrichment person. “Think of the characters. Think about the setting. Think about the beginning, the middle, the end. Think about the problem. Think about the solution.” We thought about all these things. She asked who the characters were, what the setting was, what the problem was. Hands went up, the right answers came back. “You guys did it all,” the reading enrichment teacher said. “You retold the whole story, problems, solutions — wow!”

We walked silently back to the room. “Can I have a drink, because my throat hurts?” asked a sniffly girl named Jessamyn. I said she could — there was a sink with a drinking fountain by the bookcases. According to the sub plans, I had to get through the four-leaf-clover poem quickly, because we had to have a spelling test and then snack time and then a reading of a Tacky the Penguin book before writing a story about a leprechaun. “Okay, guys, listen up,” I said. “Everybody got three holes in their poem? Good. Everybody take a seat. Guys! So this poem is a— GUYS! Chip chip aroo! Hop! Hip! This poem is kind of weird and I need your help with it.”

They quieted down and we read the poem together. It was supposed to be funny — it’s by a light-versist named Jack Prelutsky and it’s about a kid who finds a four-leaf clover that brings only bad luck — but the kids didn’t go for it. Perhaps it wasn’t the right note to strike on St. Patrick’s Day, especially coming immediately after the poem about the trickster leprechaun. I read:

I barked my shin, I missed my train,

I sat on my dessert.

“Ew,” said Ellie. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

When we got to the end, Anastasia said, very simply, “I have a lot of four-leaf clovers in my garden.”

“I have grass in my yard,” said Benjamin.

It was time for the unit 17 spelling test. Several kids suddenly discovered that they needed to sharpen their pencils: there was a lot of earnest grinding away at the fancy electric pencil sharpener hidden behind the teacher’s desk. They all knew where it was.

“All right, let’s do this! Parker! Have a seat. Has everybody written their name at the top of the page? GUYS!”

“Do you want me to clap them out?” said Tessa, with an eager expression.

“Sure, clap them out,” I said.

She frowned importantly and held her hands over her head and went clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.

Immediately the whole class went clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.

About the spelling test, the sub plans said: “You read the words on the pink sticky note, giving sample sentences for each word.” I could do that. “Were,” I said. I made up a sentence: “We were going to Kohl’s to buy a pair of flip-flops. Were.”

“Kohl’s?” said several voices.

“Macy’s?” I said. “Walmart? Somewhere.”

“I’ve been to Macy’s,” said Jessamyn, who was wearing a yellow shirt that matched her barrette.

I went on to the next word. “Look. Look before you leap, then leap like a madman and then look again. Look.”

They wrote.

“Number three,” I said. “Down. Down we go, deeper into the ocean than we’ve ever gone before. Down.”

“Where there are some strange fishes,” said Bryce, the boy who’d read The Lightning Thief.

“Leopard fishes,” said Anastasia. “Glowing leopard fishes that have glowing eyes!”

There were twelve words altogether. The toughest one was through. I remembered learning how to spell it for the first time. After the test was over I wrote through on the board. “The beginning is pretty simple,” I said. “T-H, th, and R, thr. But then you think, Hmm, there are all kinds of strange letters in there. It looks like it should be ‘throg-hah.’”

“Throg-hah!” said Carter.

“But no, it’s through. You have to journey all the way through those U-G-H letters to get to the end. Okay, and now it’s snack time, folks.”

Everyone pulled out their snacks. Some lined up at the sink to wash their hands. Cerise showed me where the Tacky the Penguin picture books were — propped on the ledge against the blackboard. People sucked on juice pouches and ate Goldfish crackers while I read the story of Tacky the Penguin’s trip on an ice floe to a tropical island, where he meets a strange soft, hairy, gray rock that turns out to be an elephant. I secretly skipped some pages to get to the end. Must keep to the schedule.

Ms. Keeler, an amiable, gentle-voiced ed tech, came in to help while the kids wrote and illustrated a story about what they would do if they met a leprechaun. We spent almost an hour on this activity. I wrote leprechaun on the blackboard, and surprise and favorite. The class had, it seemed, developed a certain animus toward leprechauns. “I would hide in my room till it was morning time,” said a girl named Evelyn. “I’d catch it in a jar and flush it down the toilet,” said Ellie. “I’d dissect it,” said Spencer, and he drew a black cage with a leprechaun trapped inside. “I would give it a piece of cake with poop inside,” said Tessa — Ms. Keeler helped her spell poop. “I would steal his gold cake,” wrote Dominic. “I would feed it cheese,” said Marina. “I would feed it an elephant,” said Jordan. Cerise was more affectionate; she said she’d keep her leprechaun with her forever. After the ed tech went to lunch, Tessa asked if they could use sparkly stickers to decorate their drawings, and I said sure — which was not the right answer. The sparkly stickers came from a sacred upper cupboard, and several indignant girls told me that the class was forbidden to use anything in the upper cupboard. “Yes we can, if the teacher says!” said Tessa. It took several minutes to sort that disagreement out — and then it was 11:10 and time for the forty-minute gym class.

I raised two fingers to signal for them all to be quiet. Again we traipsed wordlessly through the hallways. In gym they lined up along a line on the floor and the teacher put on Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” at high volume. They started running around the gym in circles. “I’ll see you at eleven-fifty,” the gym teacher said.

Out in my car, I drank the second cup of coffee, staring at a dead oak leaf, resting. My knees hurt.

Back in gym, my class was finishing something called NASCAR, in teams of two. One child sat on a blue stool perched on a wooden square with rolling wheels, and the other pushed his teammate around the gym. Jayson and Parker won, they informed me, having pushed each other around the gym fifty-two times. Everyone was sweaty and completely wiped out. Tessa, whining, said she wanted to go to the nurse because her stomach hurt badly. I told her to try a drink of cold water. They all went into the bathrooms near the cafeteria and then they lined up in the cafeteria’s lunch line. “This is your lunch break,” said the sub plans.

I ate a sandwich at my desk and wondered if I’d taught anything at all that morning of use to anybody. It didn’t seem as if I had. Did it matter? Yes, I think it did matter, more so in elementary school than in high school, because being able to read is a universally useful skill. The basic problem was that we live in a jokey, chatty world — which is a good thing — but a room full of eighteen jokey, chatty children is an inefficient place to learn.

I thought of my own second-grade teacher, Mrs. Richards — a dark-haired woman with a sly smile. She liked a report I did, “Workers Who Keep Us Well”—I drew a dentist’s office, with a patch of cracked plaster on the wall, and a garbage truck with two men behind it holding garbage cans. The garbagemen kept us well, I wrote, because they took away all the garbage. Once I went up to Mrs. Richards’s desk to ask her a question and unintentionally caught sight of her black, spiral-bound gradebook, where she’d written everyone’s name in beautiful cursive. “Nosy!” she said, which hurt my feelings. She was a really good teacher. She taught us how to spell elephant and umbrella, and how to carry the one in addition. And she taught us the golden rule.

After lunch my class was hoarse and crazy tired. Three girls said their stomachs hurt. Parker, my “handful,” was making roaring noises near the bookcase, and Jordan was singing “Who Let the Dogs Out.” Cerise said, “Dominic said something not very nice to me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Dominic, do not say not-very-nice things.”

“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” said Anastasia.

Four children — including two of the roaring boys, as it happened — left to go to a Title I remedial program.

“It’s time for silent reading,” said Cerise.

“You are so right,” I said, having studied Mrs. Heber’s plans. “Silent reading, guys, it’s time for SILENT READING.”

And then a miracle happened. In a matter of minutes the whole class had pulled out little squarish picture books, or chapter books, or nature books. They all went quiet and they read or looked at pictures. Some sat on the floor. Some had their heads on their desks and their books balanced on their laps. It was so quiet I could hear pages turning. A whole half hour passed without any noise at all, except for once when my cellphone rang, embarrassingly. I was agog. What amazing children. What an amazing school.

Then it was one o’clock, and I peeked at the sub plans, which had grown as finely crumpled as old dollar bills from my having carried them around with me for hours. “Please read another Tacky book (or two),” they said. No! The Title I kids came back. The noise level rose four notches. Anastasia told me that Mrs. Heber had just finished reading the class Charlotte’s Web. I couldn’t bear to read another Tacky book, so we played a game. Someone read a sentence from Charlotte’s Web, and left out a word. “Fern loved blank more than anything.” Charlotte! No, Wilbur! “She loved to stroke him and put him to blank.” Bed!

But soon I felt guilty that I wasn’t following the plan, and I reluctantly embarked on the story of Tacky the Penguin going to a summer camp called Camp Whoopihaha, where they made s’mores. We talked about the way marshmallows burn at the end of a stick, and then a teacher dropped by to remind me that I had recess duty, and to say that I had to be absolutely sure that no kids strayed onto the large, hazardous ice pond that had formed a few days earlier around the swingsets. “Well,” I said, slapping the big book closed. “I guess it all turns out okay for Tacky at camp. Tacky is DONE.” There was a scramble of putting on snowpants and finding mittens, and the bell rang. Ellie and Cerise told me the rules of winter recess: If you had snowpants, you could climb on the snow piles; if you didn’t, you had to stay on the pavement. If you were caught climbing on the snow three times without snowpants, you had to go stand by the wall. But fifth-graders could climb on the snow even without snowpants. I asked them what Mrs. Heber usually did at recess. “She’ll walk around and make sure that kids aren’t throwing snow or bullying,” said Ellie.

Another substitute teacher, Ms. Healey — studious, quiet, in her forties — was on duty with me. She’d been substituting in the district for a year and a half, but she never took assignments at the high school. “High school is harder because they’re full of themselves,” she said. “I don’t have the assertiveness that’s necessary.” Suddenly she called, “STAY OFF THE ICE! STAY OFF THE ICE!”

Two kids ran up to me and said, “Mr. Baker, there’s a ball out on the ice.”

“Yeah, the ball is going to stay there,” said Ms. Healey. “Someday it will be retrieved.”

A nurse came out to let us know that some kids were frolicking dangerously on a second smaller ice pond in the back; it was hidden behind a four-foot mound of gray snow.

“STAY OFF THE ICE!” called Ms. Healey.

“Mr. Baker, there’s a ball on the ice,” said Jordan.

“I know, that’s just the way it is,” I said.

After an interval of running and screaming and snowsuited misrule, all the classes lined up in five lines near the doors. There was some jockeying for position at the head of the lines.

“Mr. Baker, there’s a ball on the ice,” said Benjamin.

“I know.”

“Another tip,” said Anastasia quietly. “You can pick door holders.”

“Thanks!” I said.

“Wait till everyone’s quiet, then pick the quietest line,” Anastasia said.

I let Ms. Healey pick the quietest line — I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings — and I watched the faces fall of the quiet children in the lines who weren’t picked. Anastasia was one of the door holders. We crowded back inside our classroom — snowpants were shucked off, more girls felt sick, Cerise had hurt her chin somehow, and Evelyn held an ice pack on her elbow after a fall from a snowbank.

Tessa, the paper passer, passed out the “Mystery Picture” math worksheets. One sheet was filled with a grid of squares, some cut in half by diagonal lines, with a row of numbers along the side, and a row of letters along the bottom. On a second sheet was a color key: D-8 = G, and G stood for green. I-11 = Y, and Y stood for yellow. The idea was to color in the squares according to the key, and if you did it right, you were rewarded with a blocky likeness of a green four-leaf clover against a yellow background. “Does everyone have a green crayon and a yellow crayon?” I asked. The roaring boys were roaring again by now; somebody was lustily working the crank on the paper towel machine; Tessa was singing “Happy”; and my explanation, repeated four or five times, did not reach as many children as I would have liked.

Cerise, who was an artist, had, while I was across the room listening to a girl tell me about the time she broke her collarbone, embarked on her clover: it had wide, neatly crayoned green and yellow stripes against a white background. Two other girls quickly followed her example. Anastasia and Bryce did it exactly right. I walked around showing the confused kids how the numbers and letters corresponded to the squares. Anthony, who was smart but had some trouble talking, made a scribbly red and blue shamrock. “Did I mess up?” he said anxiously.

“Well, technically you were supposed to follow the numbers and letters, but it’s a fine-looking clover,” I said. “You just got a little carried away. I’ll write a letter to Mrs. Heber saying I didn’t do a good job of explaining the math activity.”

“It’s your fault!” said Anthony, laughing, relieved. “You’ll get a bad note!”

After half an hour of effort on the mystery picture grid everything started to fall apart. The noise reached a sort of thick, chewy consistency, and then there was a string of tiny emergencies and entreaties. Somebody poured out a box full of plastic coins. Carter wanted me to ask him to add some numbers together in his head. Anthony, who was angry about something, found some fossil rocks, which made interesting noises when banged together. Twenty magnifying glasses rattled out onto a chair. Parker scrambled over a desk and had to be talked to. Tessa got hold of some glass marbles, which made a loud clacking sound on the table. Bryce wanted to list for me all the figures of Greek mythology he knew — I asked him who taught him to read; he said his parents had. Ellie showed me the bell the teacher dinged when it got too noisy, and she dinged it repeatedly — but by then Tessa had found a set of metal wind chimes, which also dinged and jingled. I waved my arms and clap-clap-clapped and ordered the class to start cleaning up.

“How’s it going?” I said to Patrick, a quiet, pale boy whose shamrock sheet was untouched. He’d methodically torn the paper off most of his crayons.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really pay attention that much.”

I put him to work picking up crayon wrappers off the floor. Benjamin announced that he was one of two designated scrap-monsters, whose job was to pick up stray scraps of paper. Carter said his task was to check inside people’s desks to be sure they were neat. Jordan was the supply shelf helper. “I tidy up there,” he said. He began neatening the plundered box of sparkly stickers. “Great, excellent, I love it!” I said. I told Tessa to stow the marbles.

Dominic asked, “Have we been good today?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “At the end it got kind of chaotic.”

“Because if we’ve been good Mrs. Heber puts a marble in the jar.”

I laughed. “You’re kidding — the marble jar that Tessa poured out onto the table?”

“Yes.”

More cleaning, some chair stacking, and then a voice came on the PA system — time for the first bus run. Half the class hustled off, backpacks bobbing. Some of them had a long bus ride to look forward to. “Bye!” I said. More chair stacking, and a second bell. More students left. A few last kids left for after-school class, which was held in the cafeteria. “Bye!”

And then the room was empty and still. I slumped in my chair. While I was writing a note for Mrs. Heber, the custodian came by and emptied the trash cans. I apologized for the disorder, especially for the blizzard of tiny paper circles from the three-hole puncher.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I have a backpack vacuum. This is not that bad. I’ve seen it worse than this. I’ve got eighteen classrooms, twenty bathrooms, two hundred and fifty desks, worktables, and so forth.”

I whistled.

“Yep, I do that in under eight hours, five days a week. I’ve been doing it for eleven years. You have a good day.”

Anastasia came by with her mother, who was, as it happened, a fourth-grade teacher at the school. “How did it go?” her mother asked.

“It went well,” I said — half lie, half truth. “They’re really nice kids.” Which was truth.

To Anastasia I said, “Thanks for being in the class. You were great, very helpful.”

“She said to me, ‘I wish he could be a sub forever,’” said Anastasia’s mother.

I thanked them and waved goodbye. I turned out the lights, washed my hands, and splashed water on my face. I felt like crying, from exhaustion or despair or joy, I’m not sure which.

At the office, as I handed in my STAFF badge, the jolly secretary said, “Are you ready for a nap?”

“Yep, it’s nap time,” I said.

She laughed. “So did you like the little people?”

“They’re good people.”

“Would you come back again?”

“Absolutely.”

“Awesome.”

Driving home, I again wondered if I’d managed to teach anything useful that day. Suddenly I remembered that I’d shown Anthony how to spell found when he was working on his leprechaun story. That was something. Found is a good word to know how to spell.

So ended Day Two.