Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY SIX. Monday, March 24, 2014

LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, ED TECH

OUT COMES THE EYEBALL

ON MONDAY, Beth gave me a choice of several assignments — fourth grade, second grade, the middle school. She hesitated. “Or, there’s an ed tech spot at the high school.” I said I’d do it. I drove there slowly, stuck behind a heating-oil truck. Even so I got to the parking lot early. I parked next to a large gray snowpile and sat thinking about the strangeness of giving a kid like Shane, who seemed quite normal albeit sometimes irritating, a daily drug to control his behavior. The early sun cast interesting pink shadows on the rubble of frozen slush. I went inside.

“You are Lola St. Pierre today,” said Paulette, the secretary, as I signed in. The ed tech room was just down the hall from the main office — a small chamber with a scatter of mismatched chairs and four desks and a file cabinet and not much on the walls. I shook hands with Mr. Bowles, the affable, black-shirted, striped-tied ed tech supervisor, and told him I was filling in for Mrs. St. Pierre.

A plumpish, friendly middle-aged woman, Mrs. Meese, looked up from her desk. “Mrs. St. Pierre is out, too?”

“Everybody’s out,” said Mr. Bowles.

“I’m shocked,” said Mrs. Meese. They two of them began conferring. “Mr. Wakefield is in for Mrs. Batelle. So this gentleman here”—meaning me—“will be with Nina.” Their eyes met — clearly it wasn’t a good idea for me to spend the day with Nina. “Nina has boundary issues,” Mr. Bowles explained. Better, he thought, if Mrs. Meese spent the day with Nina, and then I’d do ed tech duty in the classes that Mrs. Meese normally went to.

Mrs. Meese handwrote her Monday schedule, complete with room numbers and the names of the kids in each class I was supposed to keep an eye on — usually they were the ones with Individualized Education Plans — and gave it to me. “Our trimester has just begun,” she said. “We’re kind of just getting our feet wet here.” The first class was English, with twenty-six students, one teacher, and two ed techs. “We both kind of police one side of the room each,” Mrs. Meese said. “What we’ve begun in that room is we’re reading a book. Mrs. Kennett has been reading and the kids have been following along.” Next was a history class, then came Financial Algebra, then an elective called Community Safety, and then came a small literacy study group, where they were working on the difference between literal and figurative language. “The kids are going to need to highlight or underline things in the story,” Mrs. Meese said. “So if you’re familiar with all forms of language you’ll be fine with that.”

I thanked her for the helpful orientation.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” said Mrs. Meese.

The English teacher, Mrs. Kennett, was about thirty, upbeat and appealing, wearing a red cardigan. Her room was painted a pale blue, and it had six six-sided, wood-grained-laminate tables in it; the chairs had tennis balls over their casters so that they wouldn’t squeak. I took a chair near the windows and she walked to the front of the class and turned sweepingly to face them. “Goo-oood morning, folks!” Mrs. Kennett said, as if she were Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam. “How are ya!”

Nobody answered. Five conversations continued.

“It’s like ten degrees outside,” said Mrs. Kennett loudly. “Who else is not okay with that?”

“I’m okay with it,” said Jared, in a blue sweatshirt.

“Come on, it’s the end of March!” Mrs. Kennett said.

“I actually lived in Alaska, so I’m okay with it,” said Steve, who looked like a football player.

Anabelle, in a Hollister shirt, turned. “Steve, you were in Alaska? When was that?”

“I was like five.”

“Five! You couldn’t have been that acclimated to the Alaskan tundra yet,” said Mrs. Kennett.

“He ran around naked,” said Jared.

“Yeah, and I slept with the dogs outside,” said Steve. “No, actually, we had a husky. Beautiful dog.”

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Kennett. “I’m a big-dog fan. I like big dogs.”

“I forgot my book,” said Keith cheerfully.

“That’s okay, we had somebody else forget their book. Who read the three pages you had to read?”

“I didn’t!” called out a kid from the back.

“You should have!” Mrs. Kennett laughed. The book was a movie tie-in edition of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption.

“I read it,” said Anabelle.

“I really think that the only way that you’re going to get the most from this book is if I read it,” said Mrs. Kennett. “And I’m willing to do that. It’s okay with me.”

“Woo-hoo!” said the kid in the back.

Mrs. Kennett said that over the weekend, she’d been to a place where they made maple sugar. “So, yeah, that was kind of cool. Anybody else do anything interesting over the weekend?”

“I worked at Market Basket,” said Brandon.

“I took a shower,” said Harmony.

“That’s interesting,” said Mrs. Kennett. “I have a feeling that’s pretty normal, though.”

“Nope,” said Brad, a joker.

Noah, an upbeat kid with motor-control difficulties, said that he watched the Johnny Carson show all weekend.

The class was not under control. Everyone was talking.

“I found out,” said Mrs. Kennett, “that I’m getting another niece or nephew this weekend!”

“We didn’t even know you were pregnant,” said Brad.

“No, so my sister-in-law is pregnant with her second. She’s due in November. ALL RIGHTY! SO! SHHH. QUIET DOWN PLEASE! Before I read to you guys today, I’m going to hand out — please hold the moans and groans — I’m going to hand out—”

“UH!”

“AGH!”

“—your first assessment.”

“MOAN!”

“GROAN!”

“This is an assessment that has to do with the narration standard that we talked about. The unreliable narrator. Knowing what it is, and using the book to talk about that.” She moved around the class handing out the assignment.

Sebastian, one of the students I was responsible for, was drinking a bottle of mango juice. He was long-limbed, and made quick, decisive turns of his head, taking in what was happening and simultaneously ignoring it.

“I don’t understand what the deal is with that,” said Mrs. Kennett, pointing at Sebastian’s mango juice. “It’s a tiny bottle, and it’s very expensive.”

Sebastian shrugged, fished out a pair of earbuds from his backpack, and began untangling their cords.

Mrs. Kennett explained the project. It was going to be due in three weeks. “This is something that you’re going to be doing as we read the book. This is a narration video journal. I was going to be really mean and have you guys actually present these things, but I know that there’s a lot of anxiety around presenting in front of the class. So you can choose to present, which I’m pretty sure not many of you will do — otherwise you’re going to be emailing them to me. It does kind of require you to use a little bit of technology as well. You’re going to be videotaping yourselves. But I’ll be the only one who has to see it.”

“Steve, you have to wear a shirt,” said Artie.

“Do the video in the shower,” said Brad.

“OKAY! PLEASE LISTEN. Using your iPad, and iMovie, record four video journal entries, one for every twenty-five pages, that explains whether the narrator is reliable or unreliable, citing specific lines of text to support your argument. That’s called evidence, and we’re trying to create an argument that the narrator is either reliable or unreliable.” Each video journal entry should be between one and two minutes, she said, and it should include a slide of each quote the student used.

Sebastian finished his mango juice, tipping his head way back and making a sucking sound to get the last of it into his mouth.

“I have a question,” said Keith. “What if we don’t have an iPad?”

“We’re going to have to work around that,” said Mrs. Kennett. “I realize that you’re not the only one who’s in that pickle. You might have to hand-write it, or type it if you have access to a computer.” She went over the assignment again: analyze four quotations from four different parts of the book, preferably on video, in order to show whether the narrator is reliable or unreliable.

Sebastian began jamming the empty mango juice bottle against his tightly closed eye.

That was the plan, Mrs. Kennett said, and on Wednesday, they would start watching the movie version of The Shawshank Redemption, assuming it wasn’t a snow day. There followed an interchange on extreme facial piercings, including one that exposed your lower teeth and made you look like a bulldog. “I have six tattoos,” said Mrs. Kennett. “But some things I don’t really get the point of, that’s all. OKAY! Let’s listen and follow along! Shhh.”

Doing my job as an ed tech, I leaned forward and whispered to Sebastian to remove his earbuds from his ears so he could hear the story.

And then Mrs. Kennett began reading from The Shawshank Redemption, taking up at the moment when the narrator and his convict friends are on the freshly tarred roof drinking Black Label beer. “That beer was piss-warm,” Mrs. Kennett read, “but it was still the best I ever had in my life.” Instantly a concentrated, listening silence descended. The class, which had murmured and joked and made mildly rude comments without stop for ten minutes, was now still and perfectly attentive. Only two things, it seemed, really got the attention of students in RSU66: the Pledge of Allegiance, and fiction read aloud.

Mrs. Kennett was a good, uninhibited reader. Some words, like coterie, Rotarians, and Nembutal, stumped her, but she didn’t hesitate over a sentence like: If there were a few weevils in the bread, wasn’t that just too fucking bad? Using his teeth, Sebastian managed, after several tries, to pry off the red plastic ring from the mouth of the mango juice bottle. Mrs. Kennett came to a passage about Shawshank’s prison leadership: “The people who run this place are stupid brutal monsters, for the most part,” she read. “The people who run the straight world are brutal and monstrous but they happen to be not quite as stupid because the standard of competence out there is a little higher.” When she got to the part about Andy setting up the prison library, she stopped reading to say how important it was for the prisoners to get their high school diplomas. “He helped thirteen inmates get their high school equivalency,” she said. “Think about that. You guys are in high school now. Can you imagine being in your thirties, or forties, and not even having a high school diploma? Or fifties or sixties?”

Brad said that his sister was twenty-six and didn’t have her high school diploma.

“Not yet, but she’s still pretty young,” Mrs. Kennett said. “You always have time to go back. You just have to go to school, it’s just part of life, you just have to do it. So let’s move on.”

There was a brief interchange about how Red was Irish in the book, whereas Morgan Freeman, who played Red in the movie, wasn’t Irish, obviously.

“He could get a hair dye,” said Dale.

“That would be a sight — a ginger,” said Brad.

“He’s got some freckles on him,” said Kaylee.

“Obama’s Irish,” said Keith.

Later, when Mrs. Kennett read about a big draft in Andy’s cell, somebody whispered, “Foreshadowing!”

Steve said, “It would be cool to have a scientific instrument that would go off whenever foreshadowing occurs.”

“Or everybody in the room just coughs when we hear it,” said Sebastian, who was making an origami crane out of green paper.

“Who wants to keep going?” said Mrs. Kennett. She read some more pages, but it was just about the end of the class now, and people were restless, getting ready to leave. “All right,” she said. “So you guys have the rest of fifty-eight, fifty-nine, and half of page sixty to read tonight. That’s like a page and a half. We can do this!”

The bell bonged. Sebastian was the first one out of the room. I thought, So this is the life of an ed tech in high school. I thanked Mrs. Kennett and went to history class.

The teacher, Ms. Hopkins, said she was just back from a conference on the teaching of history, and she was tired. She looked pale. “It takes a lot of energy to talk,” she said. She asked me to make some two-sided copies of a worksheet, which I did, using the big copier in the teachers’ break room. She passed out the sheets I’d copied, which had a list of words on them. Next to each word was a blank space to write its definition.

“I can’t even handle the stickiness of this desk,” said a disheveled boy, Marlon. “I spilled grape juice all over it. It’s on my sleeve.”

Cole, the kid behind him, whispered, “Shut your mouth, shut your mouth, shut your mouth, shut your mouth.”

Ms. Hopkins closed the classroom door. “I don’t want to see any technology out, put it away, we don’t need it,” she said. “We’re going to go through these definitions. I’m going to give you pretty simplified definitions, so if yours are not simplified, or close to what I say, then I need you guys to write them down. These terms are like the basis of all this class. Starting with foreign. Can anyone give me a definition of foreign?”

Josh read from his iPad, hiding it behind his backpack: “Characteristic of a country or language other than one’s own.”

“That’s pretty much right on,” said Ms. Hopkins. “The simplified version that I have is just ‘dealing with other countries.’ When we say foreign, like foreign affairs, we’re just talking about us dealing outside of our own country. Foreign affairs are not going to be unemployment— GUYS.”

Two boys had been talking. “Sorry,” said one of them.

“So if we’re talking about Russia we’re talking about foreign affairs.” She asked for an example in US history where foreign affairs popped up. There was silence.

Finally Nicholas, wearing a red hoodie, raised his hand. “Different languages?” he said.

“Different languages, right,” said Ms. Hopkins. “But tell me an example of the US dealing with another country.”

Bethanne, a smart kid, spoke. “Trade, like when we get stuff from China?”

“Right. So these are examples, and if you don’t have these you should be writing them down. Any trade outside of our country is foreign. The other issue you can put down here is war. World War I, World War II, the Cold War. Any wars that are outside of our country, that we’re involved in, count as foreign.” She paused. “A pet peeve of mine?” She wrote WW1 and WW2 on the whiteboard. “Don’t ever write that, or that. That’s not how you write World War I or World War II. You use the Roman numerals. I get some great essays in this class and they write WW2, and it just immediately makes your essay seem, like, not as good of an argument, because you don’t know how to write the war. So, random side note, please make sure you don’t do that.”

She wrote domestic on the board and together she and the class defined it: it was the opposite of foreign. Then isolationism, then diplomacy.

“I can think of a case in our history when diplomacy failed,” said Preston, a smart kid. “Nicaragua. That was when we started selling weapons to the Nicaraguans to fight their own battle.”

Ms. Hopkins wrote Nicarauga on the whiteboard and paused. “I’m pretty sure that’s spelled wrong,” she said. She erased it and looked at the worksheet. “Treaty.”

Bethanne read aloud from her iPad, not bothering to hide it. “An official agreement that is made between two or more countries or groups?”

“Yes,” said Ms. Hopkins. “So it’s a formal peace agreement between countries or groups. For this class we’re really going to be talking about countries.” She wrote NATO and North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the board. A student got it confused with NAFTA.

We moved on to affect versus effect. “These terms are confused a lot by students,” Ms. Hopkins said. “This isn’t necessarily like a US history thing, but it is two terms that you need to understand the differences of. Can anybody explain to me the differences between effect and affect?”

A boy raised his hand. “When you’re saying affect, you’re saying that you’re going to change something. Effect is kind of used more as a noun. Like, ‘The effect of being shot is death.’”

We turned to conflict. Bethanne said, “Even in our own country, we cannot agree on anything.”

“Even in our school,” said Marlon. “We can’t agree on a grading system — we change it three times a trimester.”

The Vietnam War was an example of a conflict, said Preston.

“The eternal conflict between the sexes,” said Josh, with a flourish.

“Any war is going to go under conflict,” said Ms. Hopkins, sipping from a cup decorated with a paisley pattern. They turned the worksheet over to see what the next word was. “War,” said Ms. Hopkins.

“War, a state of armed conflict,” said Josh.

“I have kind of a long one,” said Ms. Hopkins. “‘Organized, and often prolonged, conflict. It usually includes’—you should be writing this if you don’t have it—‘usually includes extreme violence.’ People dying and shooting each other and all that. Social disruption. Economic disruption.”

Some of the students wrote extreme violence on their papers. More disembodied words floated through the still air of the classroom—social, political, economic, isolationism—each of them requiring a definition and an example. We got through these, one by one, but we still had militarism, fascism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, and totalitarianism to go. We were swimming in a warm, lifeless salt pond of geopolitical abstraction. Ms. Hopkins’s throat was hurting more now. She told everyone to work on their own, and she sat down and put on some music: Journey singing “Love Will Find You.” Then she played Joan Jett doing “I Love Rock ’n Roll.” The students copied out the dictionary definitions of the disembodied words until the bongers bonged. I felt sorry for this class, and for Ms. Hopkins. I said goodbye and walked around the corner and down a hall to Financial Algebra, taught by Mrs. Erloffer, a short, tough veteran teacher.

She stood at the whiteboard going through the homework — the students were doing tax problems. For example, if somebody’s taxes were $5,975, how much more tax would she have to pay if her income went from $42,755 to some higher amount? My head lolled and I read the inspirational posters on the wall. Below a photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue, a headline said, “As a Student, He Was No Einstein.” Another poster: “The Best Way to Make Your Dreams Come True Is to Wake Up.” And another: “You Get Out of Life What You Put Into It.”

She dimmed the lights and showed a soporific PowerPoint. “So we’re going to be constructing income tax graphs using compound equations,” Mrs. Erloffer said. “We’re going to use a flat tax, a proportional tax, and a progressive tax. Examples of flat tax. Is there anything we pay a flat tax on all the time?”

“Sales tax?” said a girl.

“Sales tax, that’s right. Proportional is just another word for flat tax. And then we have the progressive tax system — that’s when you pay different taxes based on the dollar amount that you earn. So — all these fancy words. I’m not going to make you know all these words, but if you hear them you’ll remember that we talked about them in class.”

The PowerPoint included tax problems with inequalities. “So let’s check your understanding,” said Mrs. Erloffer. “Can you write the tax schedule notation, interval notation, and compound inequality notation that would apply to a hundred and seventy-two thousand eight hundred and seventy-six dollars and ninety-nine cents? Let’s write that amount down.” She wrote the number down and showed how to notate it in several ways. “The tax schedule notation sort of wants it in words. Can you put it in words, now? You can do that. Here’s the tax schedule. So, it’s telling me that it has to be over what?”

A wispy girl raised her hand. “Over a hundred and thirty one thousand four hundred and fifty, but less than or equal to two hundred thousand three hundred.”

Mrs. Erloffer nodded, writing the words on the board. “It’s important to know where you fall in a tax bracket. I hope that you guys are all earning a hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars by the time I see you after you graduate. That would be awesome! Wish I earned a hundred and seventy-two thousand.”

A boy muttered something.

“Huh?” said Mrs. Erloffer.

“I was just talking to Gabe,” said the boy.

The soft rain of dollar figures continued, and I had to catch myself from dozing off at one point. “Simplify the equation and explain the numerical significance of the slope and the y intercept,” said Mrs. Erloffer. Had she seen my sleepy head dip slowly down? I think she had, but she didn’t say anything. As the clock made its final moves, everyone rubbed their eyes and started zipping up their backpacks. “We’re not out of here yet,” said Mrs. Erloffer. She finished graphing an equation, knowing, however, that everyone had zoned out. “So that’s the significance of slope and y intercept, and we’ll continue from here tomorrow.” Six bongs and we rose to leave. I walked around the halls trying to find my way back to Mr. Bowles’s room, getting lost twice. Finally I ran into Artie, from special ed math, and he told me where it was.

Mr. Bowles greeted me like an old friend. He said he’d just had an interesting talk with a student whose father was a bear-hunting guide. Several weeks before the beginning of bear-hunting season, the bear guides put out barrels filled with molasses, french-fry grease, stale pastries, and old donuts — black bears, it seems, are crazy for donuts. The bears become accustomed to feeding on the free junk food at the bait barrels, and then, on the day that hunting season opens, “hunters”—i.e., drunk, lazy barbarians — shoot at them from hiding places nearby. Each year, more than two thousand bears are killed in Maine at bait barrels. Mr. Bowles and I agreed that baiting bears with old donuts was unsportsmanlike and wrong. Then Mr. Bowles told a story about a time when he was surprised by a bear on a camping trip. “We sort of looked at each other, and then the bear turned around. The heart was really racing there for all twenty seconds of that encounter.”

Drew, a rangy kid with a faint mustache, walked in and announced that he’d done a bad job of lacing up his boots. He joked with Mrs. Meese about how she was always late, while she ate something out of a plastic tub. “I don’t like my last class,” Drew said. “I don’t like having my most hated class at the end.”

“What’s your most hated class?” asked Mr. Bowles politely.

“Bio.”

“Oh, jeez,” said Mr. Bowles. “You’d rather have that first?”

“Probably.”

Mr. Bowles sniffed. “What’s that smell, beef stew?”

“Barbecue chicken,” said Mrs. Meese, chewing.

“I was way off,” said Mr. Bowles.

“Yeah, I don’t know how you got beef stew out of barbecue chicken,” said Mrs. Meese.

“Smells kind of like orange chicken,” Drew said.

“Nope,” said Mrs. Meese, licking her fingers.

“That’s my favorite Chinese food,” said Drew. “I love it. When my dad was in the hospital, like he came out, we all went. Most of us had crabs’ legs, orange chicken and stuff.”

They talked about which restaurants were near the hospital — Five Guys, Denny’s, Friendly’s.

“You never know what to expect in a Chinese restaurant,” said Drew. “We walk in the door, and there was a guy standing there who looked just like Elvis Presley.”

“Was he singing?” asked Mr. Bowles.

“No.”

“Wearing the white jumpsuit?” asked Mrs. Meese.

“Black suit,” said Drew.

“Big fur coat?” said Mrs. Meese.

“No.”

A few more kids came in. “Drew and I love to hate each other,” Mrs. Meese explained to me. “He likes to pretend he doesn’t like me. But I know deep down he really loves me.”

“Deep, deep down,” said Drew.

“So buried that no one will ever find it,” Mrs. Meese said. “But it’s there.”

Drew ran his hands through his hair. “Last block,” he said, “we talked about how we can afford to be a potato.”

Mrs. Meese looked puzzled. “You can afford to be a potato? What was your vote on that?”

Drew said, “I had to vote whether I should stick my pencil in a socket and become a potato, or not stick my pencil in and stay a human non-potato. She’s like, well, you’ve got to have the money to be a potato. And you’re going to have to have someone to take care of you.”

“What class was this in?” Mrs. Meese asked.

“Personal economics.”

Mrs. Meese was still puzzled. “I’m thinking what does money and being a potato have to do with each other, buddy?”

“I don’t know, she just brought it up. She was like, ‘How are you going to pay for the medical bills and stuff?’” He walked over and sat by the window.

“Vegetable,” said Mrs. Meese quietly. “Not potato.”

I asked her how long she’d been an ed tech. “I started subbing in the fall of 2012, I think. And I was hired full time a year ago. When I subbed I was in every day. It got to the point where my phone never rang anymore, I was just pre-booked. They were just literally like, ‘Okay, we just want you in.’”

I said that the school seemed to be full of good kids.

“What I found when I started subbing — the teachers are all very friendly, receptive to you being here, nobody has a problem with helping you with anything. And I’ve heard from other subs who have subbed in other places that their school isn’t that way. The teachers in this school love having ed techs to help in the classroom, and I’ve heard in other schools it’s not like that. The teachers actually don’t want the help in the room. Maybe it’s because it’s another set of ears and eyes.”

“And also,” I said, “the ed techs can be the source of a little murmur of conversation.”

“They can be,” said Mrs. Meese. “That English class you were in this morning, that is a very big class. The math class, how’d that go?”

“Fine,” I said. “I didn’t do much.”

“I’ve done that course seven times,” said Mrs. Meese. “But this is the first time with that teacher, and she’s doing it all different. So I’m walking in kind of knowing what’s going on, but not knowing how she’s going to be doing it.”

I asked her about math requirements. Everyone had to take Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II, she said. Financial Algebra was a half-credit course, and her kids didn’t really understand it, but they tried. She packed up her lunch things and went over to talk to Drew. “I’m on this side of the room just so I can irritate you,” she said to him. “I love it when I can irritate you, it just makes my day.”

“I’ll scare you,” said Drew.

“You’re not going to scare me.”

“I scared you that one time, I can scare you again.”

Mrs. Meese laughed.

“It’ll happen again,” said Drew.

“One day you’re going to scare the living crap right out of me again,” said Mrs. Meese. “I believe you.”

Drew told us about an April Fool’s trick one of his teachers did at his old school. “She took this teacher’s keys to the lunchroom, and before they made the Jell-O, she told them, ‘Put the keys in the Jell-O and serve that to her during lunch.’ She got her Jell-O and saw her keys.”

“I hope they cleaned her keys before they got put in that Jell-O!” said Mrs. Meese. “Yuck.”

“One teacher was kind of short,” Drew went on. “They put a pie over the door so that it fell right on him when he came in. It was the funniest thing I have ever seen.”

The bell rang for block 4. I walked out to one of the modular classrooms in the back of the school, near the football field, where there was a community safety class taught by Ms. Accardo, a petite smiley woman with big hair and big moves. She looked like a dance instructor giving a TED talk. As soon as the bell rang, she said, “Well! Got some review stuff for you guys! After, of course, I do attendance!” While she called names, a kid named Ronald unwrapped a sandwich and began eating it. “Just so you know,” she said, “the people listening to the iPads, if that’s what you need to do in order to focus, I’m fine with that, BUT! If you spend time in class trying to find the right song, I do have a problem with that. So just a little FYI, wanted to get that out of the way.”

She twirled on her feet and held out a finger. “Okay! What four things will clue you in about an emergency existing?”

“Behavior,” said Ronald, chewing his sandwich.

“Unusual behaviors!”

“Smell,” said Cayley.

“Unusual smells!”

“Sight,” said Anabelle.

“Unusual sights!”

“Sounds,” said Kiefer.

“Unusual sounds! Those are the four things. Very good. Okay. That will trigger, or should trigger, your rescue radar to go off. And why don’t people get involved in rescue situations?”

“They don’t know what to do?” said Kiefer.

“They don’t know what to do!”

“They don’t want to be responsible?” said Anabelle.

“They don’t want the responsibility of helping! They don’t want to get involved! And why don’t they want to get involved?”

“Because they’re afraid they might mess up?” said Andrew.

“They’re afraid they might make a mistake! And what happens sometimes when people make a mistake and hurt somebody?”

“Get sued?” said Andrew.

“They’re afraid they’re going to get sued! What are some other reasons people don’t help?”

Cayley said that you could be self-conscious.

Ms. Accardo made a slow, wide-eyed nod, turning to look at everyone in the class. “You’re going to have a big old crowd of people, crowding around, staring at you rescuing somebody! Anything else? Sometimes people are scared of catching a disease. Or they’re all grossed out, because sometimes rescuing people is nasty. It’s gross.”

Ronald raised his hand. “They think that people already have it under control.”

“Yeah. ‘Oh, there’s people there! Somebody’s taking care of that.’ Big ole assumption! Okay, so what we’re doing now is we’re taking away a lot of those reasons for people not to get involved.”

She told us how to obtain consent to help someone who is hurt. “What happens if someone is spewing blood all over the place, and they go, ‘Get away!’?”

“Call 911?”

She pointed at the girl, Jennifer, who’d said this. “Call. You cannot tackle them! And put bandages all over them! Can’t do it. Now, if they go, ‘Go away’—and then pass out? A reasonable person would want assistance if they were unconscious and severely injured. You can help now — even though they said go away before they passed out.”

But never try to do something that is outside your scope of training, Ms. Accardo warned. To illustrate this, she offered a vivid retelling of the tracheotomy scene in The Heat, which was, she said, “an R-rated flick with a lot of f-bombs.” The guy’s choking, and Sandra Bullock shouts, “I got this! Give me a knife!” She jams it into the guy’s throat, and the blood starts spraying out, and she panics. The guy is practically dying, and she’s horrified. The moral being that you don’t know how to do something just because you saw somebody do it on TV. And always, always, Ms. Accardo said, before you help somebody, tell them what you’re up to. “Your doctor tells you what he or she is doing. They just don’t stick their hand up your shirt, right? With the stethoscope? They tell you what they’re doing! You need to do the same, so you don’t look like some creeper!” After giving us several more pieces of advice, she played a video about how to move a victim, using an assist, a carry, or a drag. We watched how to do a two-person seat carry. If the victim has a head or spinal injury, you must perform a clothes drag. “Support the victim by gathering the clothing behind the head and neck,” said the male narrator, in a soothing voice. “Move the victim by holding on to her clothing, and dragging her.”

“You don’t HAVE to move the victim,” said Ms. Accardo, after the movie was over — you only had to move the victim if the place where the victim lay prevented proper care. “Example! The person’s on the bed, and you have to give CPR. You’re just going to bounce them! You’ve got to get them on a firm surface to get compressions.” The lunch bell rang and everybody left, leaving their backpacks behind.

“That was a pleasure,” I said. “I didn’t do anything, but I’m happy to be in your class.”

“Well, thank you,” said Ms. Accardo. “We’re going to go to lunch, and then we’re going to come back.”

We went to the teachers’ lunchroom, and Ms. Accardo introduced me to several teachers sitting at a round table. I started eating a chicken-salad sandwich. One of the teachers, Mrs. Plaistow, told a story of getting locked out of her lakeside camp cottage. She was out walking her dog, when her daughter went out to smoke a cigarette and forgot to bring her keys with her. Mrs. Plaistow went to a neighbor’s house to ask for help. A fifteen-year-old kid came to the door in boxers. “That’s all he’s got on is boxers. Two black Labs barking their heads off. He says, ‘I’ll go over, we’ll break into your camp.’ His dad pulls on his pants, he says, ‘I’ll go over.’” The dad went to work on the door with a credit card. “Forty-five minutes, he struggled with that door,” said Mrs. Plaistow. “I said, ‘I feel so much better! You say you’ve never had a latch you couldn’t get open, and you’re struggling.’ He goes, ‘Don’t remind me.’ He goes off to get a sledgehammer to break the lock. Three hours, standing in the cold. The dog was happy, he was playing in the snow.” She offered the son and the dad some deer-meat chili. “The dad says, ‘You don’t have to give us any chili. This is what neighbors do. Someday we might need something from you.’ I said, ‘That’s probably doubtful.’ He goes, ‘Yeah, probably it is. But you never know.’” End of story.

Mrs. Rausch, a math teacher, talked about how, when she had to miss a day, she always left way more worksheets for the class than the substitute could ever get the class to do. Some subs just let the kids go wild and swing from the chandeliers, she said. Another teacher, Mrs. Thwaite, who sold Mary Kay cosmetics, invited Mrs. Plaistow and Mrs. Rausch to come over for facials on Thursday. Mrs. Plaistow accepted.

“Nothing’s going to make my face look any better,” said Mrs. Rausch.

Ms. Accardo and I walked back to the modular classroom. She resumed the lesson. “Two-person seat carry — anyone want to do that?”

Nobody volunteered.

“I had a kid break his foot out on the field,” Ms. Accardo said. “Getting the wheelchair across an athletic field is not an easy feat. Way easier to get him into the building with a two-person seat carry.”

She waited. Still nobody volunteered.

“So you’re all good on how to carry people!” she said sarcastically. “No one wants to practice!”

“I want to drag someone,” said Anabelle. “Can I drag you?”

Ms. Accardo got down on the floor. “Go ahead, drag me,” she said. She pretended to be unconscious.

“Somebody videotape this!” said Ronald.

The girl struggled, but couldn’t move Ms. Accardo. Kiefer stepped in to help, lifting Ms. Accardo’s head.

Ms. Accardo opened her eyes for a moment. “I’ll move my hair out of the way, sorry,” she said. She resumed unconsciousness.

“I don’t want to rip her shirt,” said Anabelle. Eventually she successfully slid Ms. Accardo several feet over the floor.

We watched another educational video. “Most of us will experience some kind of severe injury at some time in our lives,” said the narrator, while a loop of ambient new-age music played in the background. We watched actors moaning in pain from several gruesome soft-tissue injuries, and we learned how to apply pressure on a wound to stop the bleeding. When the movie was over, Ms. Accardo talked about how to deal with impaled objects. “You don’t let the person take out the impaled object!” she said. “They have to resist the urge!” Her marker made squeaking sounds on the whiteboard as she drew a picture. “When there is an impaled object — let’s say here’s your arm, and here is the knife blade.”

“Ew,” said Cayley.

“God,” said Ronald.

“Here’s the knife blade, here is a blood vessel. Blood flow is stopped. Pressure, pressure.” She erased the knife with her finger and, with a cry of agony, pulled an imaginary knife from her arm. “Now the knife is missing, and…” She drew jets of blood splashing out of the wound. “Squirt, squirt, squirt. Now it’s open to bacteria, it’s open to increased bleeding.” She thought for a second. “You get something impaled in your eyeball?” She pretended to pull something out of her eye. “Aaaah, out comes the eyeball!” She told us where our various arterial pressure points were—“If you have a gusher, press on a pressure point”—and she warned us against using tourniquets. Finally, with a minute left, she asked the class to practice bandaging some wounds. I waved goodbye and hustled off across the parking lot to a ninth-grade remedial English class in the North Building, a separate one-story structure where all the freshmen were segregated.

The regular teacher was out. In her place was a fashionably dressed substitute of about sixty named Mrs. Carlisle, who wore artsy earrings and had a Florida tan. There were six kids in the class, crowded around two perpendicular tables in a room whose walls were covered with definitions and rules of grammar. The kids were slapping binders around and shouting. I introduced myself to Mrs. Carlisle as the substitute ed tech, shook hands with her, and sat down. “You need to calm down!” said a frowny smartass boy, Lance, loudly, to one of the binder slappers, Alan.

Mrs. Carlisle turned. “I have not had the pleasure of having you before,” she said to Lance.

“You’re in for a rude awakening,” said Leanne, a girl with short black hair and goth makeup.

“There’s something you need to know about me,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “I’m not just some warm body off the street that’s here to babysit you. I’m a school counselor, have been for twenty-five years, hope to be again. So with that said, I’m hoping that you’re going to do the things you’re supposed to do, so that I don’t have to do what I’m supposed to do when you don’t. Otherwise I’m very easy to get along with.” Everyone was quieter after she said that she’d been a school counselor for twenty-five years. She handed out the first worksheet, which was about idioms. “You guys remember what an idiom is?” She read its definition: a saying that does not make literal, logical, or grammatical sense, but people within the culture understand its meaning. She said, “The example they give is, Don’t let the cat out of the bag. Doesn’t mean a cat’s really going to pop out of the bag, okay?”

“Riaow!” said Leanne.

“So you need to use this idiom in your writing today: a blessing in disguise.”

“What does that mean?” asked Brianne, a big girl in a very small striped shirt.

“Think about it for a minute,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “I heard one this morning. I was helping someone write, and their prompt was if anyone from the war had shared stories with them. One of the students was telling me that one of his stories was that his brother had to go to the bathroom. He was in Iraq, and then the bomb sirens went off, so he hit the dirt. The latrine that he would have gone to was blown up. It was a ‘blessing in disguise’ that the sirens went off, because he hit the dirt instead of being in the latrine. Okay?”

The class was silent, thinking this over.

“Or it might be,” Mrs. Carlisle continued, “that when we had the snow the other day, I was going home, and a truck and a car had hit each other. The side of the car was gone. Everyone was okay. They were all standing there talking. So everyone was safe, but it was one of those really slippery days. So it was a ‘blessing in disguise’ that I stayed late to talk to a teacher. Because otherwise I might have been that car. Do you get the idea?”

“Yep,” said Leanne. “Kind of.”

“So you can get started on that. I’m going to give you till ten after.” She pointed to me. “And this is…”

“Nick,” I said. “Mr. Baker.”

Everyone laughed: there was another Baker in the class, Lance Baker.

“That’s creepy,” said Brianne.

“Smells like marshmallows in here,” said Leanne.

“Do you girls need pencils?” asked Mrs. Carlisle. “Shh! Voices off!”

Alan cleared his throat phlegmily.

“Shh!”

The remedial grind of the pencil sharpener. Giggling. Muttering. Whispering. Tapping of pencils. Time passing.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have four minutes left! I should not hear any voices!”

More muttering and giggling. Lance collected some of the papers.

“Take it away, squire!” said Leanne, holding out her sheet.

“What’s a squire?” said Lance.

“It’s like a butler,” said Leanne.

“No way!”

Mrs. Carlisle asked Lance to describe what he’d written. “I wrote, like, two things,” he said. “I’ll do my second one, because it’s funny. Most of you have already heard this. I saw a squirrel, and I went to go shoot at it. I missed, and it hit the tree, and it ricocheted and hit me where the sun don’t shine.”

Mrs. Carlisle cocked her head. “Okay, so how’s that a blessing in disguise? I guess if you’re the squirrel.”

“It could have hit my face and put my eye out!” said Lance. “And then, my second one, I was sitting in my room, and I had my paintball gun in my hand.”

“Oh, god,” said Brianne, rolling her eyes.

“You’re a dangerous child,” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“And I had my hand over the barrel, and I didn’t think it was loaded, and I accidentally pulled the trigger, and I had a huge bruise on the side of my hand.”

“A bruise, not a burn?” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“It was a bruise,” said Lance.

“Good thing it wasn’t a flamethrower!” said a goofy kid named Samuel.

“I’ve seen kids get horrible burns on their faces from paintball guns,” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“I got shot by one, it hurt,” said Brianne.

“Are you sharing?” said Mrs. Carlisle, turning to her. “Go ahead, share.”

“One day when my brother and I were home alone,” the girl said, “he had a lighter, that he was playing with. I was in the other room, and I walked in, and he told me to see how hot it was, and I didn’t believe him, so he threw it at me, and he burned me with it.” She laughed. “If you have a lighter on too long, the metal will get hot. It left a mark on my shoulder.”

“So how’s that a blessing in disguise?” said Mrs. Carlisle.

Brianne pondered. “My dad came home?”

“She wasn’t killed,” said Leanne.

Mrs. Carlisle shook her head. “A blessing in disguise would have been if your dad came home before your brother had a chance to throw the lighter at you. You wrote a story, and that’s great, but we still want you to know what the idiom means. And I’m thinking you’re still a little confused.”

Leanne said, “One time I was in a car with my mom. We were on the road going to my appointment, and I was listening to music, and next thing I knew, my mom’s hand was on my chest. She hit the brakes really hard.”

“The mom reaction!” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“And the car in front of us just, like, busted right into the other car in front of them,” Leanne said. “So it was a blessing in disguise that my mom stopped before we actually hit.”

“Remember when you popped a wheelie with the four-wheeler?” said Alan to Lance.

“I remember that!” said Lance. “I’ll try anything once.”

“I’m sure you will,” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“He popped a wheelie on his four-wheeler and fell off the back of it,” said Alan.

“Nice.”

That was the end of assignment number one. Mrs. Carlisle gave instructions for the next worksheet, which had four pages. It was about figurative language. We had to underline and label each instance of figurative language in a story about an airport. Mrs. Carlisle said, “You should find one simile, one metaphor, two hyperboles, two examples of personification, one alliteration, three onomatopoeias, two idioms, and one allusion, okay?”

A shy girl named Misty raised her hand. “How do you find these if you don’t even know what they are?”

“All you have to do is turn around,” said Brianne. Everyone turned to read the definitions on the back wall.

Samuel began singing, “Oh no, moto peeya.”

We did a little review. A simile compared two things using like or as, but a metaphor compared two things without using like or as. “So, the playground at Lasswell was an ice rink,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “That’s a metaphor.” Evidently she’d been subbing recently at Lasswell Elementary School.

“An onomatopoeia is…” She trailed off, searching her notes. “I’m a little rusty, so I looked these up for you guys. It also, um, compares two things.” She seemed doubtful and she looked at me. “Do you have anything to add?”

I said that an onomatopoeia was a word that sounded like what it meant. “So if the thunder goes ‘rumble rumble rumble,’ the word is trying to imitate what thunder actually sounds like. Or ‘He squeaked loudly when he sat down on the tack.’ The squeak — eek — is kind of a word that sounds like what it means.” I felt myself blushing — it was the first teaching I’d done that day.

“Eek,” said Leanne.

Mrs. Carlisle reviewed alliteration: “Dunkin’ Donuts has the same sound where? At the beginning of the word. Does that help? Yes, no, maybe so? Get started and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

Leanne said, “Can I have my pencil?”

“Get out of your chair and reach for it,” said Mrs. Carlisle.

The students hunched over the story and read it silently. Mrs. Carlisle and I compared notes, whispering. It was not a very good story, and there were some ambiguities.

After fifteen minutes, Brianne said, “I did not get any of this. We just started learning this.”

“Don’t get frustrated,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “We can go through it together. These are tricky, guys.”

We started with the first page, which said, Jason could feel butterflies in his stomach as he entered the bustling airport. “This place is a zoo!” his mother exclaimed as she got in line at the ticket counter.

Lance said, “I thought ‘This place is a zoo’ is a hyperbowl.”

“Some of these could go either way,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “I said it was a metaphor. But it could also be a hyperbole, because it’s saying the place is a zoo. Jason could feel butterflies in his stomach. What do you think that is?”

“Nervous,” said Brianne.

“Well, yeah, he’s nervous, but what figure of speech are we using here?”

“A hyperbowl?” said Alan. He sniffed. “Somebody’s using perfume.”

“Personification?” said Misty.

“What is that smell?” said Alan.

“Can you really feel butterflies in your stomach?” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“No,” said Leanne.

“So isn’t it kind of like letting the cat out of the bag?”

“It’s kind of a tickle in your stomach,” said Lance.

“Unless you swallow a butterfly,” said Samuel.

“Right,” said Mrs. Carlisle, “but it doesn’t say that Jason swallowed a butterfly.”

Lance said, “Like when you go up the hill and the roller coaster drops down and it’s like a tickle in your stomach. And then you look down and say, ‘Waaaaaaaaah!’”

“An allusion?” said Brianne.

Mrs. Carlisle moved on. “How about She got in line behind about a million other people. Are there really a million people there?”

“Exaggeration,” said Leanne.

“So if it’s an exaggeration, what is it?”

“That would be an opanapo…,” said Alan.

“How about hyperbole? What’s a hyperbole?”

Brianne turned and read the definition on the wall. “An exaggeration that is so dramatic that no one would believe it to be true.”

“I know an allusion,” said Misty. She found the place in the story that she’d underlined and read it. “Jason noticed that the security guard looked more intimidating than Mr. T. I found that!”

“Yep, allusion,” said Mrs. Carlisle, checking her notes. “It’s making reference to something or someone. Good job, Misty.”

Farther down the page we came to another passage: Jason placed his shoes, belt, and change onto the tired conveyor belt and walked through the metal detector. Mrs. Carlisle said, “Tired purveyor belt! Can the purveyor belt really get tired?”

“It can break down,” said Lance. “It can go, pkkkkk!”

“Is it really sleepy?” said Mrs. Carlisle. “No.”

The PA system bonged. “Please excuse the interruption for a few announcements. Track practice will begin at two-fifteen in the gym, our first tangible sign that spring is indeed here. There will be a parent informational meeting for all boys’ and girls’ track athletes this Thursday at six p.m. in the auditorium. All parents are encouraged to attend.”

“Make sure your names are on your papers!” said Mrs. Carlisle. “I should have six papers! I have five! I have Leanne’s. I have Brianne’s. I have Lance’s, I have Misty’s, I have—”

“This is not really a fanny pack,” said Lance loudly. “This is a knapsack.”

“Hobo sack!” said Alan.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “Push in your chairs.”

“Lance is Hobo Joe,” said Alan.

“Stack the chairs,” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“We don’t stack the chairs in this class,” said Lance.

“If it’s too hard for you,” said Mrs. Carlisle, “I’ll stack them after.”

“We don’t stack them,” said Leanne.

“That’s what I’m trying to say!” said Lance.

“Listen, why do you think we stack chairs?” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“So that people don’t fall over them?” said Misty.

“How do you think the rug gets vacuumed at night, guys?”

“No idea,” said Lance.

“The janitor!” said Brianne.

“Very good,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “So we do it to be kind to the people who have to clean up your messes.”

Samuel and Misty stacked the chairs. The bell for first wave bonged. “Bye!”

“Bye, guys, have a good day,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “I’ll make sure she knows that sheet was hard for you! I’m sure she already knows.”

“Hope to see you again,” I said to her. I walked to the office, saying hey to a few students I recognized. Paulette, the secretary, took my name tag. “Thank you very much,” she said.

There was a crowd of students boarding their buses when I pushed out the side exit — fifteen idling yellow buses, packed with human flesh, ready to take people home. The windows were already getting fogged on the inside.

My car was very quiet when I got in. “All right, there we have it,” I said aloud. “There we freaking have it.”

That was Day Six.