Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids

DAY SEVEN. Wednesday, March 26, 2014

LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, ED TECH

WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?

BETH HAD ANOTHER ED TECH ASSIGNMENT at the high school for me on Wednesday. My first class was US History, twenty-two tenth-graders under the practiced tutelage of Mr. Hawkes, who also coached hockey and had a powerful handshake. Mr. Hawkes knew how to take command of a class — he stood with his legs far apart as he took attendance, wearing a blue sports jacket and a black polka-dot tie, and he spoke with a remarkably loud voice. Half of the history students were missing, though — they were off interviewing for coveted spots at the regional technical school in Sanford, where those who got in could take half-day courses in the building trades, in landscaping and horticulture, in web design, videography, car repair, nursing, early-childhood education, and in other potentially remunerative fields. Mr. Hawkes referred the class to an online textbook; they could take a look at it if they wanted to. “Not that we use the book a lot,” he said. “I’m not a big book guy.” The assignment was to work on a chart about the antebellum era, but because so many kids were absent, he turned off one set of ceiling lights and put on a History Channel video called America: The Story of Us. Inspiring orchestral music came on. “We are pioneers and trailblazers,” said the narrator. “We fight for freedom. We transform our dreams into the truth. Our struggles will become a nation.” The music surged. “America — land of invention. Hot dogs, jazz, the elevator, skyscrapers. This is the story of the greatest innovation of all — the modern, vertical city.” I found a seat near the windows and relaxed; there was no one-on-one coaching I could do with a movie playing.

America: The Story of Us was heavy on the music and edited like a hard-hitting segment of Dateline, but it was good; most kids watched it, or at least half watched it. It began with the campaign to uncrate and assemble the Statue of Liberty, and went on to tell the story of the Bessemer process of steelmaking and Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie risks everything to build a huge plant in Pittsburgh, larger than eighty football fields. “Inside: five tons of molten metal, three thousand degrees, hot enough to vaporize a man in seconds,” said the narrator. Carnegie becomes fabulously wealthy. Cut to the Gilded Age. “It’s an era of obscene opulence. New York is a playground for super-rich industrialists and financiers. Wildly extravagant, they smoke cigars rolled in hundred-dollar bills, their wives’ hats studded with diamonds.” Dramatic reenactments take us high up on a skyscraper during construction. “They’re up here eight hours a day. Meals when they can. No bathroom breaks.” Really? The roughnecks are Mohawk Indians and European immigrants. “Two roughnecks out of five die or are disabled on the job.” We learn about Elisha Otis’s elevator, and the density of new urban populations, and, in the shadows of the steel-frame buildings, slums and crime. “Gangsters, murderers, thieves, and fear are on the streets.” Policeman Burns, the crime buster, gets tough, using the third degree. Jacob Riis takes photographs of poor families. Horse manure is a problem. “Wagons are blocked by three-foot-high piles of human and animal waste.” George Waring builds sewers. Edison’s bulb lights the cities, using power plants, conquering the night. “As electricity comes to the city, more and more people come with it. By 1900—”

Mr. Hawkes stopped the movie there, not wanting to get too far into the twentieth century yet, and he described what they’d be doing for the rest of the week. “Now you’ve got about ten minutes, so you can continue to pretend to find something to do,” he said. Students sat quietly, staring at their iPads, listening to music. A teacher came by to borrow some Wite-Out. Six bongs.

Ms. Accardo’s community health class, out back in the modulars, was next — but Ms. Accardo was absent. In her place was Mrs. Carlisle, the sub who had taught blessings in disguise on Monday. She was wearing jeans and leather boots with fur trim, and she had her bifocals on so that she could study the sub plans. “The first thing you are doing today,” she said, “is you’re going to need your iPads and you’re going to go on Edmodo and find the stress management folder. You’re going to read about the physical effects of stress on the body. You need to take notes on that. So get all your giggles out now.” Several kids had forgotten the group code for Edmodo and asked Mrs. Carlisle for it. She didn’t have it: subs weren’t allowed to tap into the school’s digital resources. “They trust me with you guys, but not with a piece of machinery — just lives.”

Cayley, putting away her hairbrush, tried to remember the Edmodo group login code. “It’s GLU3 something something something,” she said.

“Can you two look on with people?” said Mrs. Carlisle. “Because we’re going to be moving on.”

“I don’t understand what we’re supposed to do,” said Kim, in layers of pastel.

Reading over Kim’s shoulder, Mrs. Carlisle said, “When you have a tension headache, what happens to your body due to stress?”

“You get a headache,” said Kim.

“Yes… but.” Mrs. Carlisle waited.

“You start crying?”

“How do you know you have a tension headache?” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“Your head hurts?” said Kim.

“But where does it usually hurt?”

“Your head?”

“The back of your head,” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“Really?”

“Yep.” Mrs. Carlisle rubbed her head. “It starts back here. It’s good that you don’t know this. Adults know this because they live it.”

“Does that happen to Ms. Finn?” said Cayley. “Is that why she always walks like this?” She hunched her shoulders and held her head at a weird angle. Eric, in a gray T-shirt, laughed.

“I don’t know, honey,” said Mrs. Carlisle.

“Some days she has that buff walk,” Cayley said.

“Like a man?” said Eric.

“Yeah.”

Mrs. Carlisle handed out a packet on how to manage stress.

Jeremy tapped his feet several times and turned to the girl next him, Steph, one of the pretty girls. “You smell like mangoes,” he said.

“Really?” said Steph.

“I like mangoes,” Jeremy said.

The class began writing about tension headaches and migraines, and Mrs. Carlisle told Kim how tense she gets when she goes to the dentist. “I had a fourth-grader dislocate my jaw, and I had to have my jaw wired shut,” she said. “It wasn’t good. I’ve not seen any kids here like the kids I used to work with.”

After she’d collected the papers, Mrs. Carlisle had everyone relax. “Stretch out your legs. If you fall asleep, I am not responsible for what happens to you while you’re sleeping. Your eyes have to be closed. Listen — you have to listen!”

She turned on the stress-reduction tape — an actual cassette tape in a tape player. We heard some glissy new-age chords, over which hovered a woman’s infinitely soothing voice. She told us to close our eyes, to breathe in through our noses and breathe out through our mouths, to clench and unclench our toes. “Your body is feeling heavy and warm and soothed,” the angel-voiced woman said, “as if you just came… from a warm bath. There’s a sensation that you’re sinking… sinking… you’re sinking into the chair or surface below… you’re feeling relaxed and secure as you sink deeper into the warmth… so soothed… so comforted.” Lambent swells of ambient deep-chill music filled the classroom. Some of the kids were slumped on their desks, some had their heads thrown back with eyes closed. Cayley was studying her fingers. “You feel good about yourself… about your body… about the world around you. This feels so nice… there’s nothing to be concerned about.” The kind extraterrestrial angel goddess took us hypnotically back in time. “Remember the days… when you were a child in the back seat of a car… coming home from a long, active day of fun… you were satisfied… worn out… kind of tired… you’re in the back seat… possibly leaned up against a sibling or a favorite blanket… you hear the cars going by and the quiet music of the radio… you hear Mom and Dad in the front seat talking softly… as you allow yourself to drift into a peaceful contented sleep.” She took us to the seaside, where the warm waves teased the sand. We heard the gulls crying. “Your hair dances with the wind,” she said. “Enjoy this moment… your body is feeling so soothed and so relaxed… let your thoughts drift.” The music swelled again, metamorphosing into a sort of trancelike chorale prelude of compulsory relaxation, and then it died away. There was silence. Mrs. Carlisle turned off the tape machine with an old-school click.

Eric sucked some drool into his mouth with a slurping sound.

Cayley said, “Is it over? That was not twenty-five minutes long.”

“Are we supposed to pass these papers in?” said Kim.

Jeremy took a peek at his phone.

“Let’s take a minute to wake up,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “To process the tape. What did you think?”

Silence.

“Did any of you feel any of what she was talking about? Yes, no, maybe so?”

Silence.

“I think everyone just took a nap,” said Tasha, rubbing her eyes.

“No,” Mrs. Carlisle said. “I was watching.”

“I enjoyed it,” said Jeremy, loudly, with a smirk.

Steph turned and said, disgustedly, “You didn’t do it!”

Mrs. Carlisle said gently to the boy: “I want to know what kept you from doing this exercise.”

“I was just too cool for it,” Jeremy said.

“How about a serious answer?”

“Honestly, it just didn’t grab my mind.”

Mrs. Carlisle described the homework. “You guys have in front of you a stress-anger goal packet.” Everyone was supposed to set a stress-reduction goal and itemize a series of steps that would be necessary to reach it. “You need to pick a date for when you’re going to start your plan,” she said. “And before you get all stressed out about your plan to be stress free, think about some of the things you’re doing now. For some of you it might be sports or music or your best friend. So don’t let making a plan to manage your stress stress you out.”

Jeremy was drumming his feet on the floor. It was almost time to leave. The bell bonged. “Bye,” said Mrs. Carlisle. “Have a good day!”

Students shuffled out, bumping backpacks. When they were gone I told Mrs. Carlisle that I admired how she was able to go with the flow and make things work. “Thank you, I appreciate that,” she said. Feeling oddly peaceful and content with my lot, I went off to an eleventh-grade history class with Ms. Day, where I was supposed to shadow Sebastian.

Ms. Day was a cordial young woman with a wry smile and thick hair cut short. “Today we’re going to touch on Germany,” she said, “and then we’re going to move in on the rise of Hitler, and how Germany was able to accomplish all the things that it did. And how that happened is really correlated to a lot of things going on in the world today. History repeats itself a lot.” She shivered. “I’m going to put my jacket back on, because it’s freezing.”

Ms. Day played a YouTube video of a recent TV news story about Lasswell High School. An art class at the school was learning to draw faces by making portraits of destitute orphan children in Haiti. The idea was that the Haitian orphans would then draw portraits of the Maine kids. “In the face of sorrow,” said the newswoman, “a small message of hope, and a sketch of a brighter future.”

Ms. Day said, “So that was a cool way to start class. Good things going on.” She began showing slides. “Okay, fascism. What do you guys have about fascism? Ron, what have you got?”

“Led by a dictator having complete power,” said Ron.

“Good, led by a dictator having complete power,” said Ms. Day. “Anyone else have anything different? Here’s something else. I’m going to show you a definition. Yours does not need to say the exact same thing — you don’t need it to be word for word. It just needs to have the same message. So: fascism. This system is led by a dictator — good job, Ron — having complete power, suppressing all opposition, and controlling all industry and commerce. In our system today, who would be a group of people that oppose the president a lot?”

“Hippies!” said Sebastian.

“No. Well, not really.”

“Middle Easterners,” said Chad, eating a Jolly Rancher.

“In our own country,” said Ms. Day. “Obama’s a Democrat, so what party opposes him? Republicans, right?”

“Yes!” Side conversations were in progress around the class.

“We can get through this if you guys let me talk,” said Ms. Day. “We have Democrats and Republicans who are known sometimes to have opposing ideas. That are keeping each other in check, so that one party doesn’t grow too big and one doesn’t grow too small. They can kind of battle it out and find some common ground, ideally. A Republican can stand up there and say, I disagree with what our president’s doing, and here are my reasons.” She turned to Scott, who had his iPhone out. “Put it away, or it’s going in the trash. You can’t do that in a fascist society. In a fascist society, there is no opposition. There is one party, there is one ruler, and you all love them, and you do not say anything bad about them, and if you do, you’re going to some sort of camp, or you’re being killed, or you’re disappearing in the middle of the night. Siberia, right? The Russians did that a lot. Siberian exile.”

“Serbia?” said Chad.

“Siberia. It’s like a tundra. Okay? No opposition. There’s no lively debate. It is this way and that is the way it is.” She described the free-market system, and compared it to the economy under a dictatorship. “If I want to go start a business tomorrow, I can.” In a dictatorship all business is government-run, she said. “Two countries that had this type of government were Italy, with Mussolini, and Germany, with Hitler.”

“I didn’t know Mussolini was from Italy,” said Sebastian, who was paying attention. “I thought he was Russian.”

“No, Mussolini is Italy,” said Ms. Day. “You should look up Italy. The way Mussolini takes over Italy is pretty crazy. He took his men — he was a big war hero — walked up to the capital, and took it over. He said, I run this country now. We’re not really going to have time to go into it, but if you want to do some independent research, how Mussolini took over is pretty impressive and cool.”

“He just walked right up?” said Sebastian.

“Yes, literally walked right up.”

Fascism was extreme nationalism, often racism, Ms. Day said. “So under nationalism you should also have Germany and Italy. Make sure those countries are under that category as well. How could nationalism lead to racism? Give me an example.”

“Slavery?” said Sebastian.

“Slavery, right. The United States was pretty proud of itself, but we had slaves.”

Maria, with waist-length black hair, raised her hand. “Hitler,” she said.

“Hitler. Germans are superior, but only the Aryan German is superior. Just because all these Jews are part of Germany doesn’t mean they’re German. They don’t have the mark of the blond-hair-blue-eye, and they are the cause of all evil. That’s how it gets spun, or turns into racism. Yeah, they live here, but they don’t look like us, they don’t have the same ideals as us. The United States with African-Americans is also a good example of that, too.”

“Two questions,” said Sebastian.

“Two answers,” said Ms. Day.

“Back when Adolf Hitler was running everything, who was the country that came and defeated him?”

“It was another world war, so it was us, Britain, and France, again.”

“And Adolf Hitler didn’t have blond hair or blue eyes,” said Sebastian.

“True,” said Ms. Day. “Also what really ends up to be the defeat of Hitler, and we’ll talk about this later, is he tries to invade Russia. He attacked Russia in the middle of the winter. So that starts to deteriorate the army, and it starts to fall apart. But until then, they are a steamroller. Germans aren’t used to the Russian winter. It’s like you’ve got someone from Texas coming up to Maine for the winter. If it’s a mild winter we’re like, Oh, this is awesome. T-shirts at like what, forty? Summer’s going to kill us this year. Can you imagine it being eighty degrees? It was forty degrees a few days ago, and we were like, Wow, we should open the window, and I’m like, That’s sad, it is eight degrees above freezing and I find it warm. I remember we went down to Florida for softball when I was here — it was my sophomore year. It’s April there, and we’re playing softball, it was like seventy-five, seventy-eight degrees, and we were all like, It’s wicked hot, we’re going to go back to the hotel and swim in the pool! And somebody was like, You realize the pools aren’t heated here, right?”

Maria said, “It’s not really refreshing swimming in a warm pool.”

“No, it’s gross. So — fascism usually has a strong military, use of violence, and terror—”

“Yes!” said Sebastian enthusiastically.

“Use of censorship, and the government rules the media.” She talked about the repression of dissent in Germany, about censorship and propaganda. If there had been an Internet in the Third Reich, she asked, could German citizens have done a Google search for, say, “Bad Things About Hitler”?

“Yes,” said Sebastian.

“Nope, not in Germany,” said Ms. Day. “It would be blocked. It would say, ‘No results found, Hitler is wonderful, somebody will be at your house in a minute to get rid of you.’” China was like that now, she said, and so was North Korea. “You don’t know anything about the rest of the world, because why would you, you live in North Korea, where everything’s perfect.”

“Gangnam style,” said Scott.

“That’s South Korea,” said Ms. Day.

She showed us a clip from a cable history show. A British voice intoned, “Hitler comes to power legally on January the thirtieth, 1933. Within a few months, his dictatorship is firmly in place.” Newsreel footage of mass rallies followed, and paraphrases from Mein Kampf against the Versailles Treaty and on the need for lebensraum, and frightening images of thousands of German soldiers marching in step.

“That is a lot of people,” said Sebastian.

The British voice continued. “A pathological anti-Semite, Hitler has also taken on the mission of asserting the superiority of the Germanic, ‘Aryan’ race, menaced by the Jews. For him, the Jews were the cause of the Great War, Germany’s defeat, inflation, unemployment. The next war will be a war on the Jews.” Footage of Dachau. Then the annexation of Austria. “The clouds of war gather.”

Ms. Day stopped the clip. “Do you think Germany is listening to the Treaty of Versailles anymore?”

“No.”

“No, they’ve pretty much thrown them the double bird, saying, ‘We’re going to do what we want.’” She showed a photo of a crowd waving at Hitler’s motorcade. “You’ve seen the Zapruder film, when Kennedy drove through Dallas on the day he was shot?” she said. “People loved Kennedy. He was a very well-respected president. Which is rare. A lot of the time, no matter what great things they’ve done, we don’t always agree with the person in power. That’s fine. Like Lincoln. Not many people liked Lincoln. And then later everybody’s like, Oh my god, Lincoln’s the best! Sometimes you’ve got to give yourself a few years, and then people are like, Okay, he really wasn’t that bad, he did a pretty good job. Clinton is another really good example. But Kennedy was really well-liked during his presidency. People were pumped that he was coming to Texas. You didn’t see nearly, not even a fraction of, the amount of people come out that day to watch him drive through as you did with Hitler. So extreme, extreme, extreme nationalism.”

Fascism, she said, usually comes out in a time of need, or a time of crisis. “So, major depression, extreme inflation. People burning money to stay warm.”

“Good idea,” said Sebastian.

“You have to be able to at least start to recognize how bad things were in Germany to figure out how it got to where it was,” Ms. Day said. “How do you follow somebody like Adolf Hitler? How do you do the things you do to people? There really are logical explanations for it. Not saying that there are logical explanations for exterminating millions of people — that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that it’s logical to see how the public mass could be behind Hitler, and how he could get as much power as he did. He promised jobs. Six million people to eleven million people were unemployed at that time. So he promises jobs. And he accomplishes that. He promises revenge for the Treaty of Versailles. In Germany people were like, Finally, god, I hate that thing! I used to have an awesome life and then this treaty comes along and ruins everything I’ve ever loved. And he blames the Jews for the hardships. The public already didn’t like the Jewish people, and their leader is saying we’re going to take care of this. They don’t understand what that means at this point, and I don’t even think the plans were in place at this point, either, but they’re like, Phew, okay, good. I don’t really care what happens, because I’m not the one disagreeing with him. I’m not the one disappearing in the night. Because I’m going to get a job and I’m going to be able to afford to feed myself and feed my family again. They don’t get to flash forward fifty years and go, Ooh, maybe we shouldn’t follow this path. I’m freezing in my house, I’m burning my money, my kids are crying themselves to sleep because their stomachs hurt because they’re hungry — and this guy says I can have a job in a month? All right, we’ll see where this goes. I can’t afford to not follow it.”

Ms. Day talked more about the worldwide depression, and about reparation payments, and about the rise of fascism in Italy. Mussolini also promised change, also promised the restoration of Italy’s power. “Remember, Italy is the site of Rome,” she said. “The Romans used to own everything.”

“They owned the Colosseum,” said Sebastian.

“Italy historically always was very strong. And then in modern day they’re just kind of fading into being a normal country. So this is out of the norm for them, and they want to regain that empirelike system. And this is what Mussolini says he’s going to do. How many of you had a class where you literally did nothing? And you were like, Oh my gosh, I would rather them give me work every day, and just give me something to do, because sitting here for an hour, it just makes me so bored, I feel like my brain is turning into goo. We’ve all been there. Or you get left home alone for the weekend, and at first you’re like, Yeah, I can do whatever I want! And by day three you’re like, I’m so bored, can somebody do something with me? Give me a chore to do? That point where you get so bored you clean your room?”

“Or you clean the house!” said Sebastian.

“You hate cleaning your room so bad, but you’re like, You know what, I don’t even care, I’m doing something, I’m fine with it. Okay. Jobs were scarce, and you sat at home thinking about how hungry you were, and then somebody comes and starts putting order into society. As long as you kept your mouth shut, you didn’t have much to worry about, right?” She showed another slide about the rise of Mussolini. “He built four hundred new bridges.”

“How did he build bridges if he didn’t have money?” Sebastian asked.

“He told people to do it. Go do it. You’re not going to tell him no. With rocks and stuff. Four thousand more miles of road! All these people are out there working and doing it. Now, you throw a toll on that road, you’re going to start making money back on it.” That led to a discussion of toll revenues in highways around the United States. And then: Mussolini attacks Ethiopia.

“Everybody feels good when you have a strong army,” Ms. Day said. “What kind of things do you use the military for? Defense and—?”

“Offense,” said Sebastian.

“What’s an example of offense in a war?”

“Football!” said Scott.

Ms. Day ignored him. “Going overseas, invasions, mobilizing! What country do you guys have that practices militarism?”

“China!” said Sebastian.

“Japan,” said Ms. Day. In the twenties and thirties, she explained, Japan had a policy of glorifying the military’s power and of maintaining a standing army. This was known as Japanese expansionism. “Now, what type of landmass is Japan?”

“Um, marshy!” said Sebastian loudly, just for the sake of saying something.

Mark, a smart kid, said, “An island.”

“An island, good. So do you think they have a ton of resources, a ton of farmland? No. And they’ve watched all these other big countries go through this phase of, Here’s my empire, isn’t it pretty? And Japan says, I want to do that, too. And you can’t do that without an army.” So Japan takes over a lot of China. She circled her arm over a map of the region. “Saigon, all over here.”

Sebastian was jumpy, talking a lot. “Sebastian, do you want to leave and go work in Mrs. Prideaux’s room?”

“Oh, no, sorry,” said Sebastian.

“Didn’t think so.” Japan had a need for dominance in the Pacific theater, Ms. Day said. “They saw Great Britain’s empire, they saw Germany have an empire — didn’t work out so well for them — the Austro-Hungary Empire was around for a while, the Ottoman Empire was around for a little while — Japan wants a piece of that pie. We’re tough, we’re awesome, why don’t we have an empire? So let’s go make one.” She played another historical clip about Japanese aggression in China. “By 1938, the Japanese controlled the wealthier portions of China, and nearly half its population.”

And then she showed a slide about isolationism. “Who practices isolationism?”

“China!” said Sebastian.

“America?” said Mark.

“America, good. What’s isolationism?”

Ron read a dictionary definition.

“Good,” said Ms. Day. “We’re not going to get involved in your stuff. We’re going to let you guys fight. Please look at us as just a friend of both of you. It’s like being friends with a couple when they break up. You’re just like, Whoa, I don’t want to have to not be friends with one of you. I’m neutral.” She talked about the focus on building infrastructure. “What does infrastructure mean? It actually means inside structure. What are some good examples of that?”

“The White House?” said Sebastian.

“The White House, sure,” said Ms. Day. “But they weren’t like, Well, guys, we need to repaint the White House, so we’re not going to World War II. A lot of it is roads, bridges, highways. A lot of things like that were done under FDR. National parks. So making things nicer at home.” The US stays out of the League of Nations. “They said, Jeez, we’ve already been in one world war, we’re all set! We don’t need to be associated in a club with all these other countries, we need to focus on our own country and do our own thing. We literally can’t afford to go to war right now, can’t do it. Everyone thought World War I was the biggest mistake. We spent a lot of resources to go, and it ended a year later. We lost a lot of lives during that time we were in there, and it doesn’t seem like we’ve accomplished much, other than destroying Germany. Didn’t seem like it was our war. And this is a really awesome political cartoon—”

The bell bonged, and everyone got up to go.

“It says, League of Nations Bridge, brought to you by President Wilson. And there’s Uncle Sam leaning on—” The woman on the PA system drowned her out. “Alexa Starling to the main office, please. Alexa Starling to the main office. To the guidance office, Wayne Donnelly, Donald Bogan, Jon Sharpe, Ellis Wharf, Dylan Cadman, and Shastayne Peabody, to the guidance office.”

I said, “I enjoyed that, thank you.”

“Oh, good,” said Ms. Day.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“There was nothing to do,” she said, “you’re good.”

“So in your class,” I said, “typically what would an ed tech do?”

“Like if they were doing work,” Ms. Day said, “you would kind of just be there for questions. It’s hard subbing for an ed tech. My husband does it, too.”

—

THE NEXT CLASS was a small one in the remedial literacy room in the North Building. Here I was subbing for a Mr. T. “Mr. T.’s schedule is a bit turbulent on Wednesdays,” explained a teacher named Mrs. Pellinger. “You can just sit and join us and we’ll have a study hall.” I sat down on a plastic chair.

The teacher stopped in front of a very young, short-haired boy with a dreamy expression. “What are you doing, David, listening to music? Do you have work you need to do? Like some science?”

David pulled out a wad of worksheets. “I’ve got to finish this last piece of paper,” he said, smoothing it flat.

“All right,” said Mrs. Pellinger. “Let’s do it. You’ll be all caught up.” She read the worksheet. “So you have to explain oceanic spreading ridge, subducting plate, stratovolcano, and the continental rift. Pick one and start with that.” She looked around. “Remy’s working. Just getting everybody to do something positive here.”

Another ed tech, Mrs. Lahey, said, “Jared, I know you have plenty of stuff to do, plenty. So you need to find it, and do it.”

Jared asked to borrow Dustin’s iPad. Dustin held it to his chest with long, thin arms. “Sharing is caring,” Jared said mockingly.

Jon, a pale, doleful kid with glasses, had an assignment from English class. “I’m trying to make a comic about a writer in the seventeen hundreds,” he said.

“Okay. Do you have the facts?” said Mrs. Lahey.

“I’ve got a couple of facts,” said Jon, “but it’s junk, there’s barely any. I’m a terrible draw-er. I looked at how many books he made, I think he made a lot of books.”

“What’s his name?” asked Mrs. Lahey.

“Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

I sat up. I’d just been reading about Rousseau in Nel Noddings’s book on the philosophy of education. Mrs. Lahey looked at me.

“You know who that is?” she said.

I said, “He was a guy who had a theory of education that everybody was born innocent, and you shouldn’t interfere with a kid at all, but just let him grow naturally, and we’re all noble savages. He decided that we shouldn’t have to have teachers or force kids to do anything. Lived in France.” My heart was pounding with the tiny scrap of knowledge I had to offer.

“What do you think of his philosophy?” Mrs. Lahey asked Jon. “You just grow up, and we don’t force you to do anything?”

Jared, listening in, said, “That would be awesome.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” said Mrs. Lahey, with a gentle edge.

Jon nodded.

“We would have no discipline,” said Jared. “But it would be bad, though. Kids need discipline.”

“You need discipline sometimes?” said Mrs. Lahey. “You more than others?”

Mrs. Pellinger laughed knowingly.

Jared hung his head. “Yeah.”

Dustin, who had a speech problem, said, “Then the people who could read, could read, and the people who could read somewhat, could take longer to get something done.”

I remembered something else about Rousseau. I said, “He believed that it would all work out. But there was one problem with his philosophy, even if you agree with it. It only applied to men. Women were supposed to serve and prepare and make everything, and then the men would be able to go wild and have a free existence. It was completely gender un-neutral.”

“Did you understand what he just said?” said Mrs. Lahey to Jon. “It applied just to men. The women were supposed to serve the men, do whatever the men needed them to do. And then the men could just go wild and do whatever they wanted.”

Mrs. Pellinger asked me, “So did that mean the women had to be educated?”

I said, “He didn’t believe that women should be educated, or should aspire to the learning that men should aspire to. Men should come to it naturally, but women should be held back. It was incredibly sexist.”

Jon started writing some dialogue in a speech bubble. Mrs. Lahey helped him spell woman.

“So this is a class in reading?” I asked Mrs. Pellinger.

“I’m usually in a room with five students,” she said, “but that room is being used for something else today. There’s usually four students in here working on fluency.”

“And I’m one of them,” said Jon, looking up from his comic. “How do you spell could?”

“C-O-U-L-D,” said Mrs. Lahey. “That’s one of your spelling words.” She checked her phone. “Nineteen emails!” she said.

Mrs. Pellinger resumed explaining plate tectonics to David. “What he’s looking for is the whole thing about sea-floor spreading. The idea that the ridges in the ocean are coming together.”

“Like one goes up and one goes under?” said David.

“Yep,” said Mrs. Pellinger, “and they create a ridge in the ocean floor.”

I looked over at the Rousseau cartoon. “Does he wear a wig?”

“Yes,” said Jon. “A powdered wig.”

He didn’t want any help from me, so I let him be.

Mrs. Lahey sat next to Dustin to give him some help. Dustin was supposed to be working on learning how to set SMART goals. SMART stood for “Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.” Mrs. Lahey said, in her soft coaching voice, “If you get stuck and need some help, who are you going to ask?”

“Ghostbusters!” said Jared.

I laughed. Mrs. Lahey ignored him. “Who would you ask?” she said to Dustin. “Would you ask your teacher?”

Silence.

“Who’s your teacher?”

“Mr. Salton.”

“So that’s the person you would go to first if you need help. If he’s not available, who else could you get help from?”

“I don’t know,” said Dustin.

“Could you ask me? Could you ask Mrs. Pellinger? Who do you have for a guided study teacher?”

“Mrs. Giroux.”

“Could you ask her? Could you ask another student in class? So there are a lot of people you could ask.”

David’s science worksheet was progressing. “How does a volcano change gradually,” said Mrs. Pellinger, “and how does it change abruptly?”

“What does abruptly mean?” said David.

“Very quickly and very fast. Gradual means slow. If it happens abruptly it’s going to make what?”

The bell went bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.

“If it made a volcano that would be an abrupt change,” said Mrs. Pellinger. Jon put his colored pencils away, slid his half-finished Rousseau cartoon into a binder, and left.

I walked to another tenth-grade history class, this one taught by Mr. Domus, a youngish, congenially rumpled man with a knit tie and a green shirt. “Come on in,” Mr. Domus said. On the back wall of his room were hung the front pages of many old newspapers. “Guys, I need just a couple of minutes and then you can work, okay? First off, everyone needs to take out the sheet I gave you yesterday that broke down the project.” They were working in groups on the antebellum reform era. “I don’t care what sort of a presentation it is, that’s totally up to your group. Make sure you’re including background information. Make sure you’re including the actual reform itself — the actual efforts that will be made. Make sure you’re including significant leaders. And make sure you’re including results. Brian, you have that look like you have a question. Fire away.”

“I don’t have a question,” said Brian.

“Then why are you staring at me?”

Students put their earbuds in and began poking at iPads.

Mr. Domus came over and asked me how substituting was going. I said it was going fine, but I hadn’t been of much use to anyone that day.

“It’s hard to be a sub when the ed tech is out,” Mr. Domus said. “You have no clue who is who and what’s what. I think it’s really just law. Legally they have to have an ed tech in the class if it specifically says in the IEP that a student has to have support.”

Half the kids were out, Mr. Domus said, interviewing for the vocational tech program. There were only a hundred spots available. If you got in, you could come out with, say, a nursing assistant certificate. “That’s what my wife did,” he said. Later she became an RN.

I watched him wander the class, encouraging, joshing. The kids liked him. Soon it was lunchtime.

In the teachers’ break room I took out a sandwich at a circular table. Mrs. Rausch complimented me on my Scrabble mug, which had a big N on it. She said she’d taught Mr. Domus. “Jimmy was a good student,” she said. “I’ve been doing this for twenty-seven years. Isn’t that crazy?” She’d gone to U Maine Farmington to get her teaching degree, as had Mr. Domus. She had a gripe about having to teach kids how to use graphing calculators, because it took them a very long time to understand how to use them. “They’ve been given iPads,” said Mrs. Barrons, “and they can just type in the graph and touch it and it’ll do the calculations. But we can’t let them use the iPads because they can get online and they check answers, and they can email back and forth. So they have to use the graphing calculators. You have one piece of technology that’s so easy, and one that’s so clumsy to work with, and they have to use the one that’s clumsy.”

The two younger teachers at the table, Ms. Thwaite and Mrs. Sever, began an involved discussion about Mary Kay cosmetics. Mrs. Thwaite had bought an expensive Mary Kay starter kit, but she was unhappy with the people who skimmed off her commissions. “I don’t feel they deserve anything from me, because they’ve not supported me.” She still had more than two hundred dollars’ worth of stuff to sell, and she was thinking of moving to Florida. “I think it sucks,” Ms. Thwaite said. “I could cut my losses altogether and burn a bridge. I need to call them and ask them is there a way I can be affiliated with another director and another recruiter. I need to find out how can I disconnect from these people.”

“Meanwhile, she’s going to nag you and nag you to start doing the crap that she wants you to do,” said Mrs. Sever.

“Really?”

“Oh god, yes,” said Mrs. Sever. “Why wouldn’t she? She wants you to achieve at that level so that she can get more money.”

“It’s a pyramid,” said Mrs. Rausch, eating a stick of celery.

While I was at the sink washing my Scrabble mug I ran into Ms. Hopkins, the history teacher, who looked even paler and sicker than she’d been on Monday. She was waiting for the microwave to beep. I made a feeble joke about the need to practice isolationism.

She smiled sadly. “It’s not possible if you’re a teacher. You get something at some point.”

“I hope you feel better,” I said.

Mr. Domus was already back in class, having eaten some leftover pasta. “It’s my wife’s grandmother’s sauce,” he said.

“I love leftovers,” I said.

“Oh, there’s nothing better,” he said. “Casseroles, soups, sauces. Her grandmother is a very old-fashioned cook and the stuff is just — oh, it’s rich. We reap the benefits. They’re as tight as I’ve ever seen a grandmother and a granddaughter. Works out good for me.” He looked around. “Austin, we’re not texting, are we, bud?”

“No, man!”

“Okay, just want to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.”

Renata flung her hands up and said, “This is so stressful! We are not a good team.”

“We need to practice team-building skills,” said Liam, one of her team members.

Heather’s iPad was playing music. “I’m just putting on this awesome playlist,” she said. “Eric Clapton, hmm — never even heard of him.”

Mr. Domus made an appalled sound. “Really?”

“I’m no good with names,” said Heather.

“The first group he was in was…” Mr. Domus closed his eyes, trying to remember. “Later it was Derek and the Dominoes. Cream. First it was Cream.”

Mr. Domus and I agreed that “Layla” was a great summer song. “He’s one of those guys who’s lasted the changing times,” he said. “He’s that talented. That raspy rock voice.” He went up to the front of the room to look up something on his computer.

Near me, Monica, a girl with a gold scarf in her hair, said to her group, “Did you see that really bad Skittles commercial, the banned one? The one that goes ‘Taste the rainbow’?” (It’s a spoof commercial in which a newlywed groom splashes Skittles candies all over his bride.)

Her tablemate, Wesley, said, “He’s like, ‘I’m coming!’ He sprinkles everywhere.”

Monica said, “They put it on full screen, and they didn’t tell me. They’re just like, Watch this. I’m like, Okay.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Domus had found one of his favorite Cream songs on his laptop. He started playing it over a pair of small loudspeakers. I asked him if teachers had played music in class when he was in school. “Mm, a little,” he said. “There was still quite a mix of the new, modern-age teacher and the old traditional teacher of the sixties and seventies. It was much more rigid. We had fun, but it was a lot more work than it is now.” RSU66 was a very spread-out district, he said. “Transportation is a huge issue, because no one can walk. No one can walk.”

I mentioned that I’d heard that some of the bus rides took an hour and a half.

“If a kid does band,” said Mr. Domus, “or sports, or stays to do work and can’t get a ride, we do late buses. They don’t leave here till four-thirty. So it could be five-thirty before he’s home, after leaving at six a.m.”

Brian called out, “What’s this?”

“Clapton,” said Mr. Domus.

“Guns N’ Dandelions!” said Austin, which got a laugh from Mr. Domus — it was a running joke, apparently.

He turned back to me. “It’s funny because I’ve always been an upperclassmen teacher,” he said to me. “For nine years I did juniors and seniors. I had to switch this year. For juniors, you had your lower groups, and they were what they were, but the honors were really good. They were pretty driven, they were decent writers. They were good to be around. But I find that the sophomores are even better. The sophomore honors kids, they’re like the perfect mix.” He went off to the bathroom and I sat and listened to the class talk and work while more Clapton played.

Two girls, Lissa and Mary, were talking about a girl they knew. “She dyed her hair,” said Lissa. “Did she dye it, or did she let it go back to natural? Because I do remember it was blond.”

“Well, it was blond,” said Mary, “but then it was darker.”

“I’m never going to dye my hair,” said Lissa. “Somebody told me I should dye it. I’m way too dark for that.”

Austin said, “I was born a straight-up redhead.”

Lissa turned to look at him. “So your hair was red, and then it turned blond, and then brown?”

“Yep,” said Austin.

“And your eyes are like blue and green,” said Lissa.

One group in the back was talking quietly about literacy rates in the reform era. Nearby, Jordan, in a varsity jacket that was too big for him, was telling a story about a time someone threw a fish at his head.

“I decapitated a fish once,” said Isaac.

“You know what’s worse?” said another boy, Jamie, who sat on the edge of the bad-kid group. “Running over a squirrel on a bike.”

“Done that,” said Isaac.

“No,” said Jamie. “The squirrel went into the spokes and part of it went this way and part of it went that way and some hit my shoulder.” He was smiling, although the memory pained him. He wanted very much to be one of the interesting bad kids.

“My dad killed a squirrel with our garage door,” said Lissa. “It slapped down right on top of it.”

“That’s awesome,” said Jordan. “My mom was driving in Florida, and it was really hot and she had the windows open, and a bird flew into her window and bounced into her lap.”

Mr. Domus returned and began whistling to the music. “Which class are you heading to next?” he asked me.

“Biology,” I said.

“Oh, wonderful.” He pointed out where the science rooms were.

Renata had colored the rim of a Sharpie cap and stuck it on Liam’s face. He couldn’t rub the mark off. It looked as if he had a cut.

“Guys, fix my desks as we start to wrap up!” said Mr. Domus. The kids began straightening up the room. “Austin, what do you want to hear, buddy? I’ll play you one song before you leave.”

“Uh, like, Def Leppard!”

“POUR — SOME — SUGAR ON ME,” sang Isaac.

Mr. Domus didn’t want to play that. “How about this one?” He put on Def Leppard’s “Photograph” instead, and turned it up.

“I know this one,” said Lissa.

“Perfect!” said Wesley.

“I’m out of luck, out of love!” sang Def Leppard.

“Be sure my desks are nice and tidy!” said Mr. Domus over the music.

Students clumped by the door. When the bells bonged, Mr. Domus turned the music up louder. “I see your face every time I dream!” went the song.

“Have a good day!” Mr. Domus said.

Biology was taught by Ms. Bell, a cheery, spherical woman in her twenties, who, although she was naturally soft-spoken, had trained herself to yell-talk to be heard. “Okay! My rule is you guys can pick your own assigned seats, as long as you’re in the first two groups of four! There should be plenty of seats! As long as you’re in the FIRST TWO GROUPS OF FOUR you guys can pick your own assigned seats for attendance purposes!” The classroom was large, with black laboratory tables. “Sit anywhere you want as long as it’s in the FIRST FOUR TABLES! Anywhere you’d like!” She passed around some work packets. “’Kay, LISTEN UP,” she said. A kid made a retching sound. “By a raise of hands, how many of you are feeling comfortable with the Punnett squares and how to do them?”

Many hands went up. One hand went halfway.

“I’m good,” said a boy, Troy, with a baseball hat on.

“What I’d like you guys to do for the first ten minutes! While I’m taking attendance! Grab out the Punnett square activity, and try those last two problems, and then I will quickly show you the answers, okay? So! Quietly work on those last two questions!”

“What if you already did them?” said Dennis smugly. He was wearing a pair of new Adidas.

“If you’ve already done them, then you can work on your next worksheet! Or study for your test!”

She pointed to two names on my schedule that I should keep an eye on in this class — Drew and Jamie. “They might need your help in writing for them.”

Jamie seemed to be working fine by himself, so I sat down with Drew — he was the kid I’d met in Mr. Bowles’s class, who had been thinking about how much it would cost to be kept alive if he’d electrocuted himself and become a potato. Drew nodded at me and began cracking his knuckles one by one.

“That is some serious knuckle cracking,” I said. Drew smiled. “So did you get this worksheet yesterday?”

“I wasn’t in yesterday, I missed the bus by a minute.”

I asked him if he had a long bus ride.

“From the school to my house it’s two hours,” said Drew. “From my house to here it’s like an hour and a half. I’m one of the first pickups, the last dropped off.”

We went on a walk to get Drew a computer, because his iPad was broken and Ms. Bell had sent out a PowerPoint presentation on genetics that everyone in the class was supposed to have looked at. When we got back, a boy was asking how a widow has anything at all to do with a hairline. They were working on the heritability of the widow’s peak.

Two kids, Ryan and Norman, were playing an irritating game with pennies.

The first question Drew had to answer was What is genetics? Drew didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. I talked about what a trait was. A cat could be all brown, for instance, or it could be brown and white. Genetics was about how that trait gets passed on.

“Like a skill or something,” said Drew.

“Yes, it could be a skill,” I said. “A monkey could be an astonishingly clever climber of trees.”

“I inherited my tallness from my father,” said Drew.

“Okay, that’s a trait that you inherited. The study of that is genetics.” After some coaching from me he wrote, using phonetic spelling, study of how traits get inherited. The second set of questions had to do with Gregor Mendel — who was he and what did he do. Drew didn’t know.

Ms. Bell was helping another group of kids. “Sexual reproduction,” said Ryan suddenly, in a loud robot voice.

“Hello?” said Michelle, an alpha girl, from across the room.

“What are egg and sperm?” asked Ms. Bell.

“Cells?” said the boy.

“In order for the sperm from a guy to get transferred to a woman, you have to have what?”

The boy muttered something.

“Alex, I want you to say the word. Three-letter word.”

“Sex?” said Alex softly.

Michelle made a long peal of laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I know, it’s hard for you guys to actually say that,” said Ms. Bell. “But that’s what it’s called.”

I clicked forward in Ms. Bell’s PowerPoint presentation till I came to some slides about Gregor Mendel. “He was obsessed with peas,” I said, skimming the bullet points. “He kept growing pea plants, and asking, Why is this pea wrinkly, and this one’s smooth? He was completely fixated on pea plants. He was a monk. He’d take the seed from a smooth plant and a seed from a wrinkly plant and figure out which is going to win. Spent his life doing that. Generation after generation of pea plants.”

“He’s researching these pointless things,” said Drew.

“And yet it turned out to be an incredible discovery. His big discovery was that some genes were dominant and some genes were recessive.”

Drew wrote monk and grew peas and then tried to crack his wrist. “For some reason I can never crack my wrist forward,” he said.

“That’s probably just as well,” I said.

“I used to crack it over and over. It made a sound every time.”

Next Drew was supposed to define F1 generation, F2 generation, and gene. We talked about what genes were while I scanned a few Wikipedia articles.

Drew said, “It’s like in Spider-Man, when he first gets bit. He goes asleep, and in the dream it shows the transformation.”

Yes, the genes were getting intermingled, I said.

Drew wrote that a gene was a chemical that determines traits. “Is freckles a trait?” he asked. “I got my eyes from my dad. Brown. My mom’s eyes are blue. Brown’s dominant over blue. I learned that in middle school.”

“Right, so there’s a brown-eyed allele and a blue-eyed allele. An allele is a possibility.” Was this true?

“Like a dice,” Drew said. For his definition of allele, he wrote, different options for a gene. We’d finished page one of the six-page worksheet.

Ms. Bell called the office on the intercom. “Can you let the nurse know that I just sent Tabitha Furness down for an allergic reaction to butter?”

“I swear,” said Drew, “I’ll have moments where I just can’t write. I’ll start writing and I’ll just jumble it up.” From the distressed look of his handwriting, he had some powerful form of dyslexia.

We slowly finished a page on dominant and recessive notation, and we stumbled through the words homozygous, heterozygous, genotype, and phenotype.

“This pencil’s dominant over the paper,” said Drew.

“Phenotype and genotype,” I said, scrolling through more paragraphs from Wikipedia, “is a meaningless bit of needlessly complicated vocabulary.”

“I’ll forget it by tonight,” said Drew. “Slough it off. I’ll have a dream about it. Wake up sweating. ‘What the hell was that?’” We laughed.

I said, “The genotype is the code, and the phenotype is what it actually looks like. Like if the pea is wrinkly or not. I guess the way to remember it is ‘phen,’ with the P-H, is physical, and ‘gen’ is genetics.”

We did a few Punnett squares — those four-piece squares that allow you to calculate how many blue-eyed wrinkled peas will result from the union of two alleles.

“I have my dad’s eyes,” said Drew. “My sisters take after my mom physically, but the way they are is a mixture of my mom and dad. My sister swears like my dad. Everyone makes fun of her for that.”

I asked him if he took after his mother in swearing.

“No, my mom swears a lot, too. But my dad swears more. I don’t do a lot of swearing around the house — yet.”

It was almost time for the buses. “I enjoyed that,” I told Drew.

“I became a scientist,” he said.

“I became a science teacher,” I said.

“I’m going to tell my mom I was so smart.”

Ms. Bell came by and told people how to turn in their papers. “I want you to put them in the bin, but facedown, and like this, so they’re facing in the opposite direction.”

Tabitha, who’d returned from the nurse, was holding her hand up.

Norman said, “It looks like it’s inflamed.”

“It was the popcorn,” said Tabitha. “I put my hand in the bag of popcorn. Troy said it’s Newman’s Own, so it shouldn’t have sunflower. The only other things I’m allergic to are coconut and nickel. Like pants buttons.”

“Wait a minute,” said Troy, chagrined. “One was movie theater popcorn and the other was Newman’s.”

“So you don’t even know what you’re feeding me?” said Tabitha.

“No,” said Troy.

Tabitha shook her head. “That’s an hour of doing nothing.”

“Troy almost killed Tabitha,” said Norman.

“What if I, like, lost the use of my hand?” said Tabitha. “How bad would you feel?”

“I would feel terrible,” said Troy.

“I’d be waving around a stump for the rest of my life.”

“Come on back in, guys,” Ms. Bell called. “All the way in, close the door! Back away!” She passed around some jellybeans.

“I don’t know, am I going to die from this?” said Tabitha.

“There should be no coconut in them,” said Ms. Bell.

“Green apple!” said Ryan.

Tabitha popped a jellybean in her mouth. “This is like piña colada,” she said.

I asked Ms. Bell how long she’d been teaching at the high school.

“This is my first year,” she said, chewing a bean. Before that she’d done Job Corps and alternative ed with Sylvan Learning. Teaching at Lasswell High School was much easier than Sylvan, she said. “With alternative ed, you’d be lucky if you can get two out of the ten to work. They don’t care. They don’t want to be there. Education’s not their priority.”

I gave Drew a wave and drove home. Day Seven, done.