Substitute by Nicholson Baker
Jason was working on the definition of fungi. “They don’t make their own food,” he said. Devin and Carl were singing tunelessly.
Ashley’s next iPad quiz question was: Has cones, but no flowers or fruits. More riffling through the packet. Was it a fern or a gymnosperm? I couldn’t remember. “I’d say it’s a gymnosperm,” I said. “But I may be wrong.” She tried it. A green checkmark appeared on the screen. Phew.
Travis and Evan were struggling with a stapler, slamming it around. “He jammed the stapler!” said Travis, whose packet had six staples in it.
“Oh, now you’re blaming me!” said Evan. “I didn’t even touch it!”
I asked who was good at unjamming staplers.
“I am,” said Travis.
“You jammed it!” said Evan.
“That was the first time I touched it, Evan!”
“Don’t throw it,” I said. “It’s an expensive piece of medical equipment.”
Max looked up at me curiously. “It’s medical equipment?”
“It is if you staple somebody with it. Like in The Wrestler. Did you see The Wrestler? He staples himself.”
Lily came up. “I’m done,” she said.
I said, “You are good. If you’re done, what you have to do is recite a poem that you’ve memorized. No, do whatever you’d like to do, quietly. Congratulations on being done.”
“Do you have a paperclip?” said Evan, still intent on fixing the stapler. I gave him a pair of scissors. He and Travis pried out the crumpled staple.
Luke and Carl were sharing earbuds, listening to “Truckin’” by the Grateful Dead.
Ashley finally got a passing grade on her BrainPOP. She was happy. And the stapler was working again. I got Evan and Travis to work on their Google Docs, and Travis to define dichotomous key. Evan successfully listed the six kingdoms. “You’ve done the warmup. My god, you’re warmed up! Now what?”
“I get to relax for two minutes?” said Evan.
“Relax?” I said. “You just got warmed up. How many assignments are you behind?”
“Eleven,” said Evan.
“I have twenty overdue things,” said Travis.
“Holy crap,” I said.
Caitlin came back from working in the hall. Class over.
—
A NEW GROUP CAME IN, leaping and screaming. “Can I take the attendance down?” said Laura.
Brittany said Alexandra would be late because she was getting an ice pack. I took attendance, shoutily.
“Can I take the sheet down?” said Brock.
“Yes.”
“You said I could take it down,” said Laura.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just too complicated.” I gave the sheet to Laura. “ALL RIGHT. Mrs. Painter emailed you something terribly important. It’s a bunch of worksheets. You’ve got to answer some questions, and it’s all about the subject of taxonomy. Do you know what taxonomy is?”
“Yep,” said Georgia.
“What is it?”
“Stuffing animals.”
Mandy sang, in a sweet voice, “Stuffing little dead animals.”
“That’s taxidermy,” I said.
“Oh,” said Georgia.
“So about three hundred years ago there was this guy named Carl. Carl Linnaeus. Did Mrs. Painter mention Carl Linnaeus?”
Dana, with hearing aids, pointed at his picture. “Right there.”
“Right,” I said. “He’s one of those people who like everything to be in a certain slot. You know how some people are really organized? They can’t just look at a parking lot full of cars, they have to figure out which cars have good mileage, which don’t—they have to classify them. Some people have minds that work like that. Linnaeus did. He looked at the world—he lived in Sweden—”
This struck Mandy as very funny.
“He looked at the world, and he tried to figure out how living things were organized. Let’s say you were Linnaeus, what would you do? What’s the biggest distinction that you can find in living things? Some living things are stuck in one place, and they grow and turn green, and they have boughs. And some of them walk along, or hop, or fly. What would be the biggest distinction you could see?”
Silence.
Georgia said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, he took a stab at it, and he said, Okay, all living things are divided up into plants—and animals. Plantae and Animalia. Two chunks. Plants and animals. And then there were some microscopes floating around. People started looking down the tubes of the microscopes and they found that there were tiny little animals or plants—they didn’t know what they were. They had one cell, and some of them moved around, and some of them had flagella that would help them move, and they thought, Gosh, is that a plant or an animal? We don’t know. So they gave it a different name. Protist. So now you’ve got three.” I talked about fungi—and that word, too, struck Mandy as funny. She was having a wonderful time.
When I had finished my spiel about the six kingdoms, Sunrise, who’d been standing near the desk, put her pencil in the noisy electric pencil sharpener.
“That was so considerate of you to wait,” I said.
I told them what they had to do—watch a Keynote presentation on classification that Mrs. Painter had made.
An ed tech appeared, a Ms. Bishop, and began coaching a sprawly, wayward kid, Dylan. “What do you have to do?” she asked.
Dylan pointed to the whiteboard, which said, in red marker:
DUE FRIDAY
Quizlet #4
Brainpop—6 Kingdoms
Kingdom Packet
Mnemonic device
Taxonomy key
Darwin Finches (in class activity)
“All that stuff is due Friday!” Dylan said unhappily.
“You can only do one thing at a time,” said Ms. Bishop sternly. “You can look at that list and go, ‘Everything’s due tomorrow!’—or you can say, ‘What am I going to work on right now?’ Do it, and you can cross it off the list.”
Brittany said, “I’m going to do the kingdom packet, then BrainPOP, then quizlet.”
“It’s just relentless,” I said. “The quizlets and the BrainPOPs keep popping.”
Ms. Bishop made a mirthless laugh. She saw through me. She hated me.
Dana was trying to open Mrs. Painter’s Keynote presentation. It wasn’t working.
“I can’t download it either,” said Sunrise.
“A lot of kids are saying that they can’t get it,” said Ms. Bishop. She made an announcement. “If you can’t see the Keynote, we’ll make sure that Mrs. Painter knows. It’s not an excuse to do nothing, though. Make sure to go on to something else.”
“You have to download the Gmail app,” said Mia.
“Some of the kids have restricted iPads, so they’re not going to be able to download the Gmail app,” said Ms. Bishop. Then she spotted something amiss. She made a beeline for Dylan, who had earbuds in.
“What are you working on?” she said.
Dylan looked up at her and plucked out an earbud. “I finished the thing,” he said vaguely.
Ms. Bishop pointed accusingly at his iPad. “Busta Rhymes? You have so much work to do! You have everything done?”
“No,” said Dylan.
“You’re sitting here listening to music on YouTube?” She turned to me. “Mr. Baker? Dylan and I will be right back. We’re going to go upstairs for a minute.” She turned to the kid. “Come with me, please. Leave your iPad.” They left.
“She’s tough, isn’t she?” I whispered.
“Yes,” said Mia.
Brittany and Belle, who was growing out her bangs, came up and said they were wondering if they could go in the little room in the hall and work. “It’s more quiet.” I told them to blast through one of the assignme
Georgia came up. “Can I work in the hall?”
“Get stuff done,” I said. “If you have accomplishments, then you can work in the hall.”
Alexandra was holding an ice pack on her swollen finger. “I really haven’t gotten in trouble that bad this year,” she said to Laura. Alec wasn’t doing anything. I asked him if he’d watched the Keynote.
“My iPad is out of battery,” he said.
“And you don’t have a charger?”
“No.”
“Is that a charger right there?”
“It’s charging somebody else’s.”
Another kid at the table, Timothy, said, “I wasn’t here for the mnemonic device.”
I said, “Then don’t worry about it. Just write you weren’t here.” I looked up. “THE NOISE LEVEL. THE NOISE LEVEL IS GETTING TOO HIGH.”
Georgia came up saying she’d finished an assignment, so could she now go out in the hall? I said she could.
Belle said, “Where did my good pencil go! My mechanical pencil! Brittany! I actually wanted that pencil!”
I raised my voice again. “DID ANYONE GET THE KEYNOTE TO LOAD?”
“No.”
Dana was helping Mandy do the challenge question, about the dichotomous key. “You can go, like, an animal without a backbone, and then you go off from that.”
Mandy sang, “Twenty minutes to go till lunch.”
I sat down on a spare chair near Brittany and Belle, who were collaborating, with mixed results, on their BrainPOP quizzes. I was losing steam. I said, “BrainPOP! BrainPOP! God.”
Belle was drawing a picture of a fungus. “That’s a hypha,” she said.
“I want to see the Keynote real bad,” I said.
“I doubt that,” said Perry, who had on sunglasses.
Things were going fine with the iPads until two weeks ago, Thomas explained. “Then we got restrictions because some kids hadn’t done their work. They ended up restricting half the team. Every student has complained about how the restrictions are so counterproductive. You can hardly go to half the websites.”
“Exactly,” said Mandy.
I was really hungry, and I began reciting the six kingdoms of crunchy snacks: the Dorito Kingdom, the Cheetos Kingdom, etc.
That reminded Thomas of something. “We did our mnemonic,” he said. “Ours was ‘Don’t Kill Penguins Cause Other Friends Get Sad.’”
“That’s brilliant,” I said. “That’s the best one I’ve seen. Do you think it’s crucially important to know domain, kingdom, phylum?”
“It depends,” said Thomas. “Some people want to be scientists.”
Brittany said, “Some kids don’t, they just don’t care.”
“I still think it’s important, though,” said Thomas. He tried to recite the list. “Domain, kingdom, phylum, class—uh.” He fizzled out.
“Wait, I got this,” said Belle. She closed her eyes and held her hands up. “Domain-kingdom-phylum-class-order-genus-species!” Thomas high-fived her.
Dana asked, “Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Yes.”
Brittany said, “What’s binomial nomenclature?”
Jeff, a low-profile kid, was tapping in answers to the BrainPOP. “How do you spell vertebrate?”
“You missed an r,” I said. “V-E-R, vert. Vert means up and down. Vertical. Your spine is an up-and-down bone in your body.” A green checkmark appeared on Jeff’s screen. The next question was: Father of taxonomy.
Brock and Casey were deleting all their radio stations in iTunes. I asked them why.
“There’s a song that’s almost impossible to get,” said Brock.
“But if you delete your station, then put it back on, you can get it,” said Casey. The song was “Wild Boy” by Machine Gun Kelly.
A major slapdown of a notebook made me turn. A kid named Joseph was grinning crazily. “Do you know how loud that was?”
“No, I don’t,” said Joseph.
“It was loud,” I said.
Georgia, who had returned from the hall, said, “They’re boys, what are you talking about? They’re all loud.” She waved at Brock and Casey. “They scream at the top of their lungs.”
“You don’t look like screamers,” I said, disingenuously.
“You don’t know them very well, then,” said Georgia.
“I’m a good boy,” Brock said, smirking.
I asked them what they liked to eat for lunch.
“Pizza, if I can have it,” said Casey. “I like cold pizza.”
Sunrise finished her BrainPOP and said, “Mr. Baker, I got a D-plus.”
Brock made an announcement: “Guys, it’s almost lunchtime, praise the lord! Thank you, lord, for the food! Thank you, lord, for lunch!”
“You’re a porta-potty,” said Georgia.
“How do you spell Jackson?” Mandy asked.
“As in Jackson, Mississippi?” I asked.
“No.”
“As in Michael Jackson?”
“Yeah.”
I told her.
Time slid forward. The noise was like orange marmalade. Laura was helping Timothy spell eubacteria for the BrainPOP. Dana was fiddling with his dichotomous key. He was distinguishing between a penguin, a pigeon, an eagle, and a lion. If it was black and white, it was a penguin; if it wasn’t, go to step two. Good. I looked at the clock. Lunch was at 11:55.
“We’ve got three minutes,” said Laura.
“Were you tutoring Timothy?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Laura.
“That was great. I really admire that, good work.”
“I know, cause I’m awesome like that!” She flung her hair around.
“Well, you don’t want to preen,” I said.
“I’m awesome!”
I yawned. People started to ease halfway out the door. “Not quite yet,” I called. “You’ve got two minutes.”
Belle, Brittany, and Alexandra had turned the classification hierarchy into a clapping and chanting game. “We’re studying,” they said.
“LUNCH! LUNCH! LUNCH!” screamed Brock and Casey.
I ate an apple and sat sleepily and looked things up on the Internet. My mind and soul were dead meat. Mrs. Painter’s sub plans said, “Any student who claims he/she is done can work on the remaining level 2 skills on the capacity matrix. There are plenty to choose from!” Capacity matrix. So much of what Mrs. Painter was required to teach was pseudo-knowledge—lists of tongue-embrambling Greek- and Latin-rooted words like prokaryotic and heterotrophic and halophilic that were perfect for tests because they were hard to remember. This was torture by word list. The uglier the word, the better, because it more efficiently showed who was willing to commit gobbledygook to memory and who wasn’t. That was the true dichotomous key to Lasswell Middle School. (a) Is willing to master empty vocabulary week after week. (b) Is not willing. If (b), an ed tech will escort you away and fuss at you and restrict your iPad.
Pro means “before,” and karyon is Greek for “nut.” A prokaryote is a single-celled organism without a nut, or nucleus, so named by taxonomist Édouard Chatton in 1925. How helpful was that? Many, many years ago I often went around with a sense of futility of all our efforts, wrote a later taxonomist, in 1941. During those periods I would go home after a day at the lab, and wish that I might be employed somewhere as a high-school teacher. Not primarily because I liked that better. But simply because it would give me some assurances that what I was doing was considered worthwhile.
They came back. “Mr. Baker, how was your lunch?” said Brock cheerfully.
“Peachy good. How was yours?”
Casey picked a Cheeto off the floor and ate it.
“Germs!” said Georgia. “Ger-herms!”
A superball was bouncing
Ms. Bishop, the ed tech, returned. The room quieted down when she walked in the door. She leaned toward me. “The two guys that are sitting there near the back? They’re looking at inappropriate stuff. So I need to have a little conversation with them.”
“Okay,” I said.
Brittany and Belle tried to recite the kingdoms. Brittany did it almost perfectly. “The kingdoms are: Eubacteria, Archaebacteria, prostates, Fungi, Animalia, and Plantae,” she said.
“And Fungi!” said Belle.
“I pronounced one wrong,” said Brittany.
“You are amazing,” I said.
“I was voted by my seventh-grade class as valedictorian,” Brittany said.
“I voted for her,” said Belle.
“I need help,” said Jeff.
The question was: Two-word scientific name. The answer was binomial nomenclature. Bingo. The next question was: Plant that has tubes and cones.
“That is called a tube plant,” I said to William. “No, you need the sheet. The sheet is your friend.” We found the answer. The next question was: A kingdom of prokaryotes that live in extreme environments.
Georgia was engaged in a hostile sort of middle school flirtation with Perry. “Perry punched me in the face,” she said, laughing.
I walked over. “Is everybody happy over here? Happy stuff?”
“Yes,” said Perry.
“I’m not happy!” said Georgia, hands on her hips.
I asked her to take a seat.
“What if I can’t take a seat? What if this is not my chair?”
Ms. Bishop had left, so I went to the two boys in the back who’d been looking at inappropriate material. I asked what happened.
“I was being bad in the lunchroom,” said Brock.
“How inappropriate is inappropriate?”
“I don’t know,” said Brock. “I was telling her I didn’t want to do stuff and she got mad at me.”
“Gymnosperm,” said Sunrise. “Gym-no-sperm.”
Georgia was dancing and poking at Perry.
“You’ve got a lot of energy today,” I said.
“That’s my anger,” said Georgia.
“Where’s your chair?”