Substitute by Nicholson Baker
I said, “For each chapter you have to fill out that same worksheet?” I hadn’t quite taken that in. “My god.”
“Imagine my enthusiasm,” Brandon said.
“I can only dream,” I said. “So how do you figure out the tone of something?”
“I don’t know.”
Mrs. Meese was full of enthusiasm and pep. “Three left to do?” she said to Harmony. “Good job!”
Keith said he had eleven analysis pages to go.
“It was due today,” Mrs. Meese said. “You guys are lucky she’s out sick.”
“I have nine left,” said Brad.
I asked Dale if any of the chapters had grabbed his mind.
He shook his head.
Jared slammed down his AriZona iced tea and burped.
“That was a bad one,” said Anabelle.
Shamus told a story about his cousin being chased by a Scotty dog. He said to me, “I’ve written one word. Love.”
Pearl softly read aloud the first sentence of a chapter: “But this too is true: stories can save us.”
“I like dancing to dubstep,” said Dale, with his iPad blaring.
“DO IT,” bellowed Jared.
“Guys, come on,” I said. “Just do something. Do you have some headphones?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Pearl continued to read: “But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.” She kept on going. The narrator, Tim O’Brien, walks into a village in Vietnam after an air strike. He sees an old man lying faceup, dead, with his arm gone, and flies feeding on his face. One of O’Brien’s platoon-mates goes over and shakes the dead man’s hand and says, “Howdee-doo.” Later, his platoon-mate says, “Maybe it’s too real for you.” Pearl and a kid sitting next to her wrote that sentence down on their analysis sheets: “Maybe it’s too real for you.”
Bong. Mr. Clapper came on the PA system. “If I can have your attention just for a moment,” he said. “Over the weekend, we had a technology glitch, where a thousand of our iPads, as several of you have found out, were accidentally put into lockdown mode. We’re fixing the problem this morning. More information will be out shortly. So bear with us, and we hope to have this error corrected shortly. Thank you.”
“A ‘glitch,’” said Artie, with air quotes.
I loaned out my headphones.
“Fuckin’ double-tap it!” said Jared. Jared and Artie watched a viral video in which a girl hits another girl in the head with a shovel.
Anabelle wrote about the chapter in The Things They Carried in which a nine-year-old girl gets a brain tumor.
Suddenly Jared blasted the first measures of “#Selfie.” That got a laugh. Trevor shook his head and popped a Cheeto in his mouth. I went over to Jared. Had he gotten any of the worksheets done?
“No, not today,” he said.
Shamus had written another mood word, after love: caring.
I looked at the clock. “So that’s one word every twenty minutes.”
“That’s more than I usually do,” Shamus said. He said he’d already chosen three songs and filled out three analysis sheets, and then he’d spent two days in ISS—i.e., in-school suspension—the week before, when the due date for the soundtrack project was changed. Mrs. Meese came over to say that if he didn’t have the project done by tomorrow, when Mrs. Kennett was back, he’d get a zero. “You could have been working on it when you were in ISS,” she said.
“But I never got the paper for it,” said Shamus. “It’s not my fault.”
“It is your fault, because you got an ISS,” Mrs. Meese said.
“Yes, but it’s the teacher’s responsibility to give me my work,” Shamus said, reasonably.
“Then you talk to the teacher about it,” Mrs. Meese said. “Check with her to see if she’ll give you more time.”
“I’m not trying to make a thing about it,” Shamus said. “I was just asking a simple question.”
“And I don’t know the answer,” said Mrs. Meese. “That’s something that she has to answer.”
“Okay.” Shamus pulled the brim of his hat way down.
When Mrs. Meese had moved off to talk to somebody else, I tapped Shamus’s copy of The Things They Carried. “I met the man who wrote this book,” I said to him. “He put his heart and soul into it, and he wrote it as a work of fiction. He kept insisting that the stories are not true, but he’s kind of presenting them as if they are true. What if you found out that, say, fifty percent of the stories were exaggerated, were not true, in this book? Would it matter?”
Shamus thought for a bit. “I would say that it wouldn’t matter. I don’t see how it would.”
Dale handed me twelve pages, with some words and random song titles hastily scrawled on each one. “I’m done,” he said, zipping up his backpack.
“You are finished, man,” I said. “You are done.”
“I’m DONE.”
It was time to wrap things up. The kids who had taken out school laptops in place of locked iPads put them all away. Jared began telling the story of a movie called The Maiden Heist, with Morgan Freeman. “What the FUCK would be so important that you can’t help your old friend Christopher Walken?” he said.
“Jared, you really need to watch the language,” said Mrs. Meese, but since there were plenty of bad words in Tim O’Brien’s book, which was assigned reading, she couldn’t muster much outrage. What was interesting, though, was that Jared had a complete mastery of the Morgan Freeman movie. He could give a succinct off-the-cuff plot summary, and yet he’d done practically nothing on the analysis forms.
Mrs. Kennett wasn’t to blame, though—she taught what the Language Arts Department at Lasswell High School told her to teach. And the Language Arts Department wasn’t to blame either—filling out analysis sheets about The Things They Carried was standard operating procedure at American high schools. The people to blame were educational theorists who thought that it was necessary for all students to do literary criticism. If you want unskilled readers to read, I thought, make them copy out an interesting sentence every day, and make them read aloud an interesting paragraph a day. Twenty minutes, tops. If you want them to take pleasure in longer works, fiction or nonfiction, let them read along with an audiobook. Don’t fiddle with deadly lit-crit words like tone and mood. And don’t force them to read war books about shaking hands with corpses.
Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong. The PA woman said: “All iPads should unlock themselves by the end of block two today. All iPads should unlock themselves by the end of block two today. Thank you.” She read the names of about twenty-five students who had to report to the office.
Mr. Markey—curly hair, gruff voice, sleeves rolled up—came in with a projector to show the YouTube video, and we hooked it up to a school computer. “It’s a video of Oprah interviewing Elie Wiesel,” he said.
I said, “That’s heavy-duty.”
“Yeah—at Auschwitz,” said Mr. Markey. “So they’re walking around it and talking about it.” I had a sinking feeling. The Holocaust, at Lasswell High School. Pictures of mass death in this pale blue cinderblock room.
As he left, Jared apologized to Mrs. Meese for his bad language.
“That’s okay, Jared, don’t be sorry,” she said.
“They’re going to write an essay comparing this video to whatever book they read,” Mr. Markey said. “The idea is, what’s the best form for teaching a particular audience about the Holocaust? The best thing for today is just to pay attention to the video.”
I passed out the assignment sheet.
“Ooh, an assignment,” said Chelsea.
She and her friend Madonna were debating whether they should get their hair cut at the hair salon at Walmart on Saturday: the Walmart salon was cheap and supposedly they did a really good job.<
I skimmed the assignment sheet, which said, In an essay decide which one of the mediums we have looked at is the best for telling a survivor’s story. Defend your decision, but you must also acknowledge at least one counterclaim. In addition, be sure to use varied transitions to link your ideas and develop cohesion in your essay. If you did that, you got a score 3. To get a score 4, you had to consider the problem of which medium is best for a specific audience. Every essay had to have a thesis statement, and the students were allowed one spelling mistake—these were “non-negotiables.” “If I find a second mistake I will return it to you ungraded.” On the back was a blank chart, to be filled out with the several qualities, or “criteria,” that a Holocaust survivor’s story must have, each of which was to be multiplied by a factor of importance, one through four, called the “multiplier.” Students were asked to assign values to each format and figure out its overall score. The Holocaust assignment conformed to the following standards: Text Structures Level 6, Opinion/Argument Level 7, and Writing Process Level 5. It used the mass murder of Jews to evaluate the efficacy of various media.
“All right, my friends,” I said. “Give me some examples of some books that you’ve been reading—because you’re going to have to write an essay comparing the book that you’ve been working on with the video that you will watch.” Gloria said she’d read The Book Thief. Madonna and Chelsea were surfing makeup options. “Dark mascara?” I said. “Would that be good? Good. So this video, called Auschwitz: Death Camp, is Oprah Winfrey talking to Elie Wiesel, who’s a Holocaust survivor, in Auschwitz. The idea is to watch it and then compare it with one of the books that you’ve read.” I held up the assignment sheet. “And you have to use these criteria. I wouldn’t know how to do this, honestly, and I write for a living.”
Having discovered that his projector had no sound, Mr. Markey brought all of his students into my classroom. Some of them sat on low cabinets or on the floor; the room was crowded and hot and dark.
We watched the video. It opens with Oprah standing on the railroad track leading into the front gates of Auschwitz, on a wintry day. We see a close-up of Hitler’s eyes, and then, one minute into the movie, begins the parade of visual horror: pictures of piled, starved, naked Jewish bodies, bodies being bulldozed, bodies tossed into trenches full of more bodies. We were given a two-minute history of the war and the creation of concentration camps. Oprah said, “When American and Russian troops finally liberated the remaining camps, all they found left behind were the dead, and the walking dead.” Elie Wiesel and Oprah talk, walking on the frozen pathways of Auschwitz, exclaiming at its vastness. “This is the largest cemetery in recorded history,” Wiesel says. “I come here, and try to see the invisible, and try to hear the inaudible.” Oprah has her mittened hand in Elie Wiesel’s arm, and Wiesel is cold—you can hear the shivering in his voice. “I still don’t grasp it,” he says. “It must have some meaning. What does it mean? That evil can triumph? We knew that. That humiliation exists? We knew that. But this, which was a scandal at the level of creation?”
Wiesel is eloquent, and Auschwitz: Death Camp is a moving, freshly shocking, well-made video. But as I watched the kids sitting slack-faced, in plump-cheeked, polite silence, surreptitiously checking their text messages every so often, glancing up at the screen and away from it to think their own thoughts, adjusting their hair, while laughter and shouts floated in from the hall, I knew that this was the wrong documentary to be showing to a group of choiceless, voiceless high school kids at eight-thirty on a Monday morning, in connection with a compare-and-contrast media-studies essay assignment. The atrocity pictures kept coming, the staring corpses, the bodiless heads, while a violin played, and Wiesel read aloud from Night. And there was another problem: the particular copy of the video on YouTube that Mr. Markey had found repeated one section of the original program, so we were presented with some of the dreadful footage twice over. In the last fifteen minutes of the movie, we saw, displayed behind glass in the Auschwitz museum, a dark mound of empty cans of Zyklon B gas, and a low mountain of suitcases taken from Jewish families. We were shown a collection of confiscated baby clothes, more panned-across photos of bodies and charred faces—and then thousands of shoes, including children’s shoes. “Elegant shoes, poor shoes,” says Wiesel. “If these shoes could tell the stories of the lives of those who walked in them, imagine what they would say. Here it’s like the camp itself: we were all together. A whole community of shoes.” And then, still in the same museum, Wiesel and Oprah walk along the gigantic glass-fronted display case of human hair, which looks to be more than twenty feet long and four or five feet deep. “The first thing they did was to shave your head, from the corpses as well,” says Wiesel. The hair was sold to factories, Oprah explains: “At the time of the liberation, seven tons of hair was discovered at Auschwitz.” Wiesel almost can’t look at the hair—it’s too awful. “More and more,” he says. “Oh my god,” says Oprah. “It’s really unimaginable.” Wiesel says, “They wanted to push their crimes to the outer limit, thus depriving us of the language to describe their crimes.” The movie ends with the two of them again out in the cold, shivering, standing near barbed wire. Oprah says she can’t get her brain around the Holocaust, even now. “Oprah, the death of one child makes no sense,” Wiesel says. “The death of millions—what sense could it make?” Wiesel’s last words are, “Whenever people try to conduct such experiments against another people, we must be there to shout, and say, ‘No. We remember.’”
When the credits came on, Mr. Markey stopped the video. “Questions or comments right now?” he said. There were some small unhappy moans—no comments.
“Okay,” Mr. Markey said. “Those who came from next door, let’s go back next door. If you brought a chair, bring it back.” Many clinks and shufflings of moving chairs.
I said nothing. I sat in my chair and felt dismal. A boy named Graham and his friend talked softly together about Night—how it compared to the video they’d just watched. They discussed the museum of hair.
Bong, bong, bong, bong, bong, bong.
Madonna and Chelsea were giddy after seeing so much death: as if they were cheerleaders, they chanted, “H! O! L! O! C-A-U-S-T, YEAH!” At least they could spell it.
—
I SAT FOR AN HOUR. I had lunch and listened to voices in the hall. The bell bonged again six times. “They asked to see your ID?” said a boy. A girl called out, “Garth! Garth Connolly!”
I continued to sit. A tall tousled kid appeared at the door. “Is Mrs. Kennett not here?” He said he usually sat in the room with her this block.
I said I thought her daughter had croup.
“Huh?”
“I think her daughter got sick.”
“Oh, all right.” He waved and left. I noted down the SAT word of the day: prudent.
In the hall, a girl said, “I’m not sick, I have allergies.”
The PA lady said, “At this time, all chorus and chamber singers please go to the music room. All chorus and chamber singers to the music room.” She read off fourteen names of people who had to report to the main office.
“Your butt’s hanging,” said a boy in the hall. A girl came in and stopped. “You’re not Mrs. Kennett,” she said. She left.
The PA system booped. “Happy Monday, Lobster Nation!” said a high schooler’s male voice. “I’m Monk Bissette, and it’s a beautiful day outside. I’m here with my best friend and cohost, the one, the only, Dr. Might B. Righty.”
“Yo, wassup, Lobsters,” said Dr. Might B. Righty. “Today the boys’ and girls’ tennis team has matches with Kennebunk. Matches begin at three-thirty p.m. Also the JV and varsity softball team travels to Bonny Eagle for a four-thirty game. The JV boys’ lacrosse team hosts York at six p.m. Good luck to all Lobsters!”
Monk Bissette said, “Any student who has signed up for AP Government or AP History next year will need to attend a meeting on Tuesday, May th
Dr. Might B. Righty said, “Also, reminder to all seniors again. Please, seniors, LISTEN UP. You must turn in your permission slips and ten dollars to hold your spot for our class trip. We’re taking an awesome trip to Birch Point State Park, so PLEASE make sure you get that in by this Friday, all right—because we’re going to have to start canceling buses or adding buses. So get that IN! And also get your dues in. We’re graduating SOON, people. Get those dues IN!”
“That’s all for now. I’m Monk Bissette.”
“And I’m Dr. Might B. Righty. Stay classy, Lasswell.”
More quiet. Mr. Markey came in to say he’d gotten his sound to work with the projector.
From the hall, two girls: “That’s so cute.”
“Oh my god, that’s adorable.”
I got the Elie Wiesel movie ready to play for the next class, which was split in two parts: twenty-five minutes of Holocaust, then twenty-five minutes of lunch, then twenty-five more minutes of Holocaust. I leafed through an anthology that sat on the desk until a boy named Thad arrived. “I’m guessing I’m supposed to be in here,” he said. “I don’t know.”
I told him we were watching a video about the Holocaust. “It’s seriously heavy.”
Zach and Carter blew in. “Dude, she took my iPad with literally a minute left in class,” said Zach. “Everyone was sitting and not doing anything. So I have to get it back next block.”
“You got any food?” said Carter. Zach brought out a sandwich, which Carter rejected.
“Dude, you’re making fun of my mom,” said Zach. “You can’t make fun of my mom.”
Cece said, “Give me my headphones back.”
“Are we watching a movie today?” asked Carter.
“It’s not a cheerful movie,” I said, passing out the Holocaust assignment sheets.
“What the?” said Paul, scrubbing his face.