Substitute by Nicholson Baker
We lined up to go to the library to hear the librarian, a gravel-voiced gent named Mr. Merlier, read from Whistle in the Graveyard, a book of ghost stories. “This is a free time for you,” said the sub plans. I spent it buying an ebook of Lulu and the Brontosaurus—the class was in the middle of reading it on their Kindles—and chanting, “‘Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the pit from pole to pole.’”
In the library at 10:20 a.m., Mr. Merlier was finishing a story about a pirate who swore an oath to guard some buried treasure in Bonavista Bay, on the coast of Newfoundland. “You know pirates,” Mr. Merlier said. “An oath like that is a blood oath.”
“Can you show us the picture?” said Philip.
“You’re looking at the only picture there is,” he said.
“There is another picture!” said Philip.
“Where are you talking about?”
Philip paged through and found a picture of a pirate’s head.
“Please have a seat,” said Mr. Merlier. “You watch too much television and too much video, obviously. You need a picture for everything. Try your imaginations. Had you been born in the time when there was just radio, maybe your imaginations would be stronger. You need to work on that. Be quiet.” He read, “THEY LEFT ONE MAN—they left one man on the beach who had taken a solemn oath never to leave the treasure unguarded.”
The pirate band never returned, Mr. Merlier continued. Years went by, and the treasure-guarding pirate grew old and died and became a ghost, who still haunts Bonavista Bay. Once some men tried to dig for the treasure, but they were so terrified they went mad. Nowadays, though, Mr. Merlier said, the ghost is tired of his guard duty. One night, not so long ago, the ghost stopped a fisherman and told him to return alone at midnight and drip some blood on the ground; if he did, he would possess the treasure. The blood could be from a chicken, the ghost said, or perhaps from a cut in the fisherman’s wrist. The fisherman was terrified and ran away. “Everybody knows that the ghost is honor-bound,” Mr. Merlier read. “He took an oath to scare off people, even though he really wants somebody brave enough to come along and dig up the treasure. OKAY, GUYS, I want to wish you a good summer.”
“That book is awesome,” said Rianna.
Cormac wanted to know where, exactly, the treasure was.
“We don’t know the specifics,” said Mr. Merlier, “but it’s on Bonavista Bay. You need to find out where Newfoundland is first. And then you’ll need to find the bay. And then you’ll need to do a little digging, to find out where from the locals, maybe send a letter or two, or an email.”
We chuffed back to class. Because of the lockdown drill, snack had to happen quickly.
“SHHHHH!” said Demi.
“Whoa, that was a power shush,” I said.
Ms. Lamarche said, “All right, everyone, listen! WE HAVE A FIVE-MINUTE SNACK. SO EAT UP QUICKLY, PLEASE.”
“Why do we only have five minutes?” asked Sabrina. She’d brought out a bag of Keebler Bug Bites—graham cracker cookies in the shape of dragonflies, caterpillars, and ladybugs.
I told them we had to practice a lockdown soon. “CHOW DOWN,” I said. “Snack it up.”
In a back corner of the room, Marshall, Devin, and Jonas were crouched over their juice boxes.
“This is the man cave,” said Jonas. Colleen walked over.
“Get out of the man cave,” said Marshall to Colleen.
“No, I didn’t hear that,” I said. “You say, Welcome to the man cave. Come on in.”
“Hah hah hah, you can’t come in,” said Marshall.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“It’s called a man cave,” said Devin.
“It can be a man cave that has guests,” I said.
“We are the guests,” said Jonas.
I asked if there was a woman cave. Evidently there was. I took a bite of a sandwich.
“LET’S FINISH UP OUR SNACKS!” called Ms. Lamarche.
“Stop chewing,” I said. “Just keep it in your mouth. No, finish chewing. We’re going to get ready for the lockdown procedure.”
“What lockdown procedure?” said Imogen, eating a Fruit Roll-Up.
Mrs. Hulbert came to the door. “MRS. COMPTON’S CLASS. We should be lining up, putting our snacks away. We’re going to be practicing in the cafeteria, and then outside at recess.”
I said, “You’ve got to be focused, thoughtful—”
Ms. Lamarche blasted over me: “YOU GUYS, I WANT TO SEE A LINE, PLEASE.”
“Mr. Baker,” said Porter. “Devin and Marshall are sharing their food.”
“I think your name is funny,” said Jonas.
“I’M GOING TO START MY TIMER,” said Ms. Lamarche. “WHATEVER IT TAKES YOU GUYS TO LINE UP AND BE QUIET IS WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO DURING RECESS. Caroline! I WANT A STRAIGHT, QUIET LINE, PLEASE. YOU GUYS KNOW THE RULES.” She roared so loudly this time she made herself cough.
The cafeteria was three-quarters full and even louder than during lunch. Mrs. Shorter, one of the teachers, shouted the crowd down. “BOYS AND GIRLS. IF WE HAVE A LOCKDOWN IN THE CAFETERIA, WE ALL NEED TO GO INTO THE KITCHEN. In the kitchen there are places that we go. We have the office, which is the first room. We have the storage closet, which has food in it, the second room. We have the back room. And we have the chemical room. Also, we have the refrigerator, the walk-in cooler. Your hands cannot touch anything in any of those rooms!” The day before, Mrs. Shorter said, when they’d done a similar drill, there were a couple of issues. It got crowded in some of the rooms, especially in the chemical room, and it was impossible to close the door. Also, there might not be an adult in the room with you. “You need to be responsible for NO TALKING in that room. YOU ARE NOT LOOKING FOR YOUR FRIENDS. YOU ARE NOT CHOOSING THE ROOM YOU GO INTO. You’re going to a space as a space! IF YOU WALK INTO THE REFRIGERATOR, yes, it’s going to be cold, but you will not freeze. In the refrigerator, there’s a second door. That’s the freezer. We’re not going into the freezer.”
“We will freeze!” said a boy.
“No, we will not,” said Mrs. Shorter. “Yesterday, our best time was a minute and ten seconds. Our goal is to somehow get it under a minute. Remember, your first job is to get yourself to a safe place. Okay! PLEASE SECURE THE BUILDING!”
A hundred children pushed and shuffled as quickly as they could into the kitchen and found a space to stand in the cooler, the chemical room, the storage room, the back room, or the office. All five doors were shut.
“We’re still not getting through this doorway fast enough,” said Mrs. Shorter.
Everyone flushed back out to the cafeteria. “I smell hotdogs,” said Devin.
Mrs. Shorter gave some pointers about moving deeper into the kitchen faster, being silent, and not holding hands. “We also noticed room hopping,” she said. “If you’re in a room, it’s not who you’re with, it’s the fact that you’ve gotten yourself to a safe place. Remember, this is for your safety! Okay, PLEASE SECURE THE BUILDING!”
The second trial did not begin well and Mrs. Shorter stopped it partway through. “That was horrendous,” she said. She started them again. I timed them on my phone. One minute, thirteen seconds.
“Nice job, guys,” I said.
“You’re tall,” said a boy.
We went outside to practice another lockdown on the playground. Wayne brought along the red emergency bag, which held a key and a whistle and a walkie-talkie.
Mr. Stowe, the teacher who’d won a spa ticket, was master of ceremonies for this drill. He wasn’t a shouter; I liked him right away. “Three loud whistle-blows tells you secure the building,” he said to the group. “When you hear the three whistles, it is your job, as quickly as you can, to rush behind the basketball hoop and down to the trail. It’s kind of muddy, so our feet might get a little dirty, but that’s okay. We are going to walk down the trail. If it
“You would run,” said Rianna.
“You would be going as quickly as you can, and you would continue on that trail, all the way to the center of Wallingford to make sure that help was on the way. Today, we are just going to walk probably fifty yards or so down the trail. It needs to be silent. Right now you’re just going to be playing.”
The kids sprinted off to play.
“Do you want to be in charge of the whistle?” Mr. Stowe asked me.
“No, I don’t want to be in charge of the whistle!” I said.
Mr. Stowe inspected the whistle dubiously. “Lisa was the one who used it yesterday, and now she’s out today. Hm.” He wiped the whistle off thoroughly with a shirttail and blew it three times.
The children racewalked down a narrow trail through woods. Marshall and his confederates shot off at top speed. Mr. Stowe yelled and I tongue-whistled to call them back.
“Oh my gosh, look how far they ran,” said Myra.
We walked back to the building and lined up.
“I was running like never before,” said Clayton, who was winded and hot.
When my class had lined up, I said, “Excellent emergency management training activities. Nice going.”
“I ran all the way down the trail,” said Marshall.
Mr. Stowe reviewed the drill—what went well, what didn’t go well. Everyone had moved quickly, and hadn’t tried to stick with their friends. “In a real emergency, continuing to run like that is the best thing you can do. For today, I would say that some of you went a bit farther than fifty yards. And we could have been a little bit more quiet. I know it’s exciting, we’re running off into the woods, but we need to be as quiet as we can.”
“We went like seventy yards,” said Cecil, back in class.
“We went like seventy thousand yards,” said Marshall.
“We went like ninety yards,” said Cormac.
“EVERYBODY SIT IN THEIR SEATS, PLEASE,” said Ms. Lamarche.
Each kid had a Math Menu on his or her iPad and was supposed to do what it said for forty minutes. Every time a student tapped in the correct answer, the iPad chirped like a smoke detector with a low battery. I went around asking what nine times seven was. Half knew, half guessed or looked it up on the matrix taped to their desks. The sub plans said they were supposed to be working quietly, so I bellowed, “EVERYBODY BE QUIET, RIGHT NOW. You simply cannot concentrate if everybody’s talking this loudly.”
The intercom came on. “Is Imogen Reynolds there today?”
Yes! said the class.
“Okay, thank you.”
Imogen had a bad cough and went to the nurse. Ms. Lamarche turned the fan on—gosh, it was loud. Wayne wanted help with a word problem: The amazing upside-down carnival is coming to town, and they need help filling out their brochure. Can you fill in the missing information? He had to find the perimeter of the roller coaster and several other rides in a chart, but he’d forgotten what perimeter was. We worked out the answer, which was eighteen feet. Why was the roller coaster so small? Why was a third-grader doing perimeter problems on his iPad when he still hadn’t mastered addition or subtraction, or his times tables?
“What’s nine times seven?” I asked Cecil.
“I’m past my nines, I don’t remember them that good.”
“For today, just remember that one. What’s nine times seven?”
“Sixty-three,” he said.
Every time I helped somebody with some higher-level problem, I asked him or her what nine times seven was. Some couldn’t learn it, some could. “Burn it into your brain,” I said. It didn’t matter, except in school.
“Burn it, burn it, burn it,” said Jonas.
“My brain’s going to be illegal!” said Clayton.
A few kids were doing clock problems, but most were struggling with perimeter measurement. Demi showed me her screen: The perimeter of a square family room is 36. How long is each side? After five minutes of coaching and drawing pictures and counting out wooden blocks, she got the answer. It was obviously too hard for her. Because so much happened on iPad screens, the class was out of the habit of using scrap paper to draw shapes and lengths.
“Mr. Baker, I don’t get it,” said Elijah. “The perimeter of a square piece of tissue paper is one hundred twenty centimeters. How long is each side?” In order to answer the question, Elijah had to remember that a square was made up of four equal sides, and then, after sketching the square, he had to construct a proto-algebraic equation in his head:
+ + + equals 120 centimeters
This expression, he had then to understand, was the same as
times 4 equals 120 centimeters
Then he had to remember how to divide 120 by 4, which relied on his knowing that 12 divided by 4 is 3. His iPad finally chirped with the right answer, but Elijah, I’m sorry to say, was lost.
I swerved back to tutor Wayne, who’d been hit with an even harder problem: The perimeter of an air hockey table is 26 feet. It’s four feet wide. How long is it? After five minutes of drawing pictures and thinking about the nature of rectangles, Wayne got the answer, and his iPad chirped. He sat back, smiling and relieved. Along the way he’d tried to multiply 26 by 4, and he’d insisted that half of 18 was 8. Perimeter problems could wait. The quick, cute iPad lessons were luring these third-graders out to sea in little rowboats and leaving them there to sink.
Many intelligent, successful grownups, I happen to know, never memorized their times tables. Life doesn’t need you to know them—but middle school does, and high school does. Otherwise you end up in special ed classes playing Fast Math bowling games or in Mr. Fields’s room, guessing quotients whenever a substitute teacher honks a horn. I looked up at the class. “ALL RIGHT, IT’S GETTING A LITTLE NOISY, MY FRIENDS,” I said. “WHAT IS NINE TIMES SEVEN?”
SIXTY-THREE.
“Good.”
Imogen came back from the nurse with a note. “Imogen has wheezing in lungs. Called home and left message. She states she feels better—please send her back with any difficulty breathing. Marianne (nurse).”
“I have allergies and it’s making my lungs hurt when I breathe,” said Imogen.
“I’m sorry, that’s a bad feeling,” I said.
Kirstin, one of the smart girls, came up. “Mr. Baker, I forgot what it’s called when you’re doing multiplication and you’re adding it.”
“Repeated addition!” said Wayne and Porter simultaneously. “JINX.”
“Double jinx,” said Porter.
“Triple jinx,” said Wayne.
“Okay, okay,” I said.
“You can’t do that,” said Caroline to Jonas. Jonas was taking pictures with his iPad.
“You called me a toilet,” said Jonas.
“What’s nine times seven?” I asked Caroline.
“Sixty-three,” said Caroline.
“You are good,” I said. I turned to Jonas. “What’s nine times seven?”
“Eighteen?”
“Mrs. Compton says we’re not allowed to take pictures,” said Caroline.
“Don’t take pictures, for gosh sakes! And don’t worry about it!”
“Mr. Baker, how do you spell repeated?” said Kirstin.
I spelled it for her. Marshall, tipping, fell off his chair.
“You all right?” I said to him.
He nodded.
“Mr. Baker, look,” Porter said. His iPad said that he’d mastered three skills.
“You mastered three schools, good. Skulls? Skills. What’s nine times seven?”
“Um—sixty-three?”
“I love the sound of that.” The clock said noon. I did a Frank Sinatra imitation, “It’s time—to go to recess!”
Rianna sang, “Get rid—of all the kids.”
“I don’t want you to go,” I said.
“I wouldn’t miss Marshall, if I were you,” Rianna said.
“He’s all right,” I said. “I can handle him.”
“I can’t,” said Rianna. “He’s annoying.”
“He always fools us and makes us mad,” said Sabrina.
“CLEAN UP,” said Demi.
“CLEAN IT UP,” I said. “WHAT’S NINE TIMES SEVEN?”
“SIXTY-THREE!”
“Oh, yes! I want that achievement in your heads today.”
“Mr. Baker, can I use the bathroom?” said Cormac.
“Use it or lose it,” I said. “ALL RIGHT, SHH! I HEARD A SUDDEN CLASHING OF LOUD VOICES. It’s like swords clashing together, and it hurts everybody’s ears. The exciting news is that recess is on. I’m going to be out there, watching you like a hawk, hoping you have fun. Let’s line up.”
We went outside. Imogen had a clipboard and a pencil with her to work on math, because she’d been in the nurse’s office. “You’re not watching me like a hawk,” said Porter.
Mrs. Hulbert announced that there was no kickball for the rest of the week. I asked her what happened.
“We’ve had fights.”
“Nobody can agree on the rules,” said Mr. Stowe. “I’ve been recommending all year just a list of rules that are laminated and posted, so we all can agree.”
“Certainly makes sense to me,” I said.
This was Mr. Stowe’s first year at the school. “First year anywhere, I guess,” he said. He’d gotten a philosophy degree at U. Maine Orono, and then he’d worked as a substitute for a while, and then as an ed tech, and then he got his teaching certificate.
“They’re lucky to have you,” I said. “You have a good way with the kids.”