Mrs. Norris said, “We both like quirky, naughty children. We love them. Kids know if you’re pretending to like them or if you really like them. If you do really like kids and you show it, they’ll eat out of your hand.” Show that you’re vulnerable, she advised. Apologize to a student for getting off on the wrong foot, even if the student was being a holy terror. “There will be days when you’ll think, Okay, I wonder if Walmart needs a greeter. But you always come back. It’s probably the most rewarding job you’re ever going to do. Especially when kids get it and they tell you at the end of the day, ‘I love you.’ You might be the only person who says something nice to them—the only person who cares about them—all day long. Unfortunately that’s the case for some of our kids. So do your best to make their day a really good day, no matter how they make your life miserable.”
After some words of wisdom about fire drills and lockdown procedures and proper clothing, Shelly wrapped up the class and we went home.
—
ON THE THIRD TUESDAY, Shelly introduced three friendly, snappily dressed guidance counselors who were there to talk about Lasswell Middle School. The middle school had two floors, we learned, and it held sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders divided into nine teams, each with ninety students. The teams were named for great rivers of the world, Nile, Orinoco, Yangtze, Mississippi, Rhine, and so on.
The guidance counselors went into detail about emergency lockdown procedures and iPads—every student was issued an iPad—and class schedules. There was a certain block of time called STAR, which stood for “Students and Teachers Achieving Results,” which seemed to involve silent reading. Substitute teachers deserved the same level of respect that everyone else at the school received, said the guidance counselors. Students must dress and act appropriately—no spaghetti straps, no short shorts, no T-shirts with references to tobacco or alcohol, no hugging, no kissing. No cellphones in class. We were to separate students who were being excessively chatty, they said. If a particular student was causing trouble, we should first try to “redirect” him or her, and if they continued to act up, then call the office. “When you call, you could say, ‘I’ve tried to redirect so-and-so several times and they’re not following directions and they’re being disruptal.’” The guidance counselor paused, puzzled. “Disruptful?”
“Disruptive,” Shelly suggested.
“Disruptive, thank you! I was an English major, which is scary.”
We broke into groups and did some role-playing about how to deal with excessive chattiness and then I got very sleepy. I was on the verge of nodding off when I heard Shelly say, “Thank you again for coming,” and the class was over.
I drove home thinking that as soon as you sit down in a class, even a class you’re looking forward to, you begin to want it to be over. Even if you’re really interested in what’s going on—and I was interested in this substitute training class—there’s an intense impatience to be done. I marveled that children were asked to sit in classes all day long. Such brightly lit classes, too.
—
A WOMAN FROM IDENTOGO called to set up a second fingerprinting appointment. I apologized to her for having hard-to-scan fingers. “It happens to a lot of people,” she said. “Usually it’s poor ridge quality, or oily fingertips.” She said that if I failed three times, then they would just perform a “name check” on me—nothing to worry about.
I drove back to the fingerprinting office and washed my hands carefully twice. Again most of my fingerprints were rejected.
“See you again, maybe,” I said.
“I hope not,” said the fingerprint woman.
—
ON THE LAST DAY of substitute class, Shelly put out bowls of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups at each table for us to eat. Mr. Clapper, a beefy man with a coach’s raspy, commanding voice, was there with two of his senior staff—he called them “ladies”—to tell us how Lasswell High School worked. Mr. Clapper had taught health and physical education for twenty years, he said, and he’d coached the Lasswell football team, and then he became assistant principal and still coached the football team, and now he was Lasswell’s principal. “We have a shortage of substitutes,” he said, “and a large part of that is because some of our subs are snowbirds. They are someplace warm right now, as opposed to being available.” He talked about Lasswell’s class schedule. “Our blocks are roughly fifty-seven minutes long, and the students have six minutes to pass in between classes. Lunch happens in three segments, so some of our blocks are broken in two with lunch in between. And then we have one full block at the end of the day.”
One of Mr. Clapper’s guidance counselors passed around a sample folder of sub plans. “You’ll get a roster that you mark off for attendance,” she said. “You send one of those nice, trustworthy students right down to the office to bring it down for you.” She smiled. “They’ll be back very quickly, I’m sure.”
The sub plans would include IEPs and health concerns, the guidance counselor said. “If one of our students has seizures, that might be something you would need to know.” Substitute teachers really had to pay attention to the bell schedule, she added. “Kids will work on you. They’ll say, ‘We want to leave for lunch early, we’re starving.’ They’ll badger you. Don’t let them do that. They’re great kids and you’ll enjoy them, but they are teenagers, and they may try to pull one over on you.” Every high school student had an iPad, and iPads were for class work, not for games or social networks. Cellphones should not be out in class—they could be used between classes. “We want to keep hands off of kids,” she added, “not grabbing them, or putting a hand on their shoulder, or touching them in any way, shape, or form.”
Mr. Clapper talked at length about lockdown procedures and fire drills. “We’ve been throwing curveballs,” he said. For instance, they recently did a fire drill within a lockdown drill. Another time they sent a decoy class through the halls to lure students and teachers into thinking the lockdown was over, when it wasn’t.
Shelley handed us evaluation forms to fill out, and signed certificates saying we had successfully completed the course. “So,” she said, “you’ve gotten a picture of elementary school, a picture of middle school, and now you have a picture of high school. And you never really know how it’s going to go until you set foot in each place.” She gave each of us a last list of suggested educational games. “I’ve enjoyed doing this,” she said. “Thank you for everything. Safe travels.” We all said goodbye and thank you and waved at each other and crunched over broken bits of ice to our cars.
—
I SPENT A DAY FILLING OUT many pages of application forms for RSU66. There were actually two parallel sets of forms—one on SchoolSpring, a school employment website, and one on paper, with supplemental questions. I forwarded letters of recommendation and college transcripts, and I checked off that I’d be willing to substitute in all grades, at all schools. “Becoming a substitute teacher seems like the best, most direct way to learn how classrooms work,” I wrote in the cover letter.
I dropped off the forms and waited. Soon I got a cardboard fingerprint card in the mail—IdentoGO had determined that I was not a criminal. I danced around the kitchen waving it in the air, and then I dropped by Shelly’s office so that her assistant could make a copy. The next day I got an email: “Congratulations, Nick—you’ve been added to our Substitute Teacher List! You may begin getting calls as early as today.”
I was a teacher.
DAY ONE. Tuesday, March 11, 2014
LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, SPECIAL ED MATH
SMALL BUT HOSTILE
THE CALL CAME IN at five-forty in the morning, plinking from under my pillow. Would I be interested in filling in for a day for a math teacher named Mrs. Prideaux, in a resource room at the high school? I said I’d give it a shot, and I kissed my sleepy wife and took a shower and put on my good shoes and a sport jacket and drove for a long time in the dark, over hilly rural roa
ds, eating a toasted waffle. There had been a sudden thaw overnight, and the predawn traffic moved slowly through the side-sliding snowmist.
The buses, about twenty of them, were already queuing up as I reached the turn into the parking lot, where a sign announced that Lasswell High School was a tobacco-free area. I parked in the back, near the athletic field, a blank white plain with low shapes of cold fog slipping through the goalposts.
Hundreds of slow-moving, sleepy students were getting off buses and filing into a pair of side doors, supervised by several silent adults with clipboards. The idling engines of the buses made a heavy, steady noise; they exhaled plumes of exhaust, like cows waiting to be milked. There was a big stop sign on the door, ordering visitors to check in at the front office.
I told one of the grownups that I was a substitute and asked where the office was. He pointed down a hall. “Thank you for helping out,” he said. I waved.
It was warm and brightly fluorescent inside—not loud. Students with expressionless early-morning faces were leaning against lockers or kneeling on the floor going through their backpacks or hugging in corners. One of the secretaries, a small, pleasant, quick-moving woman in a gray cocktail dress, gave me a folder full of papers and a lanyard with a tag on it that said SUBSTITUTE, and she took me to room 18 and unlocked the door. It was a small hot space, with about ten desks, some bookshelves, some cabinets, and a whiteboard. Taped to the wall was an information sheet on attention deficit disorder. The walls were cinderblock, painted a cream color.
“Here are your attendance sheets,” the secretary said. “I’ve highlighted the different blocks that you have. All you need to do is mark them absent or tardy and then have a student bring them down to the office.” There were two lunches, she explained, and I had Lunch B, which began in the middle of block 4, at 11:49 a.m.
I thanked her and she went away. I sat down at the desk. There was a SpongeBob jar on it filled with pencils and dry-erase markers, and piles of student papers and worksheets and abandoned notebooks. A teacher—plump and capable looking—stopped by to introduce herself.
“Anything I should know?” I said.
“There are some challenging kids, because this is all special ed,” she said. “But Helen’s had subs before and it goes pretty well. I’m close and happy to help if I can.” She went away. I opened the folder and read Mrs. Prideaux’s sub plans.
Six electric bongs came over the PA system, followed by a longer boop, and then a secretary’s voice came on. “Good morning, please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.” I stood in the empty room, but I didn’t speak, because there was nobody in the room with me yet. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,” said the secretary over the loudspeaker, “and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Please pause for a moment of silence.” There was a moment of silence, another electric boop, and then she said, “Thank you, and have a great day.” School was in session. It got very quiet. I had no students.
After a long time, the electric bongs bonged again, and it was the beginning of block 1. A girl walked in. “Hello,” I said. “Hello,” she said. She dropped her backpack by a desk. I asked her her name and checked it off on a list. She left. A boy came in and sat down and opened a container of diced fruit. I checked his name off on the attendance sheet. Another kid came in and began looking through the cupboards, opening them and closing them rapidly.
“How are you doing?” I said.
“Good,” he said. In one of the cupboards he found a bag of cheese-flavored popcorn. He sat down.
“What’s your name?”
“Jack.”
“Hi, Jack, good to meet you. I’m Nick. Are you in this class?”
“No, but I usually come over here from across the hall and do work.” He sat and ate popcorn, blinking sleepily.
I asked him what kind of math he was supposed to be working on.
“I’m doing something else, I’m working on history.” He said he was researching the Vietnam War.
“Interesting,” I said. “So who started it?”
He didn’t answer.
“Hard to say, right?” I said. “Goes way back into the mists of time. People say Kennedy wanted to get us out of Vietnam. Do you think he did?”
“I think so,” said Jack.
I read a supplemental part of the sub plans, which was in capitals. “ALGEBRA 2 STUDENTS WILL COME IN WITH BREAKFAST AND MAY BE A LITTLE LATE. I’VE BEEN SOMEWHAT EASY ON THEM BECAUSE THEY’RE GOOD WORKERS.”
“People seem to wander in and out of this room,” I said to Jack.
“Yeah, they do.”
“So what do you like better, math or history?”
“Probably history.”
More students stopped by the door, saw that I was a substitute, and left to prowl the halls in search of friends. A girl wrote something on a Post-it note and asked me to sign it. It was permission for her to go to the library.
“Should I have signed that?” I asked Jack.
“Probably not,” he said.
I checked off some more names. They were juniors, it turned out. Some, who were taking Algebra II, were supposed to log on to a piece of software called MobyMax and take a test on their “core curriculum standards.” Some took it, some didn’t.
The bonger bonged again and some new students showed up. These were chattier. People were waking up now. I met a kid named Clyde who was interested in trucks and wore a plaid shirt and a baseball hat. He said he made good money by plowing people’s driveways. His grandfather had gotten him a truck which was completely rusted out—you could see the road through the floor, he said, and it wouldn’t pass inspection—so his father found him another truck on Craigslist for fifteen hundred dollars that he was happy with. Clyde told me that it was tricky to plow driveways right now, because the ground was starting to thaw. If it’s a paved driveway, then you can just drop the plow down on the asphalt, but if it’s a dirt driveway, you don’t want to rip up the surface by plowing too deep. “You get a feel for it after a while,” he said.
Another kid named Shamus came in, a quietly amused young man, also wearing a baseball hat, who turned out to have a girlfriend named Rianne. Rianne was round-faced and pale and wore very tight black pants and a black-and-pink-striped shirt and she worked at McDonald’s. She’d worked until three in the morning the night before, closing the store. “I don’t sleep,” she said. That was how she got through high school, she said, by not sleeping. She leaned against Shamus with her eyes closed, while Shamus looked at videos on his iPad.
Shamus’s friend Artie appeared—a loud, jokey storyteller, who liked to get as close as he could to dropping the f-bomb without actually dropping it: “I was like ‘What the fffffff . . . udge?’” He was stocky and handsome, and he spent his time trying to find good-looking bathing beauties on his iPad from websites that weren’t blocked. He was supposed to be doing a geometry worksheet.
Ms. Laronde, a young “ed tech”—a teaching assistant—came in to help Artie. She reminded him of the difference between complementary and supplementary angles. In a soft, faintly ironic voice, Ms. Laronde questioned and coaxed and prodded and finally got him to write his name at the top of the worksheet. That was all the geometry he did—he wrote his name. Besides that he told stories and said unexpected things. “My horrible fear is when you wake up and one of your eyes is swollen shut,” he suddenly announced. “I’m probably going to die at the age of forty-five.”
Ms. Laronde left to coach other students with Individualized Education Plans and Artie and Shamus began talking about milk. Artie said, “Boobies, cow boobies, that’s where the milk comes from.” He told a story about his little brother, who was seven. They were listening to Eminem and his little brother said, “Shut off those nigga beats.” Artie said, “Those aren’t nigga beats, those are cracker beat
s.” Later Artie’s father came home and asked what they’d been doing. His little brother said, “We were listening to cracker beats.”
The sub plans said I was supposed to discourage a tall, wiry kid named Lucas from playing on his iPad. I tried. Lucas and his friend, who wasn’t on the attendance sheet but who was allowed to visit, according to Mrs. Prideaux, were interested in watching YouTube videos of pickup trucks driving around in fields of mud—a sport called mudding. Some of the mudding trucks were “duallies”—trucks with two pairs of tires in the back. One truck was notable in that it had dually tires in the front and the back. “How can you even steer with duallies in the front?” Lucas’s friend asked. They tipped their iPads in each other’s direction: “Whoa, that’s a nice truck!”
“That’s badass, I have to say,” said Artie, leaning over.
“Check this out,” said Lucas.
A huge wave of mud spewed out from monster tires. “Oooh, nice,” they said.
Adam, who had chewed-up fingernails, showed me a picture on his iPad of his four-wheeler. It had two speeds. You’re supposed to drive up a hill in first, he said, but he’d had to shift to second to make progress. “It isn’t dangerous unless you’re stupid,” he added.
The electric bongs happened again, and it was a new block. A sad girl showed up. She’d been crying because her boyfriend had broken up with her. Rianne hugged her and stroked her cheek. Shamus said, “I could put up my kickstand for you.” Then, imitating a teacher, he said, in a low voice, “That is not acceptable!”
“I’ll tell you what’s not acceptable,” said Artie. “What if I whipped down my pants and took a shit on your grave?”
Shamus and Rianne laughed. Later Rianne tried to take a nap lying on Shamus’s lap.
Another teaching assistant showed up for a little while—very young, a recent graduate of the high school. He’d grown a goatee to look older than the students. He joshed with the young men about trucks, about jobs, about snowplowing, and about somebody’s older brother. His name was Mr. C.