Nicholson Baker wanted to know what life in the classroom was really like. To that end, the renowned author of 10 novels and five works of nonfiction took a substitute-teaching course, got fingerprinted and became an on-call sub in Lasswell, Maine. "Substitute" is his experience working with K-12 kids for 28 days in 2014.
"I've tried to convey," Baker writes in the book's preface, "without exaggeration, the noisy, distracted, crazy-making reality of one fairly typical, not-terribly-poor-but-hardly-rich school district."
Though a giant doorstopper of a thing, the book is a fun read. Baker evokes a familiar tableau — daily announcements and lunch menus, cacophonous hallways and wood-grained desks, taxonomy-of-learning posters and stacked chairs — and then peoples it with the fetching children and hardworking teachers he works with.
Every day at 5 a.m., the 6-foot-4, 57-year-old-writer gamely answers the dispatcher's call, packs his hand sanitizer and his coffee and drives the dark roads of Maine to face a roomful of third-graders or fifth-graders or high school freshmen — wherever he is needed.
The book consists of 28 chapters, each representing a day in the classroom. In typical Baker fashion, the writing is keen, lively and kind (at least where the kids are concerned; teachers and "ed techs" are not rendered so sympathetically).
Baker's observations — such as, "The sound of children rose to a full riot-gear fluffernutter death-metal maelstrom" or, "I watched the children leap onto the buses like reverse paratroopers" — are a treat to read. It's good to be in his head, to see the kids, the teachers, the "six and a half hours of compulsory deskbound fluorescence" through his eyes.
Occasionally, Baker interjects an observation of today's educational system that might seem a logical conclusion of his intermittent time there.
He disdains excessive homework, for example, and reading logs. He makes a strong case that iPads and computers detract from the learning environment instead of enhancing it. Teachers yell a lot, and kids are always being made to listen — all cringe-worthy stuff, to be sure, but the book shouldn't be considered a sociological study of education. Baker is a sub, after all, not a teacher, and there is a world of difference.
