Nicholson Baker speaks about "Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids," 7:30 to 9:30 p.m., Monday, Sept. 12, at Rhodes Hall, 1516 Peachtree St. The discussion and book-signing, sponsored by A Cappella Books, is free, but to reserve a seat you must buy a book for $27 by contacting the store at their website or at this ticket site. Information: www.acappellabooks.com/
Teachers shouting, students slamming books, announcements gronking out of the loudspeakers — the regular racket of a school in Nicholson Baker's new book, "Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids," can make your head hurt.
(Baker will speak about the book Monday, Sept. 12, during a visit to Rhodes Hall in Midtown.)
But there’s a moment, early in Baker’s 719-page treatise, when all the screaming is puffed into silence, as Baker reads to his fifth-grade class from “Danny the Champion of the World,” by Roald Dahl.
The class is mesmerized.
“Carlton’s head was up; Ian’s head was up; Nash’s head was up; the tattletale girls were intent on hearing every word I was saying. Everyone was listening.”
It is brief magic in a painful and sweet odyssey as a substitute teacher in a school district not far from his home in Maine. Baker, 59, author of 10 novels and five works of nonfiction, spent 28 days teaching every aged student, kindergarteners through high school seniors, in a system he calls Regional School Unit 66 in Lasswell, Maine, though he changed the names of the town, the school and all the people in it.
He began substitute teaching (after a background check and fingerprinting) as a sort of experiment, to help him with an essay about education. The essay grew into a book that looks at the day-to-day of school with the sort of microscopic detail that Baker made famous in many of his novels, including "Room Temperature" (a book about the fleeting thoughts that occur while giving a baby a bottle) and "Vox," (a phone sex conversation that turns into a meditation on life and love).
He discovers that students are asked to handle the intolerable, to bear two-hour bus rides in each direction, to work on iPads that are disabled by lousy connectivity or purposefully limited as a means of discipline, and, good grief, work sheets. “(F)or many kids, going to school is simply about finding a way to get through six and a half hours of compulsory deskbound fluorescence without wigging out and incurring punishment,” he writes.
It’s instructive that the spellbinding reading from Dahl occurs after Baker tries gamely to teach his students about antonyms. The lesson: technical knowledge may be useful, but the power of a story is breathtaking.
Baker spoke about “Substitute” in advance of his trip to Atlanta:
On getting kids to behave:
There are an awful lot of kids who are getting in trouble, being disciplined and having their lives in some cases destroyed by this system who are perfectly reasonable kids, who don’t need any of those consequences. Look, we live in a jokey, vine-video-saturated age. Nobody wants to be quiet; they want to be funny.
On the dreaded work sheet:
It’s tragic in some classes, when you see that much intelligence assembled in a room, that many pairs of lively eyes, ready to think about anything at all, and I have to stand up there, not knowing any of them, and I have to say, ‘I have to hand you this worksheet. This worksheet is going to handily destroy whatever interest you have. This worksheet is going to roll right over it and leave it flat.’ That’s a sad position to be in.
On his own R-rated books:
I didn't get into the books that I've written because they aren't the sort of books you want to bring to the classroom. … They did Google me sometimes, and they'd ask, 'Why did you write "Vox"?' I'd say, 'I don't want to get into it.'
On his own training in grammar:
I never learned the parts of speech, I never could have told you what an adverbial phrase was. Fortunately I became a nuclear physicist, so I didn’t need that.
On the response to the book from Regional School Unit 66:
I don’t know how they’ll take it. … I don’t want anyone’s feelings hurt. I took pains to change everybody’s name and change the name of the district. I’m hoping it’s an affectionate portrait, first of all because I did really love the place.
On teaching kids stress reduction techniques (a compulsory class at his school):
What schools are realizing is that they are a tremendous source of stress in children’s lives. They are addressing it in the way schools do: let’s make a worksheet about it. Let’s teach it. … What really needs to happen, based on my admittedly limited experience, is less time in school. There has to be less school.
How much less school?
I would say three plump hours and you’re done. I know that sounds extreme, but nobody gets anything done after lunch.
On falling in love with your class:
If you’ve struggled and flailed till the end of a day with this group of 23 kids, it seems like you’ve gone to the South Pole with them. You’ve had a genuine expedition, you’ve all become comrades in arms, there have been illnesses and moments of unhappiness, rage, laughter, everything. We’ve lived together, for six and a half hours.
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