28 days of substitute teaching
In his poem “The Novelist,” W.H. Auden wrote that the titular species of writer “must become the whole of boredom.” American author Nicholson Baker has always seen that grim dictum as a kind of challenge, one he has taken on with playful abandon, writing entire books out of moments and scenarios that would challenge the patience of a monk. His heady and hilarious first novel, 1988’s The Mezzanine, comprises the musings of a Baker-like narrator as he ascends an office escalator following his lunch break.
Baker’s preference for the micro over macro helps create many of the more charming moments in his new book, Substitute, “a moment-by-moment account” of the brief time he spent working as a substitute teacher in 2014 near his home in Maine. He didn’t do it for the cash, but rather to satisfy his own curiosity about modern public education. What he hopes to provide in the book “is a lived-through sense of how busy and complicated and weird and long every school day is.”
That Baker certainly does. Substitute is a relentless, Sisyphean epic crammed full of arguments with noisy classes and bored students, vain attempts to follow lesson plans, broken iPads, pointless exercises and the occasional quiet moment alone in a staff room or in the school parking lot. Each of the 28 days he spent as a substitute is rendered exhaustively, complete with morning announcements.
Unfortunately, with more than 700 pages, the overall effect is not so much “livedthrough” as “endured.” There is simply too much material here and Baker never finds a way to make it more than fittingly compelling. Ultimately, we know little more about modern schooling by the end of Substitute’s chaotic and frustrating 28 days than we did after the first few. Nathan Whitlock is the author of the novel Congratulations On Everything (ECW Press) as well as a part-time teacher.