The New York Public Library



Nicholson Baker | Katherine Lanpher

September 20, 2016

LIVE from the New York Public Library

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Wachenheim Trustees Room

KATHERINE LANPHER: I just want to plunge—I should also tell you that we’ve already forged a bond, so, you know, if it gets too lovey up here, just give a sign. So the book Substitute that we’re here to talk about, as well as education, tells us the story of your twenty-eight days as a substitute teacher. But originally you were going to write a meditation on education (yawns) policy. I’m sorry. (laughter) What changed your mind?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I felt I had no—I had no credentials. I had no experience, I was an imposter. It was a feeling of having all sorts of ideas and, well, very like someone in a think tank in Washington, no actual experience standing in front of children trying to teach something.

KATHERINE LANPHER: That wouldn’t have stopped many a person.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Right, but it is—it is—it’s one thing to come up with an idea about what people should know and a list of what cultural literacy means, you know, important things that children should know by grade four and by grade five. It’s another thing to stand up in front of them and get that across and somehow interest them in that thing.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I like the fact that you went to your family for some advice before you started working as a substitute. As I recall, your son was still very close to high school age when you started this. What advice did he give you?

NICHOLSON BAKER: My son was in high school and I said, “I think I really want to be a substitute teacher because I think that would allow me to learn you know, the ins”—he said, he said, “Dad, don’t do it, they’ll crush you.” (laughter) He was so right in some ways. You have to be a kind of crushed snail on the garden path before you can you know find out what you actually know.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I like that, “the crushed snail on the”—You know, it’s funny that you say that in fact because you have said before that “being a substitute teacher in K–12 education was like being a botanist in the nineteenth century going to an unknown land.”

NICHOLSON BAKER: I did, I said that.

KATHERINE LANPHER: You did. (laughter) It was really good.

NICHOLSON BAKER: It was a feeling—well, they’re uncharted territories and kindergarten is a gigantic unexplored space, third grade, every year, and in fact not just every year but every class that is assigned a year is a separate, secret, rich ecosystem. E. O. Wilson would be so happy exploring that particular fourth grade class, because the stresses, the cross-currents, the struggles, the old grudges between children, all of that stuff is unique to that class, and it’s really fun to live through the day and try to figure out, as if one is an ethnographer, an explorer, what is actually going on, what just happened.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Perhaps we should explain how the book is put together. There were twenty-eight days. What is in this almost seven hundred pages?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, first of all, okay, it’s like the wind-chill factor. Seven hundred pages sounds like a lot of pages, you know, but so much of it is conversation it really feels like five hundred pages.

(laughter)

KATHERINE LANPHER: True enough, true enough, but what I was trying to suggest was that rather than give us, you know, any educational theories, you gave it to us straight no chaser: day one, day two.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, because well one thing was I’d written this book about the lead-up to World War II, and I wrote it initially with lots of lamentations and cries of pain and worry and all the things that you would say if you looked at a horrible war, and my wife read the part of it that I’d given her and she said, “Take yourself out,” because I was using bits of journal entry and bits and newspaper articles and fragments of this and that, making a kind of bowl of broken glass that was the lead-up to World War II, and it felt so good to take myself out, because in my novels I’m always first-personing, I’m always saying, “I did this and then I did that,” “then I got on the escalator and then I got off the escalator,” and really sometimes you just want to not be there.

And so with Substitute it was take my own educational theories out and just tell it the way it happened. It is twenty-eight days, but it is twenty-eight days sprinkled over a semester, it sounds like a small amount of time. It felt like a lifetime to me. I know that I am not—and I just—is it worth saying? first of all, it’s worth saying, this is a beautiful library, I am honored to be part of this thing. I just saw the most amazing treasures in the Berg Collection, Blake’s manuscript of the Songs of Innocence and Experience. All kinds of—Dickens’s reading copy of—

KATHERINE LANPHER: Christmas Carol.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Christmas Carol. Cut down so he could compress it to an hour and a half, you know, with all the difficult stuff taken out, so I’m, well—

KATHERINE LANPHER: You have a literary high going on. We both do.

NICHOLSON BAKER: We are in a bookish place, anyway, yeah.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I was impressed that you have given us the furthest thing from a polemic. How did you ensure that didn’t happen?

NICHOLSON BAKER: How did I ensure that a polemic didn’t happen?

KATHERINE LANPHER: Yeah.

NICHOLSON BAKER: It’s easy. You just say to yourself, “when do I actually have an opinion?” Do I have an opinion that looks like this: Opinion. Bullet point, bullet point, bullet point. Second opinion. Bullet point? Of course not, the way you have an opinion is that you’re in the middle of other things, and an opinion arrives in your life unbidden. You know, it’s an opinion. My God, the kids when they come back from lunch are so sweaty and so miserable nothing gets learned after lunch. You know, that’s the opinion that pops into your mind. It happens on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, it happens at a specific moment. So what I decided to do was allow a little bit of polemic in the book but only at the moment that I actually felt it, so it would arise sort of like bits of grass up out of the paving stones.

KATHERINE LANPHER: It strikes me that education, unlike cold fusion, brain surgery, is something that we all think we know a lot about. We were students ourselves, perhaps we have children in school. It attracts opinions.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yes.

KATHERINE LANPHER: And I’m wondering why you think that is.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, for one thing, we did an amazing thing, all of us in this room, and we should be very proud tonight to remember that we all learned how to speak a language and we did it, it was a miraculous thing that we did without teachers, it was just with parents, and they taught us this thing by reflecting our words, so we are good, good learners, we have learned a lot, so—and therefore, and then, later on, other people, maybe the same people, maybe the parents, maybe they were teachers, taught this other crucial thing, which is how to—how to decode blobs of ink or pixels on a screen into something that sounds like language, so those are the two gigantic discoveries. How to speak something, how to be funny in a language is an amazing thing that kids learn as kindergartners and first grade and then how to decode, which comes a little bit later, how to pull stuff that’s frozen on the page and make it something that you can hear in your mind. So because those things have happened, I think we’re all in this room entitled to have really sophisticated, complicated opinions about what should happen with education.

So, but I had them, and I was a substitute teacher, and they changed a little bit, so I would just suggest that people who have thoughts about what should change with education, maybe they should volunteer, two weeks, three weeks, you know, twenty-eight days, whatever it is, do a little work in front of a class and see if your beliefs change. That’s what this book is, it’s sort of like a giant boulder in the road sign. Here it is. Live through these days, this record of days by somebody who is not a terribly good teacher, not a person who—I don’t like being in front of people. I like, you know, writing my books, but damnit, I was going to be in front of those people, and try to get across the stack of worksheets that I was given, I was going to pass them out and enforce what they had to do. Try doing that and see what happens to you. A lot of learning is just “What went wrong? How did this happen? Why are we here?” A lot of learning is not being able to codify things in a list, a teachable list or a testable list, but there’s a feeling of what process did I just go through? What did I just suffer through?

KATHERINE LANPHER: There’s a phrase of yours that I’m very fond of. You were talking about a word list. “An instantly forgettable gnat swarm of word lists.” I love that phrase. There’s a lot of petty tyrannies, it seems, in a classroom.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, you understand one of the crucial things that teachers have to do is teach to a curriculum. And there are curriculum planners and curriculum planners have learning targets, and the learning targets have these long things, it’s like Captain Kirk, it’s Stardate: Eng.8.28.3.5. It’s an amazing long thing and it says “understands how . . .” whatever it is, “understands how natural organisms respond to halophilic environments and something.”

So those lists of complicated words are testable. “Halophilic.” “Unreliable narrator.” “Apothem.” Does anybody know what an apothem is, a-p-o-t-h-e-m, math teachers. There are just a lot of words, thorny words, gnat-swarmy, complicated, bristly words that attract a curriculum designer’s eye, (laughter) because they are not the words that we actually use in everyday speech. What was amazing to me was the word “average” is out. You can talk about the “mode,” but you can’t talk about the “average.” So the words have to be a little exotic and then you can come up with a worksheet or an assignment packet that has those words listed and then the kids have to define the words.

Is that in fact how we learn anything of meaning in this world? I mean, honestly? No, of course not. Most of the words that we know how to use easily and without any reflection have nothing to do with our ever having defined them. So—and what we most want people to do is to be able to read fluently. I mean, just basic reading fluently. If that’s not happening, then the exotic gnat swarm of word lists has to go to one side and we have to actually sit with people and read with them so that they can get this basic skill, I think.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I bet most people here are good writers. How many people have a thesis statement before they begin any piece of writing? That’s what I thought.

(laughter)

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yeah, I was—I love E. B. White, you know, Dave Barry. I mean, think of any sort of essayist you like, any essayist, and think of what they’re doing and not even just, not the top cream-of-the-crop essayists, but just the second—think of any essayist you can think of and then think, yes, in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, you’re going to see a thing that says, maybe it would say, “Every person in a think tank ought to be a substitute teacher for two or three weeks,” it might say that, but, you know, actually it’s a mistake to do that, because what you want to do is start way out in the weeds over here and you want to go over and take a look at the shrubbery and the ferns over there, and move around, that’s what E. B. White did, that’s what the people—if you end up three quarters of the way through thinking, “oh my God, that is what he is getting at,” that’s where you want to be, you don’t want to slam down a thesis sentence, but that is what they’re taught, and especially it’s a thesis sentence about internal and external conflicts, that’s what they want to teach you. So Edgar Allan Poe has internal and external conflicts. Well, is that something that helps you enjoy and feel frightened by and feel excited by and interested in Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”? I don’t think so. It’s a way of taking “Tell-Tale Heart” and putting it into some sort of smoothie machine and coming out with something less interesting than “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

KATHERINE LANPHER: There’s a verisimilitude in the way that you describe chaos in a classroom and I was hoping that you could read an excerpt for us. Your book or mine?

(laughter)

NICHOLSON BAKER: Tell me what I should read. I’ve been going wild with the Post-it notes, but you have to tear them in half so that they look discreet.

(laughter)

KATHERINE LANPHER: I thought if we just went from here to here.

NICHOLSON BAKER: What is that? Two fifty-one, okay, sure. We both. Okay, yes, lead in.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I just wanted to say, let’s set this up just a little bit for folks. This is a class that you returned to several, many times actually, we have Mackenzie and Darryl and Caleb and Owen.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Middle school seventh grade science. Do you remember middle school seventh grade science? It was the kingdom packet, the packet of the kingdoms of living beings, and one I remember best because I hadn’t really understood them was the archaebacteria, these were the primitive creatures who thrived in saline solutions or extremely—the thermophiles, the halophiles, and the something-philes, but they were very important to know about, the archaebacteria. And I had to—I thought the one thing I can help them with is that it started with something very simple, Linnaeus. He was a guy who looked at the world of living beings and said, “What are they?” Well, they’re the plants and the animals, right? Of course you’d start with that. Some are rooted to the ground and don’t move around and some chew and defecate and do all the stuff that animals do, and then you have some that are very tiny, if you look through a microscope. And then you get into the fancy things like archaebacteria, that’s only sixty years ago or so, that’s on Nova, that’s a different thing entirely. So I’m trying to teach them about the archaebacteria and everything. By the second day they hate the archaebacteria (laughter)—they. I don’t even know how to pronounce it, archaebacteria, maybe.

KATHERINE LANPHER: So then I think you grabbed a book of facts and just started reading.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, yeah, the class was—so you get these classes so there are maybe four classes per day so each class is a different ecosystem, right, even in the day. It’s really like Groundhog Day. “Hello, kids how are you doing? I’m Mr. Baker, the sub.” “Hello, I’m Mr. Baker, I’m the sub,” “Hello” once again, so you keep going back. So this class, I kept reading. Okay, I decided I was going to—there’s one smart kid, I gave him a book, I said, “find something interesting in this book, let’s talk about it,” and he gave me the book back and it was about the fact that tails—that living creatures have tails, why do they have tails, why don’t human beings have tails? “Over time,” I read, “tails specialized to do different things in different animals, meanwhile, creatures like that us that had no use for tails evolved tailless,” then I said, “But you’ve got a tailbone, right. Once I had a sledding accident, I came off a hill and I came down boom and my tailbone hurt so badly I don’t even want to talk about it.”

“I did that,” said Jade.

“Oh my God,” said Darryl, I hate it when that bone breaks right there in two. It happened to me.”

“Ouch,” I said, but then I went back to reading, “Before we’re born, each human embryo—guys, dang, dang,” you always had to quiet them down, they’re getting overstimulated, they’re thinking about breaking their tailbones, right?

“I like this, this is interesting, guys,” said Chase.

“No, it’s not,” said Sunrise. Sunrise was so smart and so eager, she was small and at the end of the day, she came up to me saying, “I learned something about the whale,” so it worked out okay, but “No, it’s not,” said Sunrise.

I laughed. “Thank you. Before we’re born, this is the crucial thing, before we’re born, each human embryo repeats some of our evolutionary history. Tiny embryos start out with gill slits like fishes. Owen was talking.

“We’re learning here,” said Darryl.

“Words are actually flying out of my mouth and going into people’s ears,” I said.

Caleb said, “If you guys be quiet, I’ll give you a Jolly Rancher, okay?”

“Okay, I’ll be quiet,” said Owen.

I said, “And by their fourth week of development,” reading, “human embryos have little tails. So when you’re a tiny infant in your mother’s womb you actually have a tail, isn’t that bizarre?,” I said.

“Not infant, fetus,” said Luke.

“Jason had a tail,” said Jade.

I said, “That’s enough about tails, I think, let’s learn another fact, shall we?”

“No,” said Sunrise, putting her head in her arms and pretending to weep.

(laughter)

“Maybe that’s enough for now,” I said. “Do you think that’s enough?”

KATHERINE LANPHER: Thank you. So I loved all those voices piping up, but like a lot of—if this happened to be an unruly class of seventh graders, how would you get them to behave?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, look, all of you could be doing anything on this planet. You could be anywhere, you could be eating a pastrami sandwich, you could be standing on a street corner just looking at the passing parade. You decided, for reasons that I am extremely grateful for, you decided to come here. This is not true of students, right? (laughter) They did not decide. They were told they had to be in school, and that’s the crucial difference. If you have had to bounce around on a school bus for an hour and then you’re there in a class, right from the beginning, something bad has happened to you, right? You have been forced to be in a place that you don’t necessarily want to be, and you have been forced to get up earlier than you wanted to get up, so what do I do?

I embraced it. I just—somebody told me, “never say you’re the sub, never admit to it, because it’s an admission of weakness,” right. (laughter) “I’m Mr. Baker, and I’m the sub.” I tried it. I said, “Well, I’m Mr. Baker and I’m filling in for—” No! “I’m Mr. Baker and I’m the substitute teacher. I’m just going to say it,” and I did say it and it didn’t work out all that well, (laughter) but you just have to, you know, embrace what is true. Tell them the truth, that’s what I felt always, tell them the truth within the limits of your job description, tell them what is actually going on here. What is going here is I am passing out this beautiful worksheet that is one of seven worksheets that I’ve been given in a file folder, and there’s some sub plans, and I will read aloud to you from the sub plans, and we will have a great time.

KATHERINE LANPHER: So, scale of zero to ten, how bad would the din get in a room?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, it depends on the day. I think fifth grade—fifth grade was—there was a fifth grade class that was a very bad class and it happened early on. And maybe it was partly that I wasn’t seasoned slalom skier able to negotiate the hill of the day, but I—well, one of the beautiful things is that fifth grade, first of all, I don’t know if you remember what fifth graders look like, but they’re very, very small. (laughter) Compared to sixth graders and seventh graders. I was always amazed, these people are totally human beings, they have very complicated brains, they can tell jokes, and they’re very small. (laughter)

But this nice, very small person came up and said, “Mr. Baker, when they get like this, sometimes we need to go to the guidance counselor.” (laughter) And I said, “Thank you.” And she was so kind and so discreet, because she waited until no one else was hearing, so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed, and so we went together, actually once they had gone to gym, gym, what is gym? Running in an oval while “Happy” by Pharrell Williams plays, they just say, “Run,” you know, but we went, she and I went to the guidance counselor. The guidance counselor was busy, and she said, “Well, when the guidance counselor is busy, usually what we do is we go to Mr. Pierce, the principal.”

So we went to Mr. Pierce and I said, “Mr. Pierce, this has not been a good day for me. They’re being very loud.” And he said, “Yes, they are loud.” And I said, “Could you maybe come in and talk to them?” Because she said, “Just tell Mr. Pierce to come in and talk to the class,” so I thought, “She knows. She is the expert and she is being nice to me,” and I said, “Would you come in and talk to the class?” And he said, “Well, when I get a chance later on,” and he did, and he came in and talked to the class, and they had been so loud and the funny thing was that the guy who was the loudest and most disruptive, he had come up to me initially and said, “Mr. Baker, I just have two words for you: Good luck.” (laughter) And then he turned into a terror, you know? (laughter)

And Mr. Pierce came in and he did, and we all felt so bad. We all had our heads bowed, (laughter) oh my God. Mr. Pierce said, “You need to do what you know is right.” I thought, “Oh that guy, that is the most, that is the wisest thing I’ve ever heard.” (laughter) He said, “I have a piece of paper here on my desk in my office. It has a blank line in it. I could put your name there, I don’t want to put your name there, but if I put your name there it will go back to your parents. I have time, I can visit with you in my office. I don’t want to do that.” And everybody went quiet. And we all, and then he went away, and we all looked at each other, oh my God, we were just so contrite, and we felt so kind of purged (laughter) and completely done in, and then the noise level rose and rose and rose again. (laughter)

I thought, wait a minute, the principal, we’ve done it! And I said, “Jeepers, guys, come on,” I really genuinely got mad at them. I said, “just, let’s do it, let’s read it, let’s do something!” and they quieted down because I was genuinely—I wasn’t faking. Because earlier in the day I was kind of faking being mad, because you cannot be mad at these people, they’re too great, they’re too brilliant, but by the end of the day I was genuinely ticked off at them and Mr. Pierce had given them a lecture and they sensed both of those things and they quieted down. And then I read them from Roald Dahl, The Big Friendly Giant, about the puffing of the dream powders into little people’s rooms. Oh man, they went totally silent. They listened to what I said. And I said to Nash, who had been the one who said, “Good luck.” I said, “Nash, you’re quiet, you’re good. What happened?” He said, “I’m like that, I’m like that, I’m quiet, and then I get loud, and then I get quiet.” (laughter) I thought, “there’s so much self-knowledge and yet so much mayhem.”

(laughter)

KATHERINE LANPHER: One thing I took from your book was very comforting. Usually when you start talking about K–12 education most of the news is dispiriting, but reading aloud worked every time.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yeah. I had no idea. Okay, I think it was tenth or eleventh grade English and it was not a high performing group of English students and they were supposed to be studying Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption and they were just completely making little jokes and saying no, no, no. Every student has an iPad, one guy was complaining that his iPad was restricted, the usual nonsense that happened for a full ten minutes in the beginning of class, and then she said, “I’m going to read this book to you because I know you’re not going to read it to yourself,” and she just started and she was sort of halfway into. And she started reading and all of the murmuring and the side conversations and this one kid, I was an ed tech in that class, a substitute ed tech.

KATHERINE LANPHER: What’s an ed tech?

NICHOLSON BAKER: An educational technician, which means you are a person who is hired at a low wage so that a class has more grown-ups in it, and if you then are absent, a substitute person who is a grown-up is sitting there, so my charge, my person was diagnosed with ADHD so I was supposed to shadow him and make sure that he was doing his thing. So while he was doing his thing, he had three mango juice smoothies in front of him and he drank one, and then he kind of pushed it in his eye and then he drank the next one and he chewed off the rim of it and everything. As soon as the teacher, this very nice young teacher started reading Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption, he put the mango juice down, he started to listen. It was beautiful. Everybody was listening. Fiction read aloud, beside the Pledge of Allegiance, was the only thing that really got people’s attention, was fiction read aloud.

KATHERINE LANPHER: So what do you think that says to us?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, what does it say? I think it says that people get—there’s a lot more knowing than we know. There’s a lot more unsayable knowing that happens when you listen, especially when you listen to things, and I know this is true of me. I can have read something a lot of times, if I listen to it as an audiobook or especially if I read it aloud to myself, I hear it in a different way. I think there’s a lot to be said for just hearing words said in order and if they’re interesting words and taking them in and people just quiet down because they know that something of value is actually happening right at that moment.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I love that basically that kind of oral storytelling’s been going on since the first humans and a fire, right? You sit around, you talk, you tell stories.

NICHOLSON BAKER: It was either a fire or I don’t know what, yeah, marshmallows, something.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Brontosaurus. Talk about the presence of technology in the classroom. We go from the ancient to the new.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Okay, Maine—this all happened in the state of Maine, which is a great state, and the sign says “It’s the Way Life Should Be,” and that’s absolutely true, although we have a terrible governor right now.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Would you like to see him as a substitute teacher?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, you know, why not? I think anybody who has some sort of say in the world of education ought to give it a shot. It would be interesting to see how he did, but Maine is a nice place. They’re nice people. What was the question?

KATHERINE LANPHER: The question was technology.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Yes, oh, of course. Well, Angus King, the governor of Maine back in the day when everything was good, before the crash and everybody was happy and everybody had money, he gave everybody a white plastic Apple computer, back when they were white and plastic, and that has evolved into the giving of—everybody gets, in middle school and high school everybody gets an iPad in the state of Maine. The great thing about that is if you are a person who is essentially like Bartleby the Scrivener and is on strike and says, “I prefer to not to.”

Let’s say you’re somebody who likes to do snowplowing for a living or who likes to drive trucks or any number of things, and you are, say, eighteen or twenty-three assignments behind in math and you are in a remedial math class, what can you do? Well, you have this beautiful liquid crystal window onto another world. And the other world allows you to look at videos of mudding trucks and watch them jump off the hill and come slowly down into the field of mud and create a great spume of beautiful mud, and you get to watch that and you and your friends get to say, “Oh my, oh that’s so beautiful.” The iPad gives that kid something to do other than be a complete, you know, maybe paper clip and rubber band, or passing a note, something, a window onto the world. On the other hand.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I don’t think this is part of the Common Core curriculum.

NICHOLSON BAKER: But why shouldn’t it be? Everything, everything in life. Mudding trucks are fascinating, the history of mudding trucks. Why do people want to have rallies in which trucks drive through mud? There must be something there. So there’s something obviously studiable about that. The history of anything is interesting, I think, but it isn’t in the Common Core, no of course it’s not in the Common Core. The person was supposed to be doing some math, and the teacher had gotten him to write his name at the top of the page, that’s what he had done, he had done something that day, and now he was doing something else which was interesting to him.

The problem is that if he continued in this course of action, of watching mudding trucks rather than doing his assignments, terrible things were going to happen to him that involved the iPad because the iPad is a precious, expensive technological miracle, and therefore it is desired and therefore it can be taken away and therefore it becomes part of a punitive system. In elementary school, the punitive system is recess, everybody wants to go on recess. If you start doing bad things, you lose a minute of recess and then two minutes three minutes and then you sit by the wall and in the end you lose all of recess. And it’s the same way with middle school and high school if you start messing up you begin to lose apps. You cannot do this, your iPad is restricted, you can’t log on to that, finally your iPad is gone and you have nothing. You have only yourself in that class.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Well, how do you do the schoolwork, then?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, that’s a detail that you have to work out with the teacher. The teacher says, “I realize some people don’t have iPads. We’ll work it out, maybe you’ll have to use a different method.” It’s a problem. It’s a problem. It’s a very much—I—Cool Hand Luke kept coming to my mind. “I can eat fifty eggs, I’ll eat fifty eggs,” “what we have here is a failure to communicate,” prison, violation, further punitive action, and then you end up in juvie, right?

KATHERINE LANPHER: Right. Maybe we should do a quick excerpt on juvie. You had a student who ended up telling you in the class sort of his life story.

NICHOLSON BAKER: That’s the amazing thing is that is that people—is that students want to tell you everything, and I was sitting in—there was a sort of substitute, there was the ed tech area, and I was an ed tech for a couple of these guys. And he told me the story of his crime—he beat up somebody—and he was sent to juvie. He was hiding, he was apprehended. He went to juvie, and then he just—he didn’t want to stop talking, he was going, he wanted to tell me everything, and he said, “A new kid came in trying to make a name for himself, he slit a kid’s throat, so the kid came back and killed him.” I said, “In juvie?” He said, “Oh yeah, people don’t know. They don’t tell the outside world, like if someone died, they won’t tell. This one kid came in, new kid, they’re beating him up every day. I went over to him and I said, ‘what’s your problem?’ He goes, ‘I’m not guilty.’ I said, ‘everybody did something to come in here.’ This girl got him in for drug running, she passed him the stuff and got him in there. He couldn’t fight at all, he didn’t know nothing about fighting. Kids would beat him up so bad that the kid wouldn’t get up. I told him, ‘Get up.’ I went to Sergeant Stamm and I told him, ‘He’s going to die, the guys are going to get to him and he can’t fight back.’ In the shower, I said, ‘Watch your back.’ They run up and stabbed him. I said to the guard, ‘What did I tell you? He’s going to die.’ Sergeant Stamm said, ‘Yeah, so? This is your house, you’re supposed to take care of it.’ The kid made it out and I go up to see him and he says, ‘I might take my life tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Don’t do that.’ That night he woke up, made stuff out of sheets, a noose, jumped off a thing, killed himself.’”

I mean, that was just sort of in the middle of the day, and I’m thinking, “wait, I’ve got another period to go, I’ve got a guy who’s got dyslexia.” You know, you just never know what’s going to happen in the middle of a day.

KATHERINE LANPHER: How do you—there was a teacher who came in right after you heard that story, and you mentioned this to her.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Oh yeah, I said, I said, “Man, Lucas told me the whole story.” I said, “I just heard the whole grim story of juvie from Lucas.” She shook her head. “If I listened to all the stories, my heart would be irrevocably broken. Bro-ken,” and then she walked out. Yeah. What are you going to do? I mean, this is true with every day, everything where you’re dealing with people from all sorts of complicated backgrounds. The schools have everybody, and not all of the stories are happy, have happy endings.

KATHERINE LANPHER: So what is school for?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, what is school for? That is a tough one. What do you think school is for?

KATHERINE LANPHER: Nice dodge. (laughter) You’ve thought about it more than me.

NICHOLSON BAKER: I think it’s, well, I really do think reading is important, I really crucially do and because of American high schools have a lot of math in them. The times table is important. Learn your times tables, don’t mess around. They have these matrixes taped to the desk, so you know it says 6 x 7 and you go, 6 x 7 is 42, 42. Don’t do that, you’ve got to memorize it, because they’re going to kill you in high school, if you don’t know what 6 x 7 is. Is 6 x 7 42?

(laughter)

KATHERINE LANPHER: Forty-two. Nine times 7?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Sixty-three.

(laughter)

KATHERINE LANPHER: Oooh, you got that.

NICHOLSON BAKER: The thing about it is in real life does it matter that much, honestly? I know many people, many successful people who don’t care and don’t know their times tables, really. But in high school it is an absolute turnstile. If you do not know your times tables, you’re not going to get the whole order of operations, the whole thing is going to just turn to ashes and dust before your eyes.

But most people will forget most of that, they’re going to forget the quadratic formula, you’re going to forget all the fancy math and geometry that you—but you are not going to forget reading, and that’s the thing that troubled me was that there was all this stuff that seemed like they were learning reading, but actually they were learning “unreliable narrator” or “internal and external conflict,” which has nothing to do with the delight of actually taking things that are on a two-dimensional surface in code and making them and hearing them again in your head.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Themes. Remember that? Having to find the theme for every chapter of something?

NICHOLSON BAKER: The main idea, the theme, I never got it, I never could do it. I remember—I fortunately went to an alternative high school. It was a public school and I did not have to do really anything except watch My Three Sons and, you know, I played some bassoon, I read. My mother said, who’s in the audience, hi Mom, she said, “You know, War and Peace is a good novel, you may want to take a look at that,” so I read War and Peace, but I didn’t have any system, and—

KATHERINE LANPHER: How badly did you want a locker at the end of that? A locker or a gym?

NICHOLSON BAKER: I wanted to—you know those John Hughes movies, you know, where people have, where people talk to each other at the locker. Well, my school was 120 kids, no lockers, we had nothing really except bus tokens, because it was supposed to be that you would go out in the community and learn things from wherever. So I would learn things from my bassoon teacher, someone else would learn things from a radio station because he or she wanted to be a radio producer, so they would give you bus tokens, and some people would say, “I need seventeen bus tokens,” “Okay,” and they would give it to them. Then they would sell the bus tokens for a profit. (laughter) And finally every Wednesday morning we had Wednesday morning community meeting, and Lew Marks, who was the head, who was this wonderful, smart man who had conceived of the whole school, he would say, “I am hearing reports of people asking for three times too many bus tokens. Just, I’m trusting you, just ask for the number of tokens that you need,” and the number of tokens actually decreased. It was beautiful. It was a great, great school. It was a public school. It was public money funding a public school in which you could type your own transcript. Think of that. (laughter) I typed my own transcript. In the library, the Rochester Public Library on a manual typewriter, I typed my own transcript, and it sounded pretty good.

(laughter)

KATHERINE LANPHER: So, I’m just curious, given the school that you had, were you necessarily the best person to judge the kind of schooling you saw?

NICHOLSON BAKER: You mean the schooling when I was a substitute teacher? Well, the combination of my own having gone to an alternative school combined with my having watched my own two children go through Maine very traditional public schools. Maine public schools are—it’s really the fifties. It’s the fifties with a few computers and a better PA system, maybe. It’s absolutely locked into the distant time of Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.” I mean, it’s really long-ago stuff. So I watched that, but I also had my own experience of having done absolutely nothing. The great thing about my high school was you hit bottom, and you realized, “I’m bored, I’m looking out the window. Not only am I looking out the window with the curtain but I am smelling the curtain, and it smells good. I am looking and smelling the curtain and I am enjoying life and it is done, and I have nothing and I have nothing to show for this entire month except, you know, that I can tell you that the curtain smells good.” When you reach that moment, you realize nobody’s giving you anything. You have to do it. It has to come from you. Nobody’s asking for it. You have to make it happen. That was the great teaching that my public high school gave me.

And that is not what my children’s high school gave them, and instead we watched them stay up till 11:30 every night doing homework, and everybody who’s had kids knows this. You become an enforcer. “Have you got the foam core, did we do it, have you got the tacks, did you get the right kraft paper and the pens, do it, it’s 11:30, just get something down.” You know, all that horrible stuff. It is so—I want all those hours back that I could have had with my own kids that I was instead enforcing a curriculum that I didn’t believe in, frankly. I want it back. That’s part of the motive for writing this book.

KATHERINE LANPHER: So the widow of Steve Jobs just gave away ten million dollars to fund ten different kinds of schools.

NICHOLSON BAKER: That’s an interesting idea.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Actually it might have even been more than that. But let’s say that this time you heard about the deadline for applying for this. What school would you design?

NICHOLSON BAKER: What grade are you talking about? What age-group do you want me to talk about?

KATHERINE LANPHER: You can do anything between K and 12.

NICHOLSON BAKER: And you’re going to give me ten million dollars?

KATHERINE LANPHER: Something like that. That’s how I roll.

(laughter)

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, first I’d get a very nice desk. (laughter) I’d hire some assistants and a superintendent to call the snow days. No, I would really keep it really simple. Obviously, kids do love the glowing screen, and we’ve got to accept that we live in a world with that, so we can’t deny that but it would be very ridiculously touchy-feelingly free. And I’m sorry, because I went through a whole neoconservative phase, I’ve been there. I’m out of it now, okay? (laughter) I am here to tell you that we do not need to push kids in first and second grade to learn the parts of speech. I’m a writer, I write for a living, I didn’t know what an adverbial—I mean, I didn’t know the parts of speech until I got to college and took French and Latin.

It doesn’t matter. Most of the stuff that they insist that you have to learn because your cognitive nerve endings are open and ready to receive them at age eight or twelve or something, it’s false. Most of the people who are really motivated to learn things are the people who feel, as I feel, that they had a terrible lack. In high school I learned very little, so all of my life I’m trying to catch up, right? That’s my motive, is to catch up. There’s nothing wrong with feeling—there’s nothing wrong with having things be minimal and permissive and easy because they are kids, and this is the only chance that they have to be kids, and there is an awful lot of drugging and anxiety and stressing—stressing out of kids because they are failing to do whatever ridiculous series of worksheets is being demanded of them.

I just think they should have more opportunity to be bored, really, more opportunity to be bored and find out what they actually want to do, and that’s what I would say, I would say this is the school of—we would have a question of the day, every day would have a question, and one day it would be, “why do cats purr?” and another day it might be, “why do people laugh?” You know, whatever it is, it would be questions and every day you would have kind of look up a few things, and I would say, okay, every second or third day, “write me something, write me something funny, beautiful, strange, you know, complicated. Don’t give me a thesis sentence. I do not want to see it, it is not necessary. If you come to me and say, ‘I really have a thesis sentence for me and it’s crafted and beautiful,’ okay, we’re going to look at that thesis sentence, but don’t feel you have to give me a thesis sentence,” that’s the kind of thing I would do and I would be sitting there chanting the time tables with them because we’re in this together, guys, 9 times 7.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Sixty-three! Give them another one.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Four times 4. I had a humiliating experience in second grade, it was second or third grade, we all had these things, public spelling bees except they were times table bees, and I came up and she said something like 7 x 7, I can’t remember what it was, it was a horrible thing where I went ba-ah-ah. And it was a terrible feeling and I went back and studied up. It’s not something you want anybody to go through. I’m still scarred from it, really. I’m still recovering, obviously. It’s the only thing I really drilled the students in. Don’t go through when I went through.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I think you’ve made out okay. Sixteen books and counting, I believe?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, you know, most of them were thin books.

(laughter)

KATHERINE LANPHER: Why don’t we have that school you’re describing? I have this theory that people start out with what they want to be a reasonable idea of school reform and then by the time it goes through the sausage-making factory we end up with acronyms and thesis statements and worksheets.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Well, okay, I think part of it is just very natural. It’s that everything is harmed by being taught. I mean, everything is not harmed in a gigantic way but risks being harmed, everything, when it is codified, everything is a little bit the worse for wear by being put into some sort of worksheet or some sort of series of days in which you learn piece A, then piece B, then piece C, so teaching does wear things out, it smooths things out, it simplifies things. And the more times you teach something, let’s say you’re a high school teacher and you have to teach these four periods that day, by the four period you’re really tired of that thing, whatever it is, whatever that piece of knowledge is, you have been through it that day a number of times. So it is—so part of the problem is just that teaching is unnatural when you learned, most of what you learn. Let’s say you learn cross-country skiing, how learning is you watch somebody and you make a mistake and the guy says, “maybe you want to put your right pole forward first,” oh, and you try it, you make a mistake, maybe you fall, it’s this wonderful collaboration of trial and error and somebody giving you hints.

And it’s always—it’s always—the risk is always that it’s taken too far and overspecified and the problem right now is that the Common Core is so microscopically specified. I mean, they will say, they will have a line about, it’s just amazingly detailed, the Common Core, and so every teacher is in the back of his or her mind is thinking, “have I conveyed these thirteen things that are on the list of the Common Core, am I caught up?” There’s a tremendous stress. So that’s the problem now, but even if you free it up completely, the temptation is always to make a PowerPoint presentation out of the embracing of freedom. Embrace freedom for these reasons, boom boom boom, right? It just happens, it’s natural.

KATHERINE LANPHER: The intersection between politics and education. Has that always been with us? It seems to me that—

NICHOLSON BAKER: I don’t know if I am qualified to say at all, has it always been with us? I thought I would read a lot of books about the history of education when I started. And as soon as I became a substitute teacher, I realized, “No, I know something that they don’t know. I know the real thing. I’ve been there, I’ve been through the valley of the shadow,” you know. So I read—but one book I did read which is very good and I recommend it to you is Nel Noddings, who is emeritus professor at Stanford, Nel Noddings, Philosophy of Education, and of course I’d read about Rousseau, but she said that Rousseau, you know, had this belief that humans were noble savages and everything and that we just had to be noble savages and we would soak it all up. Of course, he only meant men. The women were going to help the noble savages be nobler and more savage by bringing them cups of tea and things.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Making the food, et cetera.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Making the food and serving them.

KATHERINE LANPHER: It worked out for Rousseau.

NICHOLSON BAKER: It worked out very well for Rousseau, but it’s not a way to lead your life, but anyway that was, how did we get there?

(laughter)

KATHERINE LANPHER: See, even like in a class, they’re helping you.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Thank you, nice people.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Can we talk about gender for a minute now that we’ve brought up Rousseau? Why is it that in elementary school there are so many women, and what connection if any do you think it has with the funding those schools get?

NICHOLSON BAKER: Oh, that’s a very interesting question. Well, it’s my belief that, well, I don’t want to say, women are smarter and funnier and nicer than men. And that’s all there is to it. So they’re doing the job that is actually—

KATHERINE LANPHER: Oh, go on, you big lug!

NICHOLSON BAKER: They’re doing the job that is actually pleasant and enjoyable. Here are these people who are full of thoughts—I mean a kid, a kindergarten kid comes up and says, “I saw two flies on the bus today, and the bus driver kissed them, I mean killed them.” And, you know, just little things like that, they want to have that kind of fresh draft of childhood coming at them every single day, because they are smart and they know what’s right. In high school you need to have an iron throat, and you need to talk loudly and you need to get command of the class and I saw a number of men who really had an amazingly loud voice and that was their way of maintaining control. By then the students have been in school—one kid said to me. I said, “How’s it going?” He said, “It’s not going well,” I said, “Why?” He said—he was in fourth grade, “I have been in this school for five years.” (laughter) You know? He was so bitter, bitter already. No, you’ve got years and years ahead of you. You are like one of those burros or mules, your mouth is all toughened up. By the time they get to eleventh grade, what you need is a coach. You need a person with a loud, loud voice who says, “the reform movements,” “the primary sources,” all that stuff. So that’s why I think there are more men in high school.

KATHERINE LANPHER: But I’m wondering if we belittle in budget—

NICHOLSON BAKER: That’s not fair, I’m sorry.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Or in stature, I’m wondering if we belittle in at least budget or even stature elementary school teachers because so many are women. We’ve somehow identified it as a feminine thing.

NICHOLSON BAKER: And it’s the most important part. You know, high school is gravy, it’s just high level babysitting, whereas grade school is real. You have to know how to read. It is crucial. It is the real stuff that makes a difference. Everybody’s gotta read by fourth or fifth grade, if you don’t you’re going to be in serious trouble. In high school you’re learning, you know, how to bend some metal, how to diagram a sentence, how to talk about Shakespeare. Nobody cares about that—it’s just, it’s gravy, it’s all excess, it’s all “Let’s keep these people in some way plausibly occupied until they’re sixteen and then they can go and enter and join their father’s snow-plowing business and everyone will be happy.”

KATHERINE LANPHER: I’m going to hear from that seventh-grade class again, if we go to page 254. We can just start it here at I looked at the clock.

NICHOLSON BAKER: Okay, 254. Where is that, come on, help me out.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I will, you want to just read mine? You can start down here.

NICHOLSON BAKER: I looked at the clock. “It’s time for lunch.”

“Lunch! Luuuuunch!”

“You don’t have to scream ‘lunch,’” I said, “just go to lunch.” The early release day should have ended right there. In fact, I thought all school days should be early release days. I ate a peanut butter cracker. Nobody learns a thing after lunch. The cafeteria is an endurance roaring contest. Keep teacher salaries the same, no increase them, but cut their hours in half. That should bring in some new blood, and fire the worst of the ed techs and the enrichment specialists, the ones who are paid bullies.

The kids came back squealing and grunting. They were as sick of the archaebacteria kingdom as I was. So what if the organisms could live in hot springs? This miraculous fact that I was really fascinated by, it gets worn down by being taught, right? Kyle lifted an unoccupied chair in the air and threatened someone with it. That’s when I got genuinely angry, “Put the chair down and sit in it,” I said.

“Can I go get my iPad?” Kyle asked.

“No, sit.” Later, one of Kyle’s friends brought him his iPad and he played some game on it defiantly. I ignored him. What did it matter? I left a fatuous note for Mrs. Painter and drove home. I always left a fatuous note. (laughter) “Kids were great.” They were great, they were fundamentally great, I loved them, they were great, they were wonderful. Man, they were difficult. Loud, bad, funny, brilliant, sullen, blithe, anxious children. If I were a real teacher, I would go completely nuts. I loved them. End of day eleven.

KATHERINE LANPHER: And I think we’ll end there. Thank you.

(applause)

NICHOLSON BAKER: Thank you. Thank you very much.

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