Substitute Quotes

“There are no key terms. There are no themes, no thesis sentences. There are no main ideas. Life’s curriculum is infinite. Most of the interesting things we know we can’t explain. Most of what we need to know we were not taught.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“The theme of love in Romeo and Juliet supposedly had five subtypes, listed on a separate worksheet page: Divine Love, Romantic Love, Familial Love, Superficial Love, and Plutonic Love. Mrs. Marsh, unsure of the difference between the god of the underworld and the Greek philosopher, had invented a new and wonderful form of love.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“I watched the children leap onto the buses like reverse paratroopers.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“We went outside to practice another lockdown on the playground. Wayne brought along the red emergency bag, which held a key and a whistle and a walkie-talkie.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“So what he’s saying is that the most natural state of being is not a state of being where you’re enjoying the thing you’re doing, it’s when you’re hoping for the next thing.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“Hazel wanted Mrs. Willett to help her with the spelling of teeth, but Mrs. Willett was, like many reading teachers, a believer in the primal importance of do-it-yourself phonetics, which supposedly built self-esteem and independent thinking habits—even when a kid was obviously eager to know what the real spelling was.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“Ava was obviously observant, an enthusiast of spring: she’d seen the white frog and the two baby flies killed by the bus driver. And she was a better reader and speller than the others. I told her she could get a book to read, but she didn’t want to do that, either. Instead, she got out her poetry notebook. Poor thing: she was already fed up with being asked to do inane worksheets and she was only in kindergarten. Twelve more years to go.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“one of the main things that school taught, I realized, was how to lie to get by.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“I don’t want to be a substitute teacher who forces teenagers to shake hands with the dead. All they want to do is flirt and joke and get through the day.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“You can write a three-decker novel or a whole history of Transylvania without knowing or caring in the least what the parts of speech are—and in first grade, unless you’re an unusual little person who takes an Aristotelian pleasure in verbal classification, it’s an unnecessary encumbrance and a distraction.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“It’s hard to explain why I was so nervous: it was partly that little children are mysterious beings, and partly because I genuinely believed in first grade.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“How was this helping these kids learn their times tables? All it was doing was rewarding the smart kids who already knew them. For the minority who didn’t it was just another brief storm of shame.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“I had a break from 8:26 to 9:13. I sat and breathed and thought of the way some people walk dogs. Some yank the leash to make the dog heel, and some let the dog smell the smells.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“Donkey Kong Pays Charlie Only Five Giant Strawberries,”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“I hadn’t helped anybody learn anything, I’d just allowed them to be themselves; I was there for a day to ensure that room 18 didn’t descend into utter chaos. My role was to function as straight man, to give these kids the pleasure of avoiding meaningless schoolwork. And that was maybe a useful role.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“After many tries and much sighing Sharon overrode the system and sent my flawed scans off to the identity service, IdentoGO, run by MorphoTrust USA, a subsidiary of Safran, which is a French manufacturer of aerospace components, bombs, and drones.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids

“bavardage.”
― Nicholson Baker, Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids