Baker makes English’s idiosyncrasies dizzyingly fresh. His wacky descriptive gifts are also on brilliant display ... The book is a sobering reminder of the minefield mentality that dominates our schools.
For such a long book, Baker makes few recommendations, most of them modest enough — shorter days, less homework, more attention to foundational knowledge. As a rule he’s on firmer ground when he questions sequence than when he balks at scope ... But any deficiencies one might find in Baker’s classroom management, and he finds plenty on his own, are not all his fault. Substitute reminds us how even the best teachers can only be a little better than the schools in which they teach ... Baker’s book may be the most revealing depiction of the contemporary American classroom that we have to date.
Substitute faithfully re-creates the grinding, sometimes stultifying routines of classroom life, from shushing the class to cleaning the dry-erase board. Unfortunately, this comes at considerable expense for readers ... The resulting book too often reads like a transcript, albeit one that highlights both the tedium and charm of teaching school ... Baker clearly loves kids, and the funniest, most poignant pages of Substitute capture their intelligence, humor, sweetness and exasperating energy.
The world we discover inside the walls of schools is of kids overwhelmed with homework and social media, of some kids overmedicated too. Too long a book, you say? Not for how much Baker cares about his subject and has to say. A marvel of our literary life.
...each of those days is chronicled with the moment-by-moment vividness that Baker has made one of [Baker's] trademarks ... Baker’s idea of good teaching seems to be showering students with empty compliments ... Baker, a specialist in fantasies, can’t resist indulging some pedagogical ones, too—of school days cut back from six hours to two; of only four or five kids per class ... His book is a reminder that kids and teachers are often in the same boat, and both deserve better.
Baker’s latest nonfiction book, Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids, is his longest by some distance—running to over 700 pages—and it does not skimp on detail ...has brought the intensity of attention displayed in his novels to the particulars of substitute teaching... Baker is such a wonderful prose stylist that he could probably get away with publishing his diary—which, for epic stretches, is what Substitute feels like ... He fills the space usually occupied by plot and tension — by what the teacher who drew up the lesson plan calls 'conflict' — with observation, lyricism, imagination, humor, and occasional fits of pique ... Finding pleasure in the details is ultimately what’s at the center of Substitute.
A Moleskine notebook is mentioned, and yet Substitute reads like a lightly curated, benign surveillance tape, somehow capturing all the downtime, chaos, non sequiturs, and lost-in-the-infosphere weirdness of a modern American schoolroom … His story here is morally complex and exhausting, and the subjectivity of the teacher-narrator colors every line. And yet the reality of the kids demands a maximum of attentive transparency, which means a minimum of writerly flourish. What’s required is less eye-as-a-camera than a perfectly pitched ear and a high emotional IQ. Baker has these in spades, and with them captures the flow of banter, amusement, squabbling, dire boredom, perfectly pitched demotic speech, small lurches of actual learning, and scenes of minor heartbreak that fill a school day. What he doesn’t have is developed characters, and that’s because he’s a substitute who rarely sees the same kids twice.
Substitute lacks anything resembling a thesis or stated argument, but soon enough it becomes clear that Baker believes it’s a waste of time to stuff children full of grammar and Algebra II when what they need is a good dose of existential philosophy ... each teaching day becomes a narrative case study, in which Baker ricochets between frustration and his unaccountable love of students, and one can’t help but autonomously arrive at the conclusion that Baker surely shares: It’s time to rethink our schools, our curriculum.
When you finish Nicholson Baker’s seven-hundred-plus-page tome devoted to a day-by-day, minute-by-minute account of his several-week stint as a substitute teacher in rural Maine, you will be exhausted by the accumulation of minutiae, irritated by the endlessly distracted chatter, and numbed by the sheer relentlessness of human interaction in large groups ... Unlike typical books by teachers, this one offers scant insights into big topics like social class or disruptive students and really no prescriptions for overall 'change'; nor is there the troubled kid who is either saved or lost and whose ups and downs provide a convenient narrative arc.
Baker’s observations 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 ... The book is a bit long, but it is a worthwhile and entertaining read for anyone who has ever gone to school or knows anyone in school.
