SUBSTITUTE

In 2014, after a brief orientation course and a few fingerprinting sessions, Nicholson Baker became an on-call substitute teacher in a Maine public school district. He awoke to the dispatchers five-forty a.m. phone call and headed to one of several nearby schools / when he got there, he did his best to follow lesson plans and help his students get something done. What emerges from Bakers expe rience is a complex, often touching deconstruction of public schooling in America: children swamped with overdue assignments, overw helmed by t...[Read more]