Comedian Raquel D’Apice won two Emmys as part of the writing team for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She is also the author and illustrator of the parenting book Welcome to the Club: 100 Parenting Milestones You Never Saw Coming. Her debut picture book, I Am a Highly Dangerous Warrior!, illustrated by Heather Fox, is out now from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. Here, D’Apice shares how her messiest and wildest experiences as a substitute teacher help fuel her writing.
I work as a substitute teacher, most often in elementary schools, to make extra money between writing jobs. The schedule is flexible; the hours are good.
I tell people it’s practical. (True!) I tell people it leaves my evenings free to write. (Sometimes true!) I do not mention that I’m falling in love with it because the few times I have hinted at loving substitute teaching, people have raised their eyebrows at me the way you’d raise your eyebrows at someone who claimed to love swallowing thumbtacks or licking the dust off bookshelves.
Before I admit to what I like about teaching, I’ll mention what I hate about writing, which is sitting at a computer for two hours, deleting and un-deleting a comma from a sentence. I hate the stagnation of perfectionism. I hate every inspirational writing quote that tells me to put one word in front of the other, and I hate being tethered to a quiet screen, thinking constantly about the outside world and how I am missing it.
The easiest that writing ever felt was after giving birth to my first son, because it pushed life into the type of chaos I found conducive to writing. Parenthood was filled with the fantastic and horrible sensory details that children learn about in first grade: I see someone throwing up into my mouth, I hear someone screaming non-stop during a two-hour car ride, I smell the curdled milk vomit that has dried into my sofa because I did not notice it in time. And after a few years of blogging through early motherhood (I taste applesauce! I feel crippling isolation!), my kids went to school and I happily moved on to other types of writing: magazines, podcasts, television, on topics that had nothing to do with parenthood or children. I did hours of quiet research online. I would drink coffee in silence. I could hear my own thoughts.
But when it is quiet enough to hear your own thoughts, not much is happening with your senses, and nothing has ever cured a lack of sensory details like being in a kindergarten full of waist-height children, all hopelessly tangled in the headphone cords of their Chromebooks. The floor of every kindergarten is covered in pencils, and the air is full of sharply raised hands, children shouting that they desperately need a pencil because they cannot find theirs. There is no sound like the sound of a metal chair being dragged along a linoleum floor and there is no smell like the black smudges of dry erase markers on tiny, soft hands.
Juxtaposed with the silence of my blinking cursor is a giddily screaming child holding a bloody tooth that they pulled from their own head after I had asked them to work on a math worksheet. If you want to know how often young children pull out their own teeth in class—on average once or twice a week. If you want to know how many pencils are on the floor of a kindergarten classroom, take the number of children in the class and multiply it by 14,000.
I am currently teaching a first grade class to write, and I am asking what they see, what they hear, what they feel, and all hands shoot up, desperate to tell me about terrifying insects they saw on vacation and annoying siblings and foods they love. (One child mentions ramen and a cheer erupts as if a beloved soccer team has scored a goal.) One child yelps, “MS. RAQUEL, PLEASE PICK ME!” holding out his hand as if he is drowning and I will need to pull him to the surface. When I pick him, he tells me, gasping, that his grandmother has a pet cat, and sometimes it leaves dead birds in her bed. In his next breath, he tells me his favorite food is spaghetti.
I understand that much of teaching is thankless. (I just spent my entire hour-long lunch break making paper copies of digital tests, something that no one will ever appreciate or—aside from you—even know about!) I know teaching will mercilessly drain my physical and emotional resources. But I’m realizing that if something has to slowly and dramatically kill me over the next few decades, I might like it to be this.
When I sit the kids down to write in their workbooks, some cannot contain their excitement, but a few stare at the page the way I stare at my computer, panicking at a wordless void. No amount of coaxing will help, and so I do for them what their classmates have done for me. I obnoxiously drag a metal chair across the linoleum floor until they are forced to cover their ears. I dramatically drop a bag of colored pencils, watching them scatter in all directions, and I lovingly spill applesauce onto the attendance sheet.
“Here you go,” I tell them. “This is a good place to start.”
