The Substitute, by Chris Harget
It was Dan’s first day trying a new career and already he felt like a Coliseum slave thrown to the lions. Thirty pairs of jaded teenage eyes stared, and dared him to teach them math. Which he hadn’t studied in thirty years. And hadn’t been great at back then.
“Good morning, class, Mrs. Alves will be away a few weeks. She left very specific instructions for you,” he lied. Mrs. Alves apparently rage-quit, or needed a mental-health month, or something. The principal told Dan to wing it.
“Uhm, I guess I should tell you, my name is Mr. Hopner.” He scrawled it on the white board. “How are you all today?”
Crickets. That was clumsy.
He straightened his blue neck tie. “Anyway, her notes say you’re a great class, and this should be a lot of fun–”
Snickers, guffaws, and at least one cough that sounded suspiciously like “bullshit,” rumbled forth.
Dan fumbled on. “Uhm, please take out your textbooks, and…and…” He looked around at their unimpressed smirking faces. No one reached for a book. In fact, there were none to be seen.
A red-and-blue-haired girl in a black denim jacket waved. “It’s all on our Chromebooks now, boomer.”
Gen Xer. Of course. He should’ve known that. He would’ve if getting an emergency credential involved anything more than having a bachelor’s, passing a proficiency exam, getting fingerprinted, and scoring a clean Tuberculosis test. Why couldn’t he have found a way to stay in tech marketing?
“Thank you,” he looked down at the seating chart, “Javier?”
Giggles rippled through the room.
“Ah, musical chairs for the sub. Got it.” So it was psychological warfare already, and they had home-field advantage. How to seize authority?
He cleared his throat. “Let’s try something different. Why don’t each of you introduce yourself, so I don’t mark you absent, and tell me one thing you like about math?” He pointed at the girl who’d called him old. “Please start us off.”
“Taylor O’Shea.” She shrugged. “It’s not P.E.?”
The boy with a blonde buzzcut behind her said, “Sawyer Collins. It will help me count my millions when I make it big on TikTok.”
Groans and laughs of derision skittered across the room.
The tempo picked up. Dan checked off the names at the podium, but mostly focused on something he could use to hook the class. “It’s either right or it’s not…I don’t have to memorize much…no essays…I get to prove the teacher wrong sometimes…the answers are online!”
A gaunt girl with shorter brown hair on one side snitted, “Nothing. There is nothing I like about math. Learning it is pointless.”
Dan’s sphincter clenched. A challenge to his reason for being in front of the class on day one. He’d already been made obsolete in his old career. He grasped for moral authority. If this girl ranted, he could lose the class for the whole hour, maybe for the whole gig. But…what if he got her to argue with herself?
“Why do you say math is pointless?”
She tightened her shoulders. “I said learning math is pointless, because AI will do it better for the rest of our lives. We don’t pull plows anymore or lift big stones by hand. Why should we waste our time?”
The pissy Greek chorus around her called out, “Burn…for real…preach…no cap.”
Dan had nothing. Or rather, he had ideas, but no respect from the class to impart them. His temples pounded and sweat wept from his forehead. The stale lemon smell of cleaning product residue mixed with teen coconut body spray stifled him. He needed help.
“Class, anyone want to take a crack at answering that?”
He bit his lip, using a technique that worked in marketing meetings, where you let the uncomfortable silence linger until someone can’t stand it and steps in to contribute.
A short blonde girl in a varsity jacket finally bit. “How do you know the AI is right? Or even close, if nobody knows how to check its work?”
The gaunt girl, Mara, snapped, “It doesn’t have to be me. I’ll take that chance.”
This was going down in flames. Dan’s second act would be canceled faster than a yodeler at a biker club. And AI would be to blame a second time.
He remembered an insecure colleague whose complaints always stemmed from her feeling out of her depth.
To mask his burgeoning panic, Dan stroked his chin like a deep-thinking statue. “Mara, you use AI a lot, don’t you?”
She nodded her asymmetric bob.
He continued, “And does AI make solving problems easier, harder, or about the same?”
She stammered, “Easier, because it does the work for you.”
Nods all around concurred from the chorus. “For real…straight up.”
Dan thought about all the tasks AI agents made easier in his marketing life, at first, before they became incomprehensible.
He said, “Are you better at things after the AI does it for you?”
She slouched defiantly. “I get a good result, so yes.”
“That’s not what I mean. Are you better? After letting the AI solve your problems repeatedly, without forcing your brain to do some of the work?”
Mara glowered. “Are you saying we should suffer doing pointless work because it builds character? That’s delulu.”
This was bad. No teen wanted the it-builds-character rationale. They’d already given up on learning cursive. And driving. What was their generation supposed to get good at to thrive in an AI world?
Dan said, “No. Anything you make yourself do when you’d rather…what is it you say, stay home and rot? Anything where you push yourself builds character. This is better. Learning math makes you smarter…gives your brain software a glow up…uhm, bet.”
Mara gave him the stink eye. “Not as fast as AI upgrades. God, you’re cringe.”
Dan couldn’t tell if the class thought he was a clown or a loser. The Indian boy in the front row ignored everything but a school-issued Chromebook, where no doubt, an AI was personalizing a math lesson. The blonde, auburn, brown, black, and purple heads in the back half of the room tottered between interest in the substitute’s floundering humiliation or asking for a bathroom pass en masse. Two Asian girls on the right rolled their eyes, either at their lazy classmates, or Dan’s incompetence. But they were on to something. His mirror neurons fired. He let his brow go slack and affected his best bored-with-your-teenage-BS expression at Mara.
“Why not take the easy way out? Why learn to think for yourself? Because of me, Mr. Hopner. I used to make bank writing online ads. I sold overpriced merch to people who didn’t think they needed math. Don’t be like those fools.”
The class hooted in cacophonous unison.
Mara’s face turned red. “I can just use AI to tell me what’s a good price, you beta, mid, low-rizz dinosaur.”
The chorus tasted blood. “Oooohhhh…bro got deleted…skull emoji!”
Dan’s inner child wet itself. He fell, sunk, submerged into the bottom of a deep well of panic. His ego melted in the acid of his existence. What doom awaited him if he couldn’t even survive babysitting an hour while math tutoring apps did the real work? What doom awaited them? Through the malaise a spark of clarity winked at him. If he was a failure, if he was weak, he’d share his truth for their sake.
“Let me try that again. Why study hard to catch the AI’s mistakes and improve your output? Because of me, Mr. Hopner. I don’t make bank anymore.” He bit his lip and spread his hands in supplication. “I…” he trailed off.
The room hushed, stopped breathing, and leaned forward.
Dan drew a ragged breath.
Sawyer, the wannabe Tik Tokker, cawed, “Yo, dawg, why quit marketing to be a dead-ass NPC teacher?”
Dan’s face screwed up. “I got too dependent on my AI agent. Then it fired me.”
