Today we bring you a conversation we recorded earlier this month as part of the Wordstock literary festival. Nicholson Baker, a celebrated novelist and non-fiction writer, spent 28 days working as a substitute teacher in a middle class, rural school district in Maine. He wrote a book about that experience called "Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids."
Meanwhile, Michael Copperman, who now teaches writing at the University of Oregon, wrote a memoir called "Teacher: Two Years in the Delta." It details his experience working as a fourth grade teacher in an impoverished, 100 percent African-American school in the Mississippi Delta.
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