Among School Children Read online

  "Yes, I was," Billy would reply. "You were telling me that so-and-so was throwing snots around the room."

  Actually, it had turned out that Billy remembered the names of her difficult pupils years after she had managed to forget them herself.

  Billy understood how badly Chris needed to talk. The few times when he felt truly angry at Chris, he would break off the argument and simply walk away from her. Chris would then chase Billy around the house. She wouldn't be able to help herself. She had to keep on talking at those times. Otherwise, the argument would fester.

  Chris found Billy in the kitchen and told him all about this day: Clarence's tears, Clarence's stoniness, Clarence's exit. "I don't know, Billy. Every year you get one, and every year it's the same. But it's discouraging."

  She went on: "I wasn't trained for this. I was trained to teach, not to deal with kids like this. And they stick them in your room, and you're supposed to perform miracles. Plus teach all the others."

  Poor Billy. She talked about Clarence all weekend. "Guilt," she said. "Guilt plays a large part in my life." She might as well have brought Clarence home for those two days. She kept seeing the big eyes exuding tears, and hearing the sharp, wounded voice saying, "I hate Mrs. Zajac!" She was angry at herself about her timing, too. You never scold a child on Friday afternoon and give yourself two days to brood about it. She knew better than to do that.

  On Monday morning, Chris told Pam Hunt, the student teacher, "This week I'm going to kill him with kindness. But if he lays a hand on another kid, I'm going to step on him. I'm not going to have a child afraid to come to school because Clarence is going to hit him. I'm not going to let him out of doing his work, but this week I'm just going to keep putting his name on the board and reminding him, and try that for a week."

  Pam pursed her lips and nodded.

  When Clarence ambled in, walking heel-to-toe as if to music only he could hear, Chris said, "Good morning, Clarence! How are you this morning?"

  It seemed as though Friday had never happened. Clarence grinned at her. Chris smiled over her blotter at the afterimage. Those dimples of his were so deep she could see them from behind.

  Clarence did a 360-degree turn, a pirouette with arms outstretched, and like an airplane coming in for a landing, dropped his books on his desk. Then he took his coat to the closet. Now he was gazing at the week's luncheon menus that were taped up on the closet door. He rubbed his little belly, his hand moving in a circle over it. "Mmmm! Applesauce!" he said.

  He really was extraordinarily cute, Chris thought. But in a moment, she would have to ask him for the work he hadn't done last week.

  Awakenings

  At the beginning of the first social studies lesson of the year, Chris asked the class, "What's the name of our country?" She made her voice sound puzzled. She didn't want to shame the ones who didn't know the answer. About half of the class fell into that category.

  "Holyoke?" Courtney ventured to guess.

  "No-oh," said Chris. "Holyoke is our city. Our country." She called on Arnie.

  "Massachusetts?" said Arnie.

  "No. That's the name of our state," said Chris. "Dick?"

  "North America?" said Dick.

  "That's our continent," said Chris. "It's even bigger than our country."

  Chris carried in her mind a fifth-grade curriculum guide. It conformed roughly to the twenty-year-old official guide, which she kept in her desk and never consulted anymore. If she could help it, her students would not leave this room in June without improving their penmanship and spelling, without acquiring some new skills in math, reading, and writing, and without discovering some American history and science. At about ten of eight in the morning, before the children arrived, she stood at the chalkboard, coffee cup in her right hand, a piece of chalk in her left. One of her own grade school teachers had slapped Chris's sinister hand when she'd used it, but Chris remained a lefty. The chalk rattled, never squeaked, as she wrote down the word of the day in penmanship under the lists of children who owed her work. Her own handwriting was indeed exemplary, slanted to the right and curvaceous. Sometimes she chose a word to suit her own mood ("fancy") or the weather ("puddles"). Other days she wrote the names of historical figures whom she wanted to discuss ("Benjamin Franklin," "Martin Luther King") and once in a while a word that the children would not know ("eugenics")—she hoped thereby to train them to use the dictionary.

  At eight, a high-pitched beep from the intercom announced math, which lasted an hour. Some children left her room for math, replaced by some children from the room next door. For math and reading, children were "levelized," which means the opposite of "leveled"—they were grouped by abilities. Her lower math group began the year with a review of the times tables and her top group with decimals. She would take each group as far as she could, but every child had to improve in problem solving, every member of the low group had to master long division at least, and all of the top group should get at least to the brink of geometry.

  A half hour of spelling followed math. For fifteen minutes, Chris would talk to them about their spelling words. Responses were unpredictable.

  "What's a cyclone? Arabella?"

  "Like a ride?"

  "What does 'abroad' mean? Anyone? Robert?"

  "A woman," said Robert.

  Then came fifteen minutes of study, during which teams of two children quizzed each other. Chris paired up good spellers with poor ones. She also made spelling an exercise in socialization, by putting together children who did not seem predisposed to like each other. She hoped that some would learn to get along with classmates they didn't think they liked. At least they'd be more apt to do some work than if she paired them up with friends. Her guesses were good. Alice raised her eyes to the fluorescent-lit ceiling at the news that she had Claude for a spelling partner. Later she wrote, "Today is the worst day of my life." Clarence scowled at the news that he had Ashley, who was shy and chubby and who didn't look happy either. A little smile collected in one corner of Chris's mouth as she observed the reactions. "Now, you're not permanently attached to that person for the rest of your life," she said to the class.

  She'd tell them they could take out their snacks, often adding, "Don't you think you could bring something nutritious? An apple?" One child or another would say "Ugh!" Then, as a rule, she left the spelling partners quizzing each other, and carried her coffee cup to the Teachers' Room, where she sat down for a few minutes, the first minutes of rest for her feet since penmanship. Then she hurried back to her classroom in time to supervise the comings and goings of students for reading.

  She had three different reading groups, composed of children from various fifth-grade homerooms. Two of her groups were lodged in the third-grade-level and one in the fourth-grade-level "basal" readers. The school had brand new basals. They were more than reading books. They were mountains of equipment: big charts for teaching what were called "skill lessons," and big metal frames to hold those charts erect, and workbooks for the children to practice those skills, and readers full of articles and stories that did not fairly represent the best of children's literature, and, for each grade level, a fat teacher's manual that went so far as to print out in boldface type the very words that Chris, or any other teacher anywhere, should say to her pupils, so as to make them learn to read. Chris didn't teach reading by the numbers, right out of the manual. She made up her own lessons from the basal's offerings.

  She spoke with each of her groups for twenty-five minutes every day about skills and stories. Most of the time her reading students enjoyed those conversations, and many enjoyed the twenty-five minutes each group spent in reading whatever they liked to themselves—she let them lie on the floor if they wanted during that time. But almost every child hated the twenty-five minutes spent in the basal's workbooks. Judith, a most proficient reader, who went to another room for that period, said, "I love to read, but I hate reading-reading." Chris had many disaffected readers, and the workbooks were not improving their attitud
es. They slumped over those workbooks, and some looked around for other things to do. She could make them behave, but from many she couldn't get more than halfhearted efforts. Her two lower groups weren't making up the ground between them and grade level. She couldn't quit the basal altogether, but she knew she ought to make the children see that there is more to reading than workbooks. She planned to give them breaks from the basal. She'd have them read some novels. Maybe they'd prefer that. She'd have to get Debbie, the director of the reading program, to find her multiple copies of some novels.

  Chris wished she could vary the morning's timetable now and then, so that she could linger over certain lessons. But the movement of students among homerooms for math and reading meant that, in the morning, she had to quit every subject when the clock commanded, and, on occasion, had to leave some children puzzled until the next day. As her reading groups left and her homeroom reassembled, the hallway and room full of high-pitched chatter, Chris would stand in her doorway, keeping an eye on the returning Clarence, trying to read his current mood in his face.

  She almost always stayed on her feet for the next hour, which belonged to social studies. After the first day they all knew the names of their city, state, and country, and could find them on the map that she pulled down like a window shade, over by the door and the social studies bulletin board. The official curriculum guide expected her to cover all of U.S. history. She had never yet gotten past Reconstruction by June, and did not expect to go further this year. She began with the pre-Columbian Indians, whom she was careful to call Native Americans. She defined the term "stereotype" for the children—that fall a visiting politician helped inadvertently by handing out to the sixth graders paper headdresses that identified the wearers as "Big Chief Friend of Congressman Conte."

  Eleven-thirty was lunchtime. She ate in the Teachers' Room, a small, grubby sanctuary with three tables and a couple of orange vinyl sofas and a coffee machine. She usually sat with her best school friend, Mary Ann, and they talked about wakes and weddings, sales and husbands, and only rarely about students and lessons. Afternoon brought some freedom from the clock. She read aloud for fifteen minutes to the children, who usually came back from their recess with flushed faces. Her voice calmed them. She read novels, their favorite that fall about a boy whose toy cowboy comes to life and has adventures. Many times when she closed the book and said, "We'll find out what happens tomorrow," children would groan. "Read some more, please, Mrs. Zajac?" As often as not, she obliged them.

  When she closed the novel once and for all, and said, "Okay, take out your journals, please," several children would again groan. She said, day after day, "Oh, come on. I know you have lots of interesting things to write about." They could write about anything, she told them. If they wanted, they could write that they hated Mrs. Zajac. But they must write. The fifteen minutes or so with their journals was to warm them up for an hour of more formal creative writing. They could write stories on any topic they chose. On her own Chris had read up on the so-called "process" technique of teaching writing. Most of the gurus on that subject advised that children pick their own topics, but in her experience some children would not write at all if she did not offer them freedom from complete freedom. She'd turn off the lights and pass around the room a children's book full of spooky illustrations, or she'd say they could write stories imagining how they got on the cover of Time magazine.

  Every month the children wrote a book report, a science report, a social studies report, and several drafts of a story. They jotted down story ideas for a day or two. They composed rough drafts, which they read aloud to a couple of classmates, who were supposed to give them advice. They wrote second drafts and read those aloud to Mrs. Zajac, who gave more advice. When most had finished their final drafts, Chris would examine the stories and pick out a couple of frequent grammatical errors, and then for a week would teach formal grammar lessons—on the possessive, on verb tenses, on exclamations.

  She left science for last. For several other subjects she used textbooks, but only as outlines. She taught science right out of the book; this was one of those texts that takes pains with the obvious and gives the complex short shrift. Chris didn't know much science and didn't usually enjoy teaching it. Sometimes she let creative writing encroach on science's time. About one day in ten she canceled science altogether and announced—to cheers, Felipe's the loudest—an informal art lesson. She often felt guilty about science.

  A box of tissues always sat on a corner of Chris's desk—her classes went through about twenty boxes a year. All day long stacks of papers and books accumulated on the corners of her desk, on the front table, on the counter under the window. She handled about 150 pieces of paper each day—the attendance sheet, the free lunch forms, the students' many assignments. The room looked disorderly, but every category of paper had its proper place. Within a couple of weeks, the children had mastered the routines, and only rarely did Chris lose anything, except for the key to her classroom closet, which she misplaced almost daily, the only visible manifestation of the strain on her memory. Counting all her math and reading and homeroom students, she dealt with fifty children. Every morning she brought a new list of special chores, mainly concerning children who needed individual tutoring in a subject. Four or five times a day, the intercom erupted in the middle of her lessons, usually paging staff—usually the guidance counselor—and three or four times another teacher would appear in the doorway with a question or request. After many lessons—and always after ones that had gone badly—Chris paused to perform what she called a "self-evaluation," saying inwardly, "I was boring myself. I've got to think of a way to jazz that up next time."

  According to one famous piece of research, a classroom teacher must manage, in a predictable enough way to make the children feel secure, about two hundred unpredictable "personal interactions" an hour. Some interactions are more difficult than others, of course. Chris managed an average of thirty disciplinary incidents during each six-hour day. Some lasted only seconds and required from her just a dark look or a snap of her fingers. Others, mostly incidents involving Clarence, went on for minutes, and some of those led to further incidents—some, in effect, lasted all day.

  Some days ended in haste. The intercom would announce, "Bus one," and Chris would still be assigning homework. She wrote the assignments on the narrow chalkboard between the closets in the back of the room, and always explained three times what she expected them to do for tomorrow.

  2

  The leaves had begun to turn on the distant trees on the Chicopee bank of the invisible river. The days had grown cooler. Out on the playground, along with the usual incidental trash blowing around in the fall winds, were many small pieces of what must have been a huge jigsaw puzzle mixed in with the grass. The puzzle pieces had lain there since school started and were now soggy bits of brown cardboard. Maybe a frustrated child had dumped the puzzle last summer. Out on the playground, a boy from another homeroom cavorted around on a dirt bike, doing wheelies. He was playing hooky, but evidently couldn't stay away. He waved and shouted whenever he saw a child's face in the windows.

  Inside, math was in progress. Clarence went to the room next door for math, but Chris kept Robert, her second most difficult student, and she received from the homeroom next door lanky, mischievous Manny. Math was almost always lively. Chris sat at the spindly-legged table at the front of the room. The top math group, five girls and only three boys, but a nearly equal mixture of white and Puerto Rican children and one Filipino, also from next door, sat at desks on the side of the room by the window, wrestling with word problems in bright morning sunlight. That top group's heads were bowed over open textbooks, their lips bunched up in great concentration. The low math group looked different. Children from next door made up half of this group, too. The low group surrounded Mrs. Zajac: three fidgety children at the table, before her and beside her; Felipe a little behind her on the right; three children standing at the board, working on multiplication problems; and the
rest of the fifteen in the low group at desks on the doorway side of the room, behind Mrs. Zajac's back. Some eyes in the low group were darting and furtive. There were always whispers among them, also grins, and a few stifled yawns.

  This year's low math group wasn't like last year's, which was entirely remedial. It contained a gang of five boys, who, whenever she turned her back, threw snots and erasers and made armpit farts at the children who were trying to work, and among them was the boy—this was one of her favorite teacher stories—who decided one day to start barking in class. Not, Chris knew, because of Tourette Syndrome, some of whose victims bark involuntarily. This boy barked in order to get suspended, so he'd have a holiday. She thought, "No way, buster. I can wait you out." The boy yipped. She ordered him to stop. He growled. She tried to embarrass him by describing what he was doing. He laid his head back and bayed. So she decided to ignore him, and went on teaching: "Ten times five is what?" "Ruff ruff." "And carry the five." "Aroooo!" Afterward Chris and her math aide found an empty room off the principal's office, went inside, and laughed for a good five minutes. Tears flowed down their cheeks.

  Now from the group of low math students behind Chris came the sound of muffled, tuneless singing: "Cha, cha, cha. Cha, cha, cha."

  "Robert, would you like to sing for the class?" said Chris, glancing over her shoulder at the burly child. "No? Then why don't you get busy. You still owe me yesterday's math."

  The singing stopped.

  She held up a flash card, aiming the question "4 × 6 =" backward over her shoulder, for Felipe, who still hadn't learned his times tables, while with her left hand Chris corrected Jorge's paper, then paused and, leaning farther left, examined sleepy Jimmy's work, which wasn't going well. "How much is seven times seven, Jimmy?"