Among School Children (13 page)

Clarence, as Judith observed, could be "very sweet." In spite of everything, he was growing on Chris. She found a folded piece of paper on her desk one afternoon not long after she scolded Clarence gently—she was certainly trying to be gentle—for not doing his work,
I LOVE MRS ZAJAK
, the anonymous note said. The handwriting was unmistakable. Alice whispered to Judith that Clarence was just trying to butter up Mrs. Zajac, but Chris felt moved. "Thank you, whoever wrote this," Chris said.

She could remember peaceful afternoons with Clarence, such as the one Chris didn't want to wreck by making a fuss because Clarence had forgotten both grammar book and homework again. "Why is it," Chris said to him, leaning her elbows on her desk (Clarence now sat at the desk closest to hers), "that I have to remember fifty thousand million things, and I'm an old lady, and you can't remember one book?"

Clarence turned around in his chair and looked at Chris. "Old?" he said.

"Yes! I'm an old lady," said Chris.

"You don't look like it," said Clarence, solemnly shaking his head.

One Friday afternoon, she peered into Clarence's desk, putting on her stupefied look, her mouth agape and tongue lolling out, at the chaos inside. "I'd hate to put my hand in there," Chris said to Clarence. "It might get bitten off by the animal that's back in there."

Clarence looked up at her and shook his head. He grinned, revealing the slots where his eyeteeth would be. "Nah," said Clarence, "it don't bite."

Chris gazed down at him. "Clarence," she said. "You are an original."

But Chris didn't imagine she'd begun changing Clarence's life. Not long ago he jettisoned one of his spelling books on the playground, to get even with Miss Hunt—there were no small children around for him to hurt that time. The soggy book was discovered, and Chris sent him to the office for destroying school property. Afterward, Clarence, suddenly the most prolific of writers, had composed this rough draft of a story:

Hunten house

There once lived a witch her name was Mrs. Zazac and she was a very bad witch and never like no body there was a boy name Clarence she didn't like and she lived in a hunten house an it was bad no one will go in there then one day Clarence went in there was bats all over the place and Alice Judith Felipe Dick and they say watch out look beside you and the witch saw their eyes lid up and the children ran and Clarence look behind him there was Mrs Zazc the witch I didnt believe it and she came right after me than the goust starad to come after me i was right in the corner they haged me up and i was about to di into Judith came she had an big ax to cut down the rope it was to late then we all got trap in a cage where ghousts lives and pretty soon we got batter to them they helped us out then we were called goustbusters and put on our lazer guns we killed our teacher and alice judith felipe and i started to cry and we sad we did what we had to do and that was the end of the wicked witch, the End.

Chris had talked to the class about setting a scene. To his story, Clarence had appended:

part two

About the wicked witch she died outside it look it was and a nice gradering big color tree big brown rocks and

Perhaps the school psychologist would want to see the story. Chris put it in one of her desk drawers and said to Clarence, "I'm sorry you think I'm a witch, but I wasn't the one who threw away your spelling book." And that was the end of it.

Their truce was of the sort then raging in Lebanon. Chris preferred not to send children to the principal's office, except for violent, dangerous behavior. But she had taken Clarence there many times already. If on one day Chris decided that Clarence's behavior really had improved at last, and it was time for her to find new ways to get him to do more schoolwork, on the next or the day after the next, she would be marching down the hall toward the office, her arms swinging high and hands in little fists—her taking-a-kid-to-the-office walk, as one colleague called it.

Clarence would be trailing some distance behind, his face sullen, his hand running down the grooves in the cement block wall. Chris would turn back to wave Clarence onward. "Do you remember yesterday, when we talked about consequences? This is the consequence, Clarence, when you don't control your temper."

Clarence would answer angrily, saying of the usually more innocent Felipe, "
He
starts the trouble!"

For Chris, Clarence's life outside school seemed too distant even to imagine. She knew only that Clarence lived in the Flats with his mother. She'd have taken action if she'd seen any physical signs to support the schoolhouse rumors about Clarence being beaten, but she had been keeping a lookout and hadn't seen any. She couldn't do anything about his life away from school, whatever it was like. She told herself, "Let's face it. I as a teacher have to deal with things as they are in the classroom, whatever the situation is at home."

When AI suspended Clarence, Al would send along a message that Clarence's mother had to come to school the next day to get her boy reinstated. This inverted form of kidnapping always worked. The first time Al used that strategy, during the first weeks of school, Chris excused herself from her class in order to confer with Clarence's mother in the vice principal's office. His mother was a big woman, much taller than Chris, and was dressed in slacks and sandals. "Okay," she said, looking out the window, when Chris had finished describing Clarence's latest offense.

Chris set up the old homework-signing deal. And maybe, said Chris, Clarence's mother could come to school every two weeks or so to talk to her about Clarence?

"Okay," said his mother. She had a deep, musical voice. "I'll give it a shot. I did it last year."

"It's only September," said Chris. "But he's sliding, and we've got to stop it now. He's not a happy kid. I think he comes to school with a chip on his shoulder some days. How is he at home?"

"He's good," said his mother. "He plays good outside." She sighed. "Well, can't give up."

"Oh, no!" said Chris. "He's much too young for that! If we work together, we can help him have a good year."

"Yeah, well, give it a shot," said his mother, looking again toward the window.

But she could not have checked Clarence's homework any more often than Robert's mother checked his, because Clarence, too, almost never did any. Clarence's mother did not come to see Chris again that fall. She did come to Kelly periodically, to get Clarence reinstated. Once, Chris saw her in the hall, and for a moment could not remember which infraction Clarence had committed this time. Lately, Chris had all but stopped sending Clarence to the office, although he still gave her cause. Sending him there, or home, hadn't done any good.

Thinking about Clarence tonight didn't lead to any new strategies. She'd just go on trying to ignore small offenses and to get him to do his work. She'd keep on trying to talk to him. Maybe she had made some progress. She still heard bad stories from other teachers who dealt with him. But he was behaving fairly well now for her, or at least better than in September. That was a start maybe. He'd done well on this social studies test. There was always reason for hope.

Chris put the social studies tests in piles. There were four A's, four B's, four C's, two D's, four F's, two absent. "I don't want that to happen. I want the majority to be in the A's and B's. But Clarence. I've really got to praise him. And Ashley, who I didn't think was paying
any
attention, she got a C. So did Claude." Propping up her chin with her hand, Chris gazed into her kitchen at the clock on the wall. "Oh, what am I going to do about those four who flunked? Jimmy. Well, maybe if I move his seat..."

It was past bedtime.

Chris's parents had always recited the rosary at night. Sometimes Chris did, too, while trying to get to sleep. Her reasons were less pious, she guessed. Chris thought of prayer as a better way of counting sheep, and of keeping her students' faces out of her bedroom. If she failed, she wouldn't sleep well, and all the next day her voice would sound to her like branches snapping.

Passing by the door to Room 205, Chris's best teacher friend, Mary Ann, heard screams and a thudding like soldiers tramping. Chris and Pam were sitting at a table down in the library, working on lesson plans. Mary Ann called down from the balcony, "Chris, you can't believe what your class sounds like. Are they supposed to be doing that?"

"They're having music," Chris called back. "And, Mary Ann, I don't want to hear about it."

A little later, Mary Ann called down again. "Chris, it's getting worse."

"It's not my problem, Mary Ann."

Late on Wednesdays, as a gesture toward integrating Spanish- and English-speaking children, half of Chris's class went to the bilingual room next door and half of the bilingual class came into hers, and while Chris went outside with her texts and planning book, the children had art, which often entailed the teacher's screeching for quiet and often ended, a half hour later, with the children sunk into a sullen, grumbling obedience. Then the children in Chris's room had music, which was different from art.

The music teacher was cheerful and buxom. She had a lovely soprano voice. Lifted in song, it commanded attention. Lifted to declare, "I'm in a mean mood today, children," it lacked credibility. The music teacher said those words once at the start of her lesson, and Clarence jumped up, flexed his biceps, and yelled, "Me, too!" The music teacher would arrive out of breath, with a bongo drum under one arm and, in her other hand, a satchel stuffed with cowbells and maracas, the ends of flutes and recorders and xylophones sticking out of the bag. It sometimes seemed as if she were bringing equipment for a riot. When they were reminded that they had music today, the children would emit soft purrs. They'd cheer when she appeared in the doorway to supplant the art teacher.

When the music teacher walked in that afternoon in October, to deliver the lesson that alarmed Mary Ann, Clarence jumped up from his chair and ran furiously in place for a few seconds. Then he put the eraser of his pencil to his lips, as if it were a rap singer's microphone, and cried, "Everybody clap your hands!"

The music teacher didn't seem to notice. She explained to the class—she had to raise her voice to be heard the minute they spied all the instruments and the big tape recorder—that she wanted to celebrate Halloween by making a recording of spooky sounds. Today, she would hold auditions to see who could do the best imitations of ghostly moans, rattling chains, loud footsteps, door creakings, and window slammings. "And I need one person who can do a really fantastic scream," the music teacher said, her high voice raised still higher because they caught on right away.

In a moment, the children were standing on their chairs and their desk tops, stomping their feet, while Clarence went bounding in one mighty leap over a desk and then sprinted twice around the room. Felipe rolled around on the carpet, wrestling with a chubby boy from the bilingual class and crying out, "Get off me, you starving pig!" Some children tried to outdo each other's moans, and others tried to outdo each other's screams, and even good Arabella was using the maracas both to imitate chains and to bonk her friend Kimberly on the head.

"Time out! Time out!" cried the music teacher, but she didn't sound angry.

Judith and Alice were the only two sitting down, in their usual seats. They clutched their stomachs and alerted each other to various sights. "Look at Clarence!"

He had mounted the cart of encyclopedias and sat on top, a grinning emperor on an elephant, while another boy wheeled the cart around. Clarence was pounding the encyclopedias against the metal shelves to imitate heavy footsteps.

"I guess we can't do this, boys and girls!" cried the music teacher, but she still didn't sound angry at all.

"Hey, teacher! Hey, teacher! I got a door slammin'!" yelled a boy who was vigorously kicking the metal cabinets near the window. Another boy executed somersaults. Clarence dismounted, and did a somersault, too. Children strutted to and fro, stiff-legged, imitating Frankenstein. Clarence disappeared under desks. His head popped up, grinning at Judith and Alice. Someone was beating the bongo drum, and the music teacher's voice was growing hoarse.

"Children! Children! Sit down in your seats. Or else we can't do this."

They crowded around her and the tape recorder instead, and finally, though it was impossible to say how it happened, they all quieted down for a while. They had just finished the recording when Mrs. Zajac opened the door. Before her lay the aftermath of music: the slightly sweet odor of children's perspiration, the flushed faces, and the form of Clarence still crouched beneath a table, Clarence's huge eyes and white grin lurking in the shadows. The children were ignoring the music teacher's cries of "Sit down in your seats!" when Mrs. Zajac entered and said, "I don't think some of you heard. Get in your seats."

"It's wonderful when you're quiet like this," said the music teacher to the class then.

Over at her desk, Chris murmured, looking around, "I can't believe this. Now I have to clean up this room." But she smiled and applauded, too, as the class applauded itself, when the tape recording was played and the last Halloween sound, the really fantastic scream, was dying away. It was the sort of event that becomes a part of the oral history most teachers keep of their classes to distinguish one from the others over the years. No other event that fall quite rivaled it, not even the rhythm bee, which the music teacher staged several weeks later.

Ancient Greek and Roman schoolmasters adopted various instruments for classroom management, such as ferrules, switches, and taws, which nineteenth-century English pedagogues found useful. In some of Germany's nineteenth-century Latin schools, children passed by whipping posts on their way to class, and when they got in trouble had to visit the Blue Man, the official in charge of punishments—the Blue Man always wore a blue coat, under which he concealed his tools. Although the practice has been greatly reduced, formal beatings of schoolchildren still happen in America; most states still permit them, though not Massachusetts, at least in theory. Some medieval European and some colonial American schoolmasters probably thought they were doing their students a favor by literally beating the Devil out of them. Historical records make it plain that some teachers and school administrators enjoyed having licenses for their tempers, and perhaps some still do. But a central fact in most sorts of schools has always been the fear of the Lilliputian mob. In America, corporal punishment began to wane around the time when elementary education was becoming universal and compulsory—around the time, that is, when keeping order probably became more difficult. One sociologist of teaching describes the situation as "dual captivity": the children
have
to be there, and the teacher has to take the children sent to her.