Among School Children (14 page)

The problem is fundamental. Put twenty or more children of roughly the same age in a little room, confine them to desks, make them wait in lines, make them behave. It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to do, declared that all of them should do it.

Some people think it must be easy to manage a room full of children, but if that were the case, it wouldn't often be said that adults who have been behaving badly have been behaving like children. A man recently out of college came to Kelly School one day that fall to try his hand at substitute teaching. It wasn't even noon when Al, making his third visit to restore order in that substitute's room, told the man that he might as well give up and go home. The screams of his pupils had broadcast his failure throughout the classroom wing. He left with his collar loosened, his necktie askew. He had to go down the main hallway to get out of there, and he walked as fast as a man can without running, and kept his eyes lowered, avoiding the looks from the teachers, mostly women, whom he passed.

Classroom management, as Mrs. Zajac practiced it, required an enlargement of senses. By now Chris could tell, without seeing, not only that a child was running on the stairs but also that the footfalls belonged to Clarence, and she could turn her attention to curing one child's confusion and still know that Clarence was whispering threats to Arabella. She was always scanning the room with her eyes without moving her head, seeing without being seen. Peripheral vision gave her that glimpse of Judith squinting at the board. And there had developed in Chris a sense not easily accounted for—like a hunter's knack for spotting a piece of furry ear and inferring a deer standing in a thicket—so that, for example, she could sit at the slide projector, pausing in a film strip to lecture the class on the Iroquois, and know that, behind her, Robert wasn't paying attention. In fact, Robert was playing baton with his pencil, noiselessly flipping it in the air. Chris didn't stop talking to the class or even turn around. Extending her left hand back toward Robert, she snapped her fingers once. Robert stopped flipping his pencil and, as usual, blushed.

Once when Chris was busy on the other side of the room, Dick, the quiet boy from the Highlands who loved social studies, leaned over to a classmate and, inclining his head toward Mrs. Zajac, said, "She knows every trick in the book."

At the end of a day in October, Pam said to Chris, "I don't know how you do it." Pam looked sad. "You just come in and they're quiet."

Actually, they posted sentries when Pam's lessons were nearly over. Clarence or Robert or Felipe would look out the doorway and hiss, "Mrs. Zajac! She's comin'!" Clarence would dash back to his seat, vaulting into it like a stunt man into a car. So when Mrs. Zajac walked in, she would find Pam standing there with her jaw looking hardened and the class sitting with its collective hands folded, the last whispers fading, all eyes on the door.

"What am I doing to this poor, sweet girl?" Chris asked herself at those moments.

Now when Chris drove down to the Flats, the canals steamed in frigid air. She started wearing her green cloth winter coat, which would answer for all the seasons and all the fashion she needed from now until after St. Patrick's Day. For her week of recess duty in November, she brought wool socks to slip over her stockings before going outside. The first snowstorm struck just before Thanksgiving. At home that evening Chris kept peering out windows; Billy told their son, "Mom's on blizzard alert," the way he always did; and Chris spent the next day at home, rejoicing about snow days until nightfall, when she got out her homework and reminded herself that this day would still be served, tacked on to June. A few small epidemics passed through the class, and children with puffy eyes and reddened noses, walking Petri dishes, were driven home by the outreach workers, leaving temporary holes in the room.

In October, fire had gutted the tenement where Lisette lived with her mother and her mother's boyfriend. The girl moved away in November. Chris had set out, as her first goal for Lisette, to get the girl to smile, and though Chris had succeeded only a few times, she had begun to see flickers of aptitude, if not of great interest, in the girl. Lisette had written compositions about several boyfriends, and of "rapping" with them, sometimes with two on the same day. Unfortunately, Chris, who always had to play catch-up with the latest student lingo, did not know until long after Lisette had left that "rapping" had acquired new meanings, which ranged from kissing to intercourse. Chris mourned Lisette's departure: "I thought I was making some progress with her. And now where is she?" As for the children, only Clarence, as usual noting any change in the room, mentioned the fact of Lisette's empty desk.

The potted plant on the corner of Chris's desk died from lack of water. A teacher friend had sent it to Chris on the first day of school. It was the only plant in the room. Chris hummed the funeral dirge—"Dum dum dum, dum da-dum da-dum da-dum"—and dumped the withered remnant in the wastebasket, saying, "I don't have time to water plants."

Massachusetts law didn't require that schoolchildren say the Pledge of Allegiance. The Jehovah's Witnesses, of whom Chris had several, weren't allowed to say it. She led the class through the Pledge only once that fall. The exercise turned up the fact that Clarence wasn't quite sure which hand was his right, which suggested that there might be better things, arguably more patriotic, for Chris to do with those few hurried minutes before math.

That fall, Chris ran the class and Pam practiced on them for a while every day. For the first several weeks Chris sat in on Pam's lessons, and afterward gave her advice. Pam tried to cover too much ground; Chris showed her how to plan against the clock. Pam spoke too softly. "We need to give you a mean, horrid voice like mine," Chris told her. All in all, Chris felt pleased about Pam's teaching. She liked the way Pam enfolded her lessons in games for the children. She could tell that Pam labored over her lesson plans. Pam came from Westfield State, which was Chris's alma mater. Chris imagined her planning at night in her dormitory room, just as Chris had done in her own practice-teaching days. One time Chris told Pam, "Jimmy loves you," and Pam replied, "I think I'd rather have him hate me and do his work." Chris felt pleased. Pam had the right instincts, Chris thought.

Above all, Chris approved of the emotion that Pam brought to the job. In Chris's philosophy, a brand new teacher needed to feel strong affection for her first students in order to sustain her. The first days of school, when Pam merely sat as an observer in the back of the room, Chris spied on her, including Pam in the searchlight sweeps she made of the room. She saw Pam gazing fondly at the children. Some, especially Clarence and Felipe, kept turning around at their desks to smile at Pam. Pam hunched her shoulders and smiled back, a smile she might have used to entertain a baby in a crib. Pam was falling in love with these children, Chris thought, and the gentle spectacle took her back to her own first class, to a time when she had felt that there never were more fetching children than the ones placed in her care, and she had indulged herself by crying a little at night, in her room at her parents' house, over her first deeply troubled student—the boy who had stolen the class's goldfish. That boy had possessed so little sense of right and wrong that when the fish had been extracted, gasping, from his pockets, he had declared indignantly, "I didn't hurt 'em. They're still breathin'."

Chris felt confident that Pam had all the equipment to become a good teacher. She needed only to learn how to control a classroom. "The discipline part," Chris thought. "She's got all the rest of it."

At the end of her sixteen weeks of practice, Pam would have to teach the class for three entire days without Chris in the room. After the third week of school, to start breaking Pam in, Chris left her alone for a half hour to teach spelling. The first couple of times, Pam's spelling went well. On a Friday, however, Clarence struck.

Pam was trying to administer the weekly spelling test. Robert, Felipe, Arnie, and Clarence kept telling each other to shut up. As Mrs. Zajac had advised, Pam gave them all warnings, and then she wrote the next offender's name on the board: Robert. That meant he was in for recess. Robert shrugged. Then Pam wrote Clarence's name on the board, explaining that he was not to disturb the rest of the class anymore.

"So?" said Clarence, glaring.

"If you don't care, then go out and stand in the hall," said Pam. Mrs. Zajac had said to put him out there if he was disturbing the class and wouldn't stop.

"No," said Clarence.

"Yes," said Pam. But she didn't make him go. She wasn't sure how to do so. If she laid hands on the boy, he'd make a fuss, Pam thought. So, instead, she told him, "You're not impressing anyone by having that attitude. Clarence, get up and go sit at this front desk. Clarence, right now."

He obeyed, but he banged chairs as he went.

"I feel bad for the people who want to take the test and do a good job."

"So?" said Clarence angrily.

"Don't answer me back!"

She turned her back on him and read the next spelling word. Behind her, Clarence muttered, making faces at her. She wheeled around. "Clarence, get up and go stand in the hall!"

She lowered her voice. "Please."

She stood over him and said softly, "Please move your body into the hallway."

Clarence jumped up. He made a small cry. In the doorway, he turned back and said to Pam, "I'll punch you out! I'll punch you in the face!"

"All right!" Her voice hit her upper register. "You can say that to Mr. Laudato!"

Mrs. Zajac had said that you need to know your ultimate threat, which at Kelly was usually Mr. Laudato, but that you should never go to it right away. And as Pam explained later, "The reason I get wishy-washy, part of me wants to yell at him, and another part wants to wait until he's cooled down a little and I can talk to him." Now she obeyed the second impulse. She didn't take Clarence to Mr. Laudato.

Behind her, Robert was chortling. "He said he'd punch her!" Robert squirmed in his seat. Julio and Jimmy grinned at each other.

Pam returned to stand in front of the class. Behind her, Clarence edged himself around the doorjamb. He peeked in. Several children giggled. Pam turned. Clarence vanished. "Clarence, I don't want to see your face!" Pam turned back to the class to read the next spelling word. Clarence's face came back around the doorjamb, mouthing silently at her back, "Fuckin' bitch. Gonna get you." The class giggled. Clarence began to grin.

Pam went to the door. Clarence's face disappeared. She closed the door and said to the class, "I hope you'll just ignore him." But in that contest of personalities, hers as a teacher still unformed and divided, she was bound to lose.

The door was closed, but Clarence's face now appeared in the small, rectangular, gun-slit window in the door, his nose and lips distended as he pressed them against the glass. Even Judith ducked her head and shook with the giggles. Others laughed openly. "I'd appreciate it if you'd ignore him and not laugh. You're making things worse," said Pam. But how could they help it? School days were long and this was something new.

Clarence was making faces in the window, bobbing up and down in it. The sound of his drumming on the door—
bang, bang, bang
—accompanied Miss Hunt's reading of the words for the remainder of the test.

The dénouement was predictable by then. Pam tried to talk to Clarence in the hall, and he wouldn't look at her. So she held his chin in her hand, to make him, and a few minutes later he got even with her by sneaking up behind Felipe—in the hallway, on the way to reading. Quickly thrusting both arms between Felipe's legs, Clarence lifted his friend up and dumped him, face down, on the hallway carpet. Felipe arose weeping. Clarence got suspended. Pam spent the afternoon worrying about his mother punishing him.

Chris stayed after school with Pam that day. They sat at the front table. Pam told Chris the whole story. Chris said, "You've got to remember there are twenty other kids, and you
are
getting to them. Clarence may be beyond us. We'll do our best, but don't let him ruin your time here. It's not your fault. He walked in like this. You've got to take your little advances and try to forget things like this."

Pam nodded and smiled. She had a confession to make. "The thing is, I almost cried, and then he'd know he'd gotten to me, and I'm thinking, 'He's only ten years old. I can't let him make me cry.' "

Chris went home worried. She told Billy the story. When she got to the end, she said, "Oh, God. If she had cried..."

Chris didn't want to preside over the destruction of a promising career. She worried that Pam would lose her enthusiasm if being alone with this class turned into torture. Chris wanted Pam to taste success, so from time to time Chris continued to sit in on some of her lessons. The children always behaved on those occasions. It was obvious why. They kept glancing at Mrs. Zajac. "If I stay in the room, she won't learn how to discipline," Chris thought. Within months Pam would become a certified teacher. Next year, probably, she would have her own class. Then there'd be no Mrs. Zajac to intervene and help out. Pam had to learn how to control a class now. So for the most part, when it was Pam's turn to teach, Chris gathered up her books and went out to the hall, and told herself as she left, "You have to sink a few times before you learn."

Chris did her own practice teaching in the old West Street School, where, war stories had it, the staff wore mittens indoors in the winter and often got bruised when breaking up fights on the playground. Chris's supervising teacher eventually left Chris alone, to teach her lessons in a dank, decrepit basement room—one day the blackboard fell off the wall. Chris found herself with a class of thirty-four children, many of whom didn't speak much English. Chris remembered coming into that room one day and finding the class bully perched on a chair with one chair leg planted on the stomach of a writhing classmate. She didn't do much real teaching, she thought, but in truth she always could manage, almost from the start, to get a class under control. Chris's skills had grown. Now she could make discipline into a game, as on the day this fall when, apparently looking elsewhere, she noticed some girls passing a piece of paper down the back row during reading. "I'm not even going to ask you for that note," Chris said ten minutes later. The girls' mouths fell open in astonishment. Chris smiled at them. "Teachers have eyes
all around
their heads," she said. She leaned down to get her face close to the girls' faces and drew her fingers all the way around her head, as if encircling it with a scarf. "That's why I don't cut my hair shorter. I
hide
them."