Among School Children (15 page)

Chris knew that confidence is the first prerequisite for discipline. Children obeyed her, she knew, because she expected that they would. But that kind of confidence can't be invented. Pam would have to find it herself. Chris tried to help. For an hour on Wednesday afternoons, during art and music, Chris and Pam would sit down on the brown vinyl sofa in the balcony corridor between Room 205 and the boys' lavatory. Then, and also after school, the two women would sit facing each other, both dressed in clothes fit for church, the elder looking old only in comparison to the neophyte, the rookie teacher eyeing the veteran respectfully. Pam compressed her lips and nodded as Chris gave her tips:

— No college course prepares you for the Clarences and Roberts, so don't think that you should have known how to handle them when you got here. You are doing a good job, at least as good a one as the other practice teachers in the building.

— Don't let yourself imagine that you are a cause of a troubled student's misbehavior. If you do, you become entangled in the child's problems. You must cultivate some detachment. You have to feel for troubled children, but you can't feel too much, or else you may end up hating children who don't improve.

— When teaching a lesson, don't only call on the ones with their hands up.

— While you teach, scan the room with your eyes for signs of incipient trouble.

— Don't put a child in a situation where he, for the sake of his pride, has to defy you.

— If a child starts getting "hoopy," call on him at once. Stand beside his desk while you teach the class.

— If he acts up anyway, send him to the hall. You must not allow one child to deprive the others of their lessons.

— Before you even start a lesson, wait until all the children have taken their seats. Don't try to teach until all of them have stopped talking.

That was easy for Mrs. Zajac to say. Before starting a lesson, she would simply fold her arms and, leaning a shoulder against the front chalkboard, stare at the class. The children would scurry to their desks. They'd stop talking at once. But what if Pam did that and some of them just went on talking and wandering around the room? What should she do then?

Pam wanted the class to do some work at their desks, quietly. She was trying to get Clarence to sit down first. He was walking around the room backwards. She touched his arm. He threw her hand aside and proceeded, walking backwards. She turned to Robert, who was making choking, chuffing sounds. "Robert!"

"My motor ran out of gas," Robert explained.

She turned again, and there were Felipe and Arnie wrestling on the carpet. She ordered them to stop, but while she was doing that, Courtney had gotten up from her desk and had gone over to Kimberly's to gossip.

"Courtney, go back to your desk."

"Wait a minute," said Courtney, who had never talked back before.

"No, I'm not waiting!"

Robert was babbling. "That cold. Cheat. Cheat. Cheat. Five-dollar food stamps." He stood up as Pam approached, and did a shimmy in front of her, his big belly jiggling. He was protesting that he couldn't get to work. "I don't have no book," he said.

Mrs. Zajac walked in. The sentries had failed.

"Then you go over there and get one!" thundered Mrs. Zajac.

Robert froze. His face turned pink.

Pam was trying to show a film strip about colonial days, but Clarence kept putting his hand in the beam. Then Robert put his hand in the beam. Then the usually well-behaved Julio tried it, too. Then Clarence put his hand on the rump of the colonial maid on the screen. Felipe leaned way back in his chair, laughing and laughing.

Pam stopped the film strip. She put the names Clarence, Robert, and Felipe on the board, which meant they couldn't go outside after lunch. As the class arose for lunch, Clarence said, right in front of Pam but as though she weren't there, "Lunch! I'm goin' outside."

"
I'm
goin' outside," said Robert.

As for Felipe, he refused to get up and go to lunch at all. He had his arms folded. He pouted.

"Felipe, you are going to lunch," said Pam.

"No, I ain't!"

"Yes, you are!"

"Read my lips!" said Felipe. "I'm stayin' here!"

"Tsk, tsk, tsk," said Robert.

"Because we were laughin', then she had to put my name down. I hate her! I'm sick of her!" yelled Felipe as Pam, twisting her mouth, decided to leave him there and get help.

One day, when sent to the hall, Clarence stood in the doorway, pointed a finger at Pam, and declared, "I ain't stayin' after school either." Then he watched Pam wrangle with Robert. He cheered Robert on, saying, "Crunch her, crunch her."

Pam said, "Okay, Robert, would you get up and go down the hall to the office?"

"No, please. I wanta stay," said Robert, smirking up at her.

"Robert, get up," she said. "Robert, get up."

"I wanta stay here."

"If you're going to stay here, you have to be good."

"See dat?" said Clarence from the doorway. "She doesn't make Robert go. She prejudice, too. See, she didn't get Robert."

"Shut up, Clarence," said Robert.

"Robert, go to the office," said Pam.

"No," said Robert, smirking.

Another time, Pam said to Clarence, "Shut your mouth!"

Clarence replied, "No. It's
my
mouth."

Pam said to Robert, "You can work on your story now."

"No, I can't," said Robert. "I don't know what to write."

"Use your brain," said Pam.

"My brain gooshed out," said Robert. Then he looked up at her and began beating on his cheeks, a popping sound. Then he gnawed on his hand. Then he slapped his own wrist.

"I don't want any more foolish comments!" she thundered. "Do you under
-stand?
"

Clarence watched. "She not human," he said.

Pam turned to Clarence. "You don't disturb twenty other people."

"There aren't twenty people," said Clarence. "There's..." He started counting.

"He knows how to count," said Robert.

Chris returned to find Pam sitting at the teacher's desk, staring out the window, with her jaw misaligned.

It wasn't as if Pam did no teaching. The children would sidle up to her table throughout the day, bringing her pictures they'd drawn and asking for help. She tutored many individually. Some of the lessons she taught without Chris in the room went smoothly. Once in a while when Miss Hunt was teaching, Judith or Alice or Arabella spoke up and told Clarence and Robert to be quiet and stop making trouble. But usually that just egged the boys on, especially Clarence. Some of those boys' responses to Pam's efforts to tame them seemed surprisingly sophisticated, as if they themselves had read handbooks on classroom management. Once, for instance, Pam turned her back on Robert, and Robert called to her, "That's right. Just ignore me."

As for Clarence, he often wrote his name and Judith's on the board, as if to claim her, but that didn't give Judith any special power over him. He told her once that she needed someone "to pop her cherry." One time, after he had been especially nasty to Pam, Judith told him, "You have the brain of a caterpillar."

Without hesitation—the lines seemed to have been already planted—Clarence replied, "I'll take yours out and put it in your hand and make you eat it." Clarence made his slow, threatening nod at Judith.

Judith looked skyward. She said to Alice, "How did God make such a mistake? He had no choice but to put Clarence on earth. He didn't want him up
there.
"

On one of those bad days that fall, on the way to lunch, Judith said softly to Pam, "Are you reconsidering your decision to become a teacher?"

"No, Judith," said Pam, and she smiled. "
You
make it all worthwhile."

Judith herself had begun reconsidering her embryonic plans for becoming a teacher. She wondered why Pam kept coming back, and didn't even take a sick day. Judith believed that Pam had to be a very strong and admirable person, but even as the days of Pam's travails wore on and Clarence's antics lost their novelty, Judith still couldn't help laughing when Clarence, banished to the hall, did a soft-shoe routine for the class in the doorway. As Robert indignantly pointed out—"Hey, the teacher's laughin', you're not sposed to laugh"—even Pam couldn't always hide her amusement. For example, the day when she told the class that primates have tails, and Clarence stood up, poked out his rear end, patted it, and said, "Check out mines."

Chris didn't witness those scenes. Leaving Pam alone in the room for a period, Chris would go out to the sofa in the hall and try to work on her plans for next week's lessons. She had a hard time concentrating. She'd hear distant, muffled sounds of commotion, then Pam's voice, high and angry, then more commotion. Chris would flinch. She'd get up and peer down the corridor, to see if Pam had put Clarence out in the hall. One time, when Pam had put him out there, Chris waylaid a passing teacher and said, "Give Clarence a dirty look when you go by, okay?" When boys came by on the way to the bathroom, she waylaid them. "Felipe, come here, please. What's going on in the room?"

"Miss Hunt is in a bad mood," said Felipe. "Clarence was talking back to her, and everybody laughed. He wrote on the board, 'Miss Hunt is a jerk.' She kicked him out, and he wanted to come back, and she yelled at him, and he's mad."

"Okay. Thank you."

Felipe moved on. Chris sat on the couch, fuming. "Children can be so cruel when they sense a weakness. I'd like to go in there and..." She bared her teeth.

On the bulletin boards in the hallways, Halloween displays lingered almost until Thanksgiving. Most of the displays were store bought or inspired by books of ideas for bulletin boards, on sale at all stores that cater to teachers. No child would have recognized his fears in the black cats, toothy pumpkins, and witches on broomsticks. They all looked much too benign. But some of the witches' faces that hung in the classroom, over the closets and under the clock, had malevolence, especially high-strung Felipe's. His witch's face was long and distended, like an El Greco, and her mouth suggested an appetite for little children. And Clarence had acquired a pair of plastic fangs, painted red, which he wore for the class during one of Pam's lessons.

As November wore on, Pam taught more and more. Chris grew increasingly restive out on the couch in the hall. Now and then Chris felt a little consternation at Pam. One afternoon, she stood on a chair just outside the door, taking down an old bulletin board display. While she pulled staples, Chris eavesdropped. A fair amount of noise came out of the room. "Does it always sound like this?" Chris muttered under her breath.

From the room came Pam's voice. "Felipe! Why are you out of your chair?"

"That's a good question, Miss Hunt," muttered Chris. "Why is he?"

Sometimes rivalry develops between a practice teacher and the one whose class she borrows. Neither Pam nor Chris committed any rivalrous deeds, though. Chris really liked Pam. She ached for Pam while she sat on the sofa imagining trouble back in the room. But Chris had more on her mind than Pam's travail. In December, the real test began, both for Pam and Chris. Pam took over the class for three whole days in a row. Chris couldn't sit still. She roamed the olive-carpeted halls like an expectant father. Two days went by. Finally, Chris sat down on the sofa. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "I want my class back!"

A dusting of snow covered the playground. Heavy coats filled the closets. Out in the hall, just before Pam's last grammar lesson, one of the last lessons she would teach the class, Chris said, "Well, Pam, are you ready to slam down the book, and close the door, and let 'em have it?"

Pam looked at Chris, and then Pam hunched her shoulders and smiled.

Chris went to the sofa. In a moment, she arose and sneaked up to the door of Room 205. She peeked through the gun-slit window. "Oh, good. Pam just threw down the book. I wish I could hear what she's saying. I told her to get right up to Robert's face with her teacher finger."

Chris went back to the sofa. From there, she could hear Pam's voice, not the words, but the form of it, loud and angry but confident. In a moment, all was still. This time, quiet endured.

Afterward, Pam told Chris that the class behaved well after she slammed down the book and let Clarence have it. Pam said she felt better. She said she believed that the class had been waiting for her to do that, and that they felt better, too.

"She's learning," said Chris after school that day.

They gave Pam her farewell party on a day in mid-December. Chris, Judith, Alice, and Mariposa organized it. Chris sent Pam on an errand so they could hang up crepe streamers. Felipe got so excited during the preparations that Chris had to send him out to the hall. "So you can calm down."

When Felipe came back in, Clarence, now on his best behavior, looked at him and said, "You still ain't calmed down."

On the front table was apple juice and a cake inscribed "Good Luck." Pam had brought each child a candy cane and now laid them on the desks. Robert refused even to touch his. He refused to get into the class picture that Pam took. He sat at his desk, and while the other children scurried around and chattered, Robert pulled his sweatshirt up over his mouth, to his nose. Then he clawed at his eyelids. Then he began slapping himself, harder and harder, in the face.

Chris stared at Robert from her desk. "Look at him! I gotta get him out of here."

She took Robert down to the office to see the counselor, but the counselor was busy, as usual. So she sat Robert down on one of the bad-boy chairs outside Al's office. "Why didn't you want to make a card for Miss Hunt?"

Robert shrugged. "I didn't have no paper," he said in a squeaky voice.

"Don't give me that!" said Chris. She lowered her voice. "What's wrong, Robert?"

"Nuttin'!"

She left him there. Maybe the counselor could get something out of him. Probably not. Later, she'd wish that she had asked Robert, "You're sad Miss Hunt is leaving, aren't you?" At the moment, though, Chris had to get back to the party.

Pam gave Chris a new, larger bookbag and a note that concluded, "You are a very special person and a dear teacher."