Among School Children (16 page)

Chris had decided that she missed Pam already. So had the children, including most of her tormentors. They were putting on their coats.

"Bye, Miss Hunt," said Jimmy.

"We'll remember you," said Felipe.

Pam smiled and gulped.

The time arrived for the walkers to leave. Judith pulled Arabella back by the collar and delivered her to Pam. Arabella hugged Pam. So Felipe had to hug her, too. Judith, who had said she'd like to give Pam a present but couldn't think of anything except maybe earplugs, gave Pam a casual, one-armed hug. Last was Clarence. He hugged Pam hard for a long time, burying his face in her dress.

"Bye, Miss Hunt."

"Goodbye, Clarence. Be good and do all your work."

"
I will!
"

Then it was Chris's turn. Walking Pam to the door of the room, she said, "I think you'll do well. I really do. I hope you have an easier class. And remember, the first day it's gotta be
grrrr
."

All of the children except Robert had made cards for Pam. Clarence's was the longest and most elaborate. He had decorated the outside with hearts, inside which he had written, "Spelling
BEST
" and "Teaching is the
BEST
." Inside, in very neat lettering, he had written:

Dear Miss Hunt

I am sorry you are leaving Today and I now how i been bad to you but i Want to say something before you leave That here it is I Love you And thank you for all the help i needed Thank you Miss Hunt?

Merry Christmas
Your Friend
Clarence by!

Once again, Chris felt moved by Clarence's note. But when, several weeks later in the Teachers' Room, someone said that Westfield State should pay part of Pam's tuition to Chris, Chris remarked, "Actually, they should pay Clarence." She added, "Pam took Clarence 202."

The Mrs. Zajac of Mondays was strict, and you obeyed her quickly. The first homework was on Monday night, so on Tuesday morning, if you hadn't done yours, she would probably put your name on the board and give you a lecture, and if you missed a few times, she might keep you in for recess or talk about the late bus, and her voice might sound angry, especially if you didn't do the work you were supposed to do in class. But at least you knew what to expect.

Down on the handball court in the Flats, one of last year's fifth graders told Julio, the tall, quiet boy who was being held back a grade, "Yo, Julie. You got Mrs. Ajax, bro? She is
mean,
bro. If you do your work, she tears it up. She used to scream at me for
nothin'!
" But Julio said, "Now I believe for my own self she ain't as mean as they say. She's fair, because if you do your homework and forget it, she says that's all right but bring it in the next day. But if you keep on skipping, she'll get mad and try to get even."

You were supposed to raise your hand before you asked or answered a question during one of Mrs. Zajac's lessons. If you didn't raise your hand, she would probably call on you. You could count on that. But she gave you a lot of time to answer and she wouldn't get angry if you couldn't, unless you hadn't been paying attention, and she wouldn't let your classmates make fun of you. She said she always made mistakes herself, and that was true. She was always losing the key to her closet and asking Mariposa to find it. If you tried to tell on someone, she'd say, "I don't want to hear it," unless someone had hit someone else or was being mean, usually Clarence, and then if you told, Mrs. Zajac wouldn't let Clarence know it was you.

She was always correcting kids' grammar. If someone said something like, "Mines is good," she'd make herself look like a crazy person and pretend that she was going to run her nails down the chalkboard. She'd say, "
Mine!
Not
mines!
Mine!" It was funny. Maybe some kids sometimes said "mines" or "ain't" just so she would go into her crazy act. You had to be careful not to say swears, or "It sucks." She'd say, "That's street talk," and she was sure that your mother and the other kids' mothers wouldn't want their kids to hear that kind of language, and she wouldn't either, if her son was in the class. She said please and thank you and excuse me, and if you didn't, she'd say the words for you. She'd say to you, "Thank you, Mrs. Zajac, for finding my book." Some kids would say "Huh?" But after a while they'd catch on.

She didn't know some things. For instance, she thought you still thought Michael Jackson was a fresh, bugged-out homeboy. But she knew some of the new words. She liked to say "chill out." And you could joke with her, especially at the end of the day, when a lot of kids hung around near her desk and told stories and talked about movies and TV shows. You could play the game called "arshhht" on Mrs. Zajac then. It was just a silly game that a lot of kids played on each other around Kelly. You'd ask the other person a question, like "Guess what?" If the other person was off guard and said "What?" back to you, then you'd say "Arshhht," which meant you'd fooled the other person. Clarence would come up to Mrs. Zajac's desk at the end of the day and ask her, "Guess what, Mrs. Zajac?" Mrs. Zajac always fell for it. Then Clarence would yell "Arshhht!" and Mrs. Zajac would laugh. "Mrs. Zajac loves to laugh," Clarence told Pedro one day, after arshhhting her.

Sometimes she'd make up games—the boys against the girls, or one side of the room against the other side—to review for a test, or she'd make up a mystery. One time she picked up the stapler and the pot of glue and the pot that the plant used to be in and a piece of crepe paper and several other things, and she started putting them on kids' desks. She almost put the glue pot on Robert's, but then you could see she changed her mind, and, of course, you knew why. Felipe kept saying, "What's this for?" and Mrs. Zajac just smiled. Then when she was all done, she said, "Now why have I put these things on your desks?" And Felipe yelled, "I don't have the slightest idea!" and Mrs. Zajac said, "I've just given each of you something," and Clarence said, "We get to keep these?" and she said no, it was just pretending, and then she started telling you about the words, such as "yours" and "hers" and "mine, not mines," that meant something belonged to someone.

If she caught you passing a note, because you wanted to tell Kimberly that the new boy liked Arabella, and it was Monday, Mrs. Zajac would probably take the note and put it in her skirt pocket, but you could get away with notes and a lot more on Friday, and especially on a Friday before a vacation. Fridays were the best times, not as funny and crazy as some of Miss Hunt's lessons when Clarence was talking back, but peaceful and happy, like reading aloud, which was another good time, when, after recess, Mrs. Zajac would sit on the front table and read stories or books, and you could listen and write letters or draw pictures or organize your desk, as long as you didn't bother anyone else.

Judith was the smartest in the class, Claude announced one time, and Mrs. Zajac said, "Thank you, Claude, for deciding that for me." She asked Claude, if he did his work and studied for tests, wouldn't he be as smart as Judith? Claude said he guessed so. Of course, everyone knew Judith was the smartest, but Judith appreciated what Mrs. Zajac said. Mrs. Zajac praised her a little too much for comfort, but not the way some other teachers had, not by saying to other kids, "Why can't you do as well as Judith?"

Mrs. Zajac had a high temper, and she yelled at Clarence and Robert. "It makes things not so nice," Judith thought. But, all in all, Judith approved of Mrs. Zajac. "I think she's one of the best teachers I ever had," Judith had decided. "She's really nice, and she's up front. I like blunt people. They take after me. You don't have to wait for her to be blunt with you. She just tells you. Sometimes kids might get mad, but that's the way it goes. She's kind, but she's strict. And she's fair." Judith did some Sunday school teaching herself. "That's one thing I admire in a teacher, being able to control a class like ours and still be fair," said Judith.

Al came by the room and said, "It's ho-ho time, Chris." He meant that he wanted her to change the bulletin board outside her door, and that Christmas vacation was near. For Chris, the period just before vacation was the happiest so far this year. Pam's practicum was over. The interregnum had ended. Chris missed Pam, but she had missed her class more. She thought she could count some real gains, in all subjects, by most of her students. She had vowed in the fall that this year she would get the parents more involved, and she'd had a good turnout at the first parent conferences, which is to say that a little more than half of the parents had come. The many notes she'd sent home doubtless encouraged some parents. Others came at the urging of their children. Felipe had told his father that Mrs. Zajac was strict, but that it was for his own good—of course, Felipe knew his father would like to hear that. Mariposa had talked her mother into coming; she'd told her that Mrs. Zajac was nice. And Julio's stepfather had come. Here was a man who worked two jobs and still could make time to visit his stepson's teacher. So much, Chris had thought, for one favorite theory of certain white Holyokers: that all Puerto Ricans came to town to get welfare.

The deficiency lists on the upper right hand corner of the board did not vanish, but Clarence behaved remarkably well, for Clarence, in that period just before Christmas. At lunch in the cafetorium, among his buddies, Clarence would talk knowingly about girls who liked to "rap." Once he pointed to a sixth-grade girl and said, "She smoke reefer, bro." But no one is sophisticated about everything. Chris overheard Clarence talking about Santa Claus. Clarence said he wanted a new dirt bike. She figured he didn't want her to tell on him to Santa Claus.

The windows were closed now, and the heater under the window ran all the time. Its hum replaced the sounds of the factories outside. Clarence had discovered that a piece of paper would levitate if he put it down on the heating vent in the counter under the window. Snow had come, gone, and come again to the landscape outside. In early afternoon light, the snow on the playground made the colors of the small factories look bleaker, especially that one hospital-green wall of Laminated Papers, which opened periodically to let in trailer trucks. But in the morning, sun streamed through the half-lowered blinds on that east-facing window, which stayed clean because it was too high up for graffiti. The children's coats in the morning and after recess were sachets full of the thrilling smell of winter air. Over the window hung the class's pictures of Famous Patriots. Felipe's portrait of John Hancock looked down on the room with a small, smug smile, as if that gentleman were still pleased with himself for having signed the Declaration in the boldest hand.

Chris had her class back and under control. She often grew weary of the role of disciplinarian. She'd say at the end of a bad day with Clarence and Robert, "It's exhausting being a bitch." But she never wearied of what discipline brought her. It allowed her to teach.

Of all the subjects, Chris liked teaching social studies most. She had loved social studies ever since her college course in American history, when she had discovered that it was a story, and didn't even resemble the boring lists of dates, the names of good guys and bad guys, she'd had to memorize at Holyoke High. She had not read deeply in history, but she had read some, and had concocted most of her own lessons. She used the social studies text mainly as an outline. Chris thought the book both too hard and too boring for most fifth graders to read.

In Room 205, the Revolution began just before Christmas. Chris had begun reading them a novel about the Revolution, from a boy's point of view. The first day she warmed them up. "We are
not
—and some of you will be disappointed—going to get into the blood and guts of the war. We're going to get into why there are wars and, in particular, why this one." She talked about taxes, about the distance between England and its American colonies, not lecturing exactly, but, as was her custom, asking such questions as, "What are taxes? Felipe?" with a note in her voice that seemed to say she wondered, too. (One of the best teaching manuals says you should ask a question first, then name the child you want to have answer it. That so the other children won't lose interest. Chris always questioned that way, but for a different reason: so that the child she was going to call on wouldn't have time to get scared and forget every thought.) She mentioned such figures as King George III, saying, "He's going to be an important character in our story." She wondered out loud, "What was the Boston Tea Party?" and answered, "That's one of the things we'll find out." These were all by now familiar ploys, but applied with such vigor that Clarence actually blurted out, "It sounds like a movie!" That was high praise.

The next morning, just before lunch, Chris went to the board and wrote,
CAUSES
. She turned around so swiftly that her skirt swirled, and she sashayed toward their desks. "What name did they call the war between the English and the Americans? Clarence?"

He had been gazing toward the window. Now he turned and grinned at Chris. He seemed to be in high spirits today. She was going to make use of Clarence.

"If you don't know, Clarence," she said, "you'd better pay special attention." She began to pace before the class, her hands in her skirt pockets. "All a war is, is a gigantic argument, and how many of you have ever been in an argument with someone?" She stopped and folded her arms. There were lots of responses: "I have!" "Me, too!"

"And as with all arguments, there are two sides," she went on. She made both arms flow out to her right, her hands cocked with the palms toward her, until her arms were fully extended, whereupon she rolled her hands out flat, like the tongues of party favors. "You think one way, and your friend thinks the other." Her arms flowed out to the left. Then she repeated the movements in abbreviated form: hands to the right, palms on edge, set like facing walls, then hands like walls to the left. "And if the fight goes on, sometimes you hit each other." Her hands chased each other in a circle, divided, and then came back, one over each shoulder, the thumbs up, like an umpire's declaring an out. "When you were younger. I hope you're not doing that now."