Among School Children (2 page)

The other children went home, and so did Miss Hunt. Chris sat at her desk, a warm late-summer breeze coming through the little casement window behind her. She worked on her plans for next week, and from under cover of her bowed head, she watched Clarence. The children's chairs, the plastic backs and seats of which came in primary colors, like a bag full of party balloons, were placed upside down on the tops of their desks. Clarence sat alone at his desk, surrounded by upended chairs. He had his arms folded on his chest and was glaring at her. The picture of defiance. He would show her. She felt like laughing for a moment. His stubbornness was impressive. Nearly an hour passed, and the boy did no work at all.

Chris sighed, got up, and walked over to Clarence.

He turned his face away as she approached.

Chris sat in a child's chair and, resting her chin on her hand, leaned her face close to Clarence's.

He turned his farther away.

"What's the problem?"

He didn't answer. His eyelashes began to flutter.

"Do you understand the work in fifth grade?"

He didn't answer.

"I hear you're a very smart boy. Don't you want to have a good year? Don't you want to take your work home and tell your mom, 'Look what I did'?"

The fluorescent lights in the ceiling were pale and bright. One was flickering. Tears came rolling out of Clarence's eyes. They streaked his brown cheeks.

Chris gazed at him, and in a while said, "Okay, I'll make a deal with you. You go home and do your work, and come in tomorrow with all your work done, and I'll pretend these two days never happened. We'll have a new Clarence tomorrow. Okay?"

Clarence still had not looked at her or answered.

"A new Clarence," Chris said. "Promise?"

Clarence made the suggestion of a nod, a slight concession to her, she figured, now that it was clear she would let him leave.

Her face was very close to his. Her eyes almost touched his tear-stained cheeks. She gazed. She knew she wasn't going to see a new Clarence tomorrow. It would be naive to think a boy with a cume that thick was going to change overnight. But she'd heard the words in her mind anyway. She had to keep alive the little voice that says, Well, you never know. What was the alternative? To decide an eleven-year-old was going to go on failing, and there was nothing anyone could do about it, so why try? Besides, this was just the start of a campaign. She was trying to tell him, "You don't have to have another bad year. Your life in school can begin to change." If she could talk him into believing that, maybe by June there
would
be a new Clarence.

"We always keep our promises?" Chris said.

He seemed to make a little nod.

"I bet everyone will be surprised. We'll have a new Clarence," Chris said, and then she let him go.

When Chris had first walked into her room—Room 205—back in late August, it felt like an attic. The chalkboards and bulletin boards were covered up with newspaper, and the bright colors of the plastic chairs seemed calculated to force cheerfulness upon her. On the side of one of the empty children's desks there was a faded sticker that read,
OFFICIAL PACE CAR.
A child from some other year must have put it there; he'd moved on, but she'd come back to the same place. There was always something a little mournful about coming back to an empty classroom at the end of summer, a childhood feeling, like being put to bed when it is light outside.

She spent her summer days with children, her own and those of friends. While her daughter splashed around in the wading pool and her son and his six-year-old buddies climbed the wooden fort her husband had built in their back yard, she sat at the picnic table and there was time to read—this summer, a few popular novels and then, as August wore on, a book called
The Art of Teaching Writing,
which she read with a marking pencil in hand, underlining the tips that seemed most useful. There was time for adult conversation, around the swimming pool at her best friend's house, while their children swam. In August she left Holyoke and spent a couple of weeks near the ocean with her husband and children, on Cape Cod. She liked the pace of summer, and of all the parts of summer she liked the mornings best, the unhurried, slowly unfolding mornings, which once again this year went by much too fast.

Chris looked around her empty classroom. It was fairly small as classrooms go, about twenty-five by thirty-six feet. The room repossessed her. She said to herself, "I can't believe the summer's over. I feel like I never left this place." And then she got to work.

She put up her bulletin board displays, scouted up pencils and many kinds of paper—crayons hadn't yet arrived; she'd borrow some of her son's—made a red paper apple for her door, and moved the desks around into the layout she had settled on in her first years of teaching. She didn't use the truly ancient arrangement, with the teacher's desk up front and the children's in even rows before it. Her desk was already where she wanted it, in a corner by the window. She had to be on her feet and moving in order to teach. Over there in the corner, her desk wouldn't get in her way. And she could retire to it in between lessons, at a little distance from the children, and still see down the hallway between her door and the boys' room—a strategic piece of real estate—and also keep an eye on all the children at their desks. She pushed most of the children's small, beige-topped desks side by side, in a continuous perimeter describing three-quarters of a square, open at the front. She put four desks in the middle of the square, so that each of those four had space between it and any other desk. These were Chris's "middle-person desks," where it was especially hard to hide, although even the back row of the perimeter was more exposed than back rows usually are.

When the room was arranged to her liking, she went home to the last days of summer.

Chris let the children choose their own desks the first day. On the morning of the second, she announced, "I'm going to make a few changes in seats right now. Some of you are too short for where you are. There's nothing wrong with being short. Mrs. Zajac's short." She directed traffic as, without audible protests but with a lot of clanging of metal, the children pushed their chairs like vendor's carts across the blue carpet. Shortness had little to do with where she placed them, but it was too soon to tell them most of the real reasons.

She knew all of their names by that second morning. She wasn't any better than most people at remembering names, but in a classroom that knack is a necessity and naturally acquired. Confronting a new class isn't like meeting strangers at a party. Inside her room, Chris didn't have to think as much about how she looked to the children as how they looked to her.

Here they were, and they were, as always, compelling. Four years ago these children were still learning to dress themselves. Four years from now these cute little ten- and eleven-year-olds would be able—but not disposed, she hoped—to produce children of their own. Some of their voices hadn't changed yet, but they were only pausing here on their way to adolescence.

One boy, Julio, had the beginnings of a mustache. Julio was repeating fifth grade. He wrote in one of his first essays:

Yesterday my mother and my father unchul cusint me we all went to Springfield to see the brudishduldog and rode piper ricky stemdout ladey is fight for the lult

She put Julio in one of the middle-person desks. ("He's sort of a special project, and I also know he's got to be pushed. He's very quiet. He doesn't bother anyone. That was the problem last year, I'm told. He didn't bother anyone. He just didn't
do
anything.")

Kimberly, whom Chris had noticed squinting yesterday and who confessed she'd lost her glasses, got a seat on a wing of the perimeter, up near the board.

Chris moved Claude to the wing farthest from her desk. ("Because he seems to be the type who would be up at my desk every minute, and if he's going to drive me crazy, he's going to do it over there.") Claude was a pale boy with elfin ears. He had spent most of the first day picking at his lip and making it bleed. When Chris took the globe out of her closet and carried it up to the front table, Claude piped up, "My uncle got a big globe like that. It cost about, let's see, a hundred and ninety-two dollars. It stood up this high."

"Oh, my," said Chris. She smiled.

She had caught Courtney not paying attention several times yesterday. Courtney was small and doll-like, with a mobile, rubbery face—she had a way, when worried, of making her mouth an O and moving it over to one side. Courtney wore what looked like long underwear, clinging to her skinny frame. ("I look at Courtney and I think, 'I hope she stays in school.' If school doesn't become important for her, and she doesn't do better at it, she'll have a boyfriend at fourteen and a baby at sixteen. But, you never know.") Courtney got a middle-person spot.

Chris put Robert in another of the hot seats. Robert was a burly child with a cume almost as thick as Clarence's.

She sent handsome, enthusiastic Felipe to a spot between Margaret and Alice. Felipe seemed to be very talkative and excitable. He was probably used to being the center of attention. Chris guessed, "He's easily influenced by the people around him. If he sits between twits, he'll be a twit." Placed between two obviously well-mannered children, Felipe might be an asset. ("People think that teachers want a room full of girls with their hands folded in their laps. I don't! You like a lively room.")

Alice and Margaret, both from what was called the upper-class Highlands, were obviously friends. But to Chris, it seemed as though Margaret hovered near Alice, aware of Alice when Alice didn't seem to be aware of Margaret. Margaret would need to learn some independence. Felipe would be a buffer between the two girls. ("I want to separate Margaret from Alice, but not too far.")

Several children seemed quick academically, especially Alice and Judith, a Puerto Rican girl with long, dark, curly hair and penetrating eyes. Judith was easy to spot. On the second day, Chris organized an exploratory math game called Around the World, a game like Musical Chairs, in which the players advance around the room on the strength of their right answers. In Chris's experience, one child rarely beat everyone. Yet Judith did, not once but twice. In victory, Judith walked quickly back to her desk, a little unsteadily on medium high heels, which emphasized the sway of her hips, and with her head laid against one shoulder, as if she were trying to hide her face. Every child clapped for Judith. Felipe cheered loudly. So Judith was popular, too, Chris thought. Also curiously reserved. The girl didn't even smile at the applause.

Chris moved Judith next to Alice. ("Judith's exceptional, and I want Alice to get to know an Hispanic kid who's at her level.") Maybe Judith and Alice would become friends. At any rate, they made a comely picture, the silky-haired and pink-cheeked Alice with freckles around her nose, from the Highlands by way of Ireland long ago, and the pale-skinned and dark-eyed Judith, from the Flats by way of Juncos on the island of enchantment (as Puerto Rican license plates say), sitting side by side.

Chris put Clarence in the remaining middle-person desk.

On the third day of school, a Friday, several children including Clarence came in without homework, and Chris told them that they were in for recess. Holding midday detention would cost her half her lunch break, but what mattered now, it seemed to her, was that they realize that she cared whether they did their work. Clarence objected to the news about being in for recess. He threw an eraser at one classmate and punched another. Chris didn't see him do that; she'd left the room for a moment. A couple of the children told on him. Chris thought, "I have to put a stop to this now."

So much, she thought, for her talk yesterday about a new Clarence today. She called him to her desk. He came, but he stood sideways to her, chin lifted, face averted. She told him, in a matter-of-fact voice that wasn't very stern, that he could put someone's eye out by throwing things, and that he could not hit anyone. He didn't say a word. He just stared away, chin raised, as if to say, "I'm not listening to you."

Chris had to move Felipe's desk again that day, to a spot nearer hers. Felipe was chattering too much.

"Good," hissed Clarence when Felipe pushed his desk to its new spot.

"Why is that good, Clarence?" Chris asked.

He didn't answer.

But it was obvious to her. Clarence felt wronged. He felt glad that someone else was getting punished, too.

All of the children kept in for recess worked hard, except for Clarence. She had put up lists of the work that children owed on the upper right hand corner of the board, and "Clarence" appeared on every list. He did a little work after lunch, but he came to a full stop when, late in the day, she asked the class to write a paragraph and draw some pictures to describe their visions of the lives of Native Americans. She told them that later, after they'd learned all about Native Americans, they'd look back at these paragraphs and pictures and probably have a good laugh. All the other children got to work, quite happily, it seemed. Clarence said he didn't understand the assignment. She explained it again, twice. Finally, she told him that she'd have to keep him after school again today if he didn't get to work on the paragraph. She called him to her desk and said, "Clarence, you are making a choice between going home with your friends and staying here after school. You're a bright boy. Why don't you just pick up your pencil and write?" She hoped he would. She didn't want to stay after school on a Friday.

She watched Clarence. He sauntered back to his desk. On the way, with an angry swipe, Clarence brushed all the books and papers off Robert's desk. Then he sat down and glared at her.

Chris turned for another whispered conference with Miss Hunt, about scheduling. The other children bent their heads over their papers, working out their impressions about Indians. Chris saw Clarence take out his ruler and put it on top of his pencil. Grinning, he tapped the ruler with his finger. It spun like a helicopter blade.