Among School Children (3 page)

Chris watched the ruler spin. She understood this as defiance. The lines were being drawn.

The intercom called the last bus. The children who lived near the school—"the walkers"—lined up at the door. Clarence headed for the closet and took out his brown vinyl aviator jacket. It was new and had epaulets. It was a little big for him, and made him look even younger than he was.

"Where do you think you're going, Clarence? I don't know why you think you need your coat." She never liked to hear that ironic sound in her voice, but she felt annoyed. Because this boy would not work, she had to stay after school.

Clarence threw himself into his chair. He sat with his jacket in his lap and watched the other children file out the door.

It was just like yesterday. Chris sat at her desk and did some paperwork while watching Clarence. Now and then she said, without looking up, "The pencil's moving. Right, Clarence?" She could see that it wasn't, but her voice was not ironic. It carried the same sort of message as yesterday's: "Let's assume that you are going to do the work."

Clarence's paper lay on his desk. He hadn't written anything on it. He didn't even look at it. He gazed, mouth slightly ajar, at nothing. Then he glared at her, then stared off. From her desk, his face appeared as if suspended in the forest of inverted chairs.

Children get dealt grossly unequal hands, but that is all the more reason to treat them equally in school, Chris thought. "I think the cruelest form of prejudice is ... if I ever said, 'Clarence is poor, so I'll expect less of him than Alice. Maybe he won't do what Alice does. But I want his best." She knew that precept wasn't as simple as it sounded. Treating children equally often means treating them very differently. But it also means bringing the same moral force to bear on all of them, saying, in effect, to Clarence that you matter as much as Alice and won't get away with not working, and to Alice that you won't be allowed to stay where you are either. She wanted Clarence to realize that he would pay a price for not doing his best and for misbehaving. If she was consistent, Clarence might begin to reason that he could make school a lot easier by trying to do his work. If she got him to try, she could help him succeed, and maybe even help him to like school and schoolwork someday.

But this was Friday. Chris never stayed after school on Friday. She felt worn out. The first few days always made her yearn for a sofa and some pillows. Her feet ached. She had earned her Friday afternoon away from here and Clarence. Why had she put herself in this position? On a Friday!

Clarence's teacher last year had said that Clarence cried a lot. The teacher was no fool, but Chris just bet that she, and the teachers before her, had too often relented at the sight of Clarence's tears, just as Chris had yesterday when she'd asked for a new Clarence. She would not relent again. She looked across the room at Clarence and flexed the muscles in her jaw. She felt testy. Just then, it seemed like the best way to feel:
All right, blister. What you need is what I've got.
Chris took a deep breath and let it out. Then she got up and strode across the room, her hands in fists.

Clarence jerked his head away as she approached.

"Are we going to go through this every day, Clarence?"

She grabbed a chair and sat down beside him, leaning her head forward and a little to one side to get it close to his. He turned his farther away. "I can wait you out as much as you can wait me out. If this is not done Monday"—she tapped the blank paper on his desk—"plus all the other work you owe me, you won't have recess. And you'll be after school. You are
going
to do it."

Tears began to streak his cheeks again.

"Secondly," Chris began, and she let her voice rise. It was all right to let it rise; this offense was more severe. "If you're mad at Mrs. Zajac, you deal with me. You don't take it out on others! You raise a hand again to anybody and you're out of here. Do you under
-stand?
"

He had turned his face all the way around, so that she was looking at the back of his head.

Chris's voice came down. "I tried yesterday to be nice to you, and said, 'Let's start over.' But you don't want that. Now, Monday, this work is going to be done. Do you understand?"

He didn't speak.

"Now, go," she said.

Clarence jumped up and ran out the door. From the hallway, echoing back up the stairs, came his voice. There were tears in it. It was a sharp little cry. "I
hate
Mrs. Zajac!"

Chris sat for a while in the child's chair that she'd pulled up to Clarence's desk. She sat there, looking out the door, until the worst of her defeated feeling passed. It was the sort of feeling that follows domestic quarrels. You feel that you have every right to speak angrily to your child or your parents, and when you do and a wound appears, you suddenly see the situation altogether differently. She hadn't been able to sympathize fully with Clarence until now, when she had hurt him.

She couldn't help getting angry sometimes, and sometimes getting angry worked. Usually, the sort of child who got her angry was the sort of child who got angry back. They could wrangle openly. Together, they could clear the air. But Clarence wasn't that child, and mistaking anger for reason was always dangerous. Clarence needed firmness, but she wondered if he hadn't seen too much anger from adults already.

I hate Mrs. Zajac!
Once she heard the cry, she could imagine any number of gentler words she could have used on him, and all of them seemed better than the ones she'd chosen. By yelling it on the stairs, he let her know she'd wounded him and didn't give her a chance to make repairs. He won that skirmish.

There were a lot of stories about Clarence around. One school department psychologist remembered him as a kindergartner and remembered being struck by the eagerness with which he climbed into her lap. There seemed to be a desperate quality about Clarence's search for love. Chris would have felt better if she could have told herself that Clarence really did dislike her. But, of course, that wasn't what he meant. He
hated
her. Had he attached himself that strongly to her already? This was only the third day of school. If things went on this way with Clarence, it was going to be an exhausting year.

Chris got up and walked over to her desk. She stared out the window. It was one long, rectangular sheet of smoky, slightly scratched plexiglass flanked by two small casements. The windows opened onto the playground below: a field of grass with a baseball diamond and a concrete basketball court in one corner and a few scrawny young trees on the edges along the chain link fence. The playground ended at a line of warehouses and factories. One factory building was old, of dingy brick, with its ground-floor windows covered in plywood. Another, Laminated Papers, had pale green walls the color of hospital corridors. The factory roofs hid all views of the wide, brown Connecticut River, rushing down from the huge falls, which once powered all of industrial Holyoke. Under a string of high-tension wires, a lumpy horizon of trees, the only full-grown trees in sight, rose from the Chicopee bank of the river. Chris stared out at the hospitalgreen walls of the Laminated Papers building. Clarence is an angry child, she thought. Angry at the whole world. Worst of all was that stony, averted face he wore when she tried to talk to him. How could she ever get close enough to reason with a child who put up a barrier like that?

Anger wouldn't work, obviously, nor would endless sessions of detention—they would simply make her feel resentful, too. Maybe she should simply warn him that he was getting F's. No, that wouldn't work either. On his first report card he'd flunk everything, and that would tell him the same old news, that he didn't have to do the work because he couldn't.

After spending most of six hours alone with children in one room, a teacher needs to talk to another adult, if only to remind herself that she still is an adult. Chris needed to talk more than most people. She couldn't sort out her thoughts until she had turned them loose into the air. She hated, not solitude, but the silences that cover up emotions. This evening especially she would have to talk.

When she got home her husband, Billy, was there already. Billy was about six feet, with prematurely gray hair and an open, youthful face. He was a good listener. The first year or so of their marriage, she would bring home teacher stories and halfway through would pause to check. She'd say accusingly, "You weren't listening, Billy."

"Yes, I was," Billy would reply. "You were telling me that so-and-so was throwing snots around the room."

Actually, it had turned out that Billy remembered the names of her difficult pupils years after she had managed to forget them herself.

Billy understood how badly Chris needed to talk. The few times when he felt truly angry at Chris, he would break off the argument and simply walk away from her. Chris would then chase Billy around the house. She wouldn't be able to help herself. She had to keep on talking at those times. Otherwise, the argument would fester.

Chris found Billy in the kitchen and told him all about this day: Clarence's tears, Clarence's stoniness, Clarence's exit. "I don't know, Billy. Every year you get one, and every year it's the same. But it's discouraging."

She went on: "I wasn't trained for this. I was trained to teach, not to deal with kids like this. And they stick them in your room, and you're supposed to perform miracles. Plus teach all the others."

Poor Billy. She talked about Clarence all weekend. "Guilt," she said. "Guilt plays a large part in my life." She might as well have brought Clarence home for those two days. She kept seeing the big eyes exuding tears, and hearing the sharp, wounded voice saying, "I
hate
Mrs. Zajac!" She was angry at herself about her timing, too. You never scold a child on Friday afternoon and give yourself two days to brood about it. She knew better than to do that.

On Monday morning, Chris told Pam Hunt, the student teacher, "This week I'm going to kill him with kindness. But if he lays a hand on another kid, I'm going to step on him. I'm not going to have a child afraid to come to school because Clarence is going to hit him. I'm not going to let him out of doing his work, but this week I'm just going to keep putting his name on the board and reminding him, and try that for a week."

Pam pursed her lips and nodded.

When Clarence ambled in, walking heel-to-toe as if to music only he could hear, Chris said, "Good morning, Clarence! How are you this morning?"

It seemed as though Friday had never happened. Clarence grinned at her. Chris smiled over her blotter at the afterimage. Those dimples of his were so deep she could see them from behind.

Clarence did a 360-degree turn, a pirouette with arms outstretched, and like an airplane coming in for a landing, dropped his books on his desk. Then he took his coat to the closet. Now he was gazing at the week's luncheon menus that were taped up on the closet door. He rubbed his little belly, his hand moving in a circle over it. "Mmmm! Applesauce!" he said.

He really was extraordinarily cute, Chris thought. But in a moment, she would have to ask him for the work he hadn't done last week.

At the beginning of the first social studies lesson of the year, Chris asked the class, "What's the name of our country?" She made her voice sound puzzled. She didn't want to shame the ones who didn't know the answer. About half of the class fell into that category.

"Holyoke?" Courtney ventured to guess.

"No-oh," said Chris. "Holyoke is our city. Our
country
." She called on Arnie.

"Massachusetts?" said Arnie.

"No. That's the name of our state," said Chris. "Dick?"

"North America?" said Dick.

"That's our continent," said Chris. "It's even bigger than our country."

Chris carried in her mind a fifth-grade curriculum guide. It conformed roughly to the twenty-year-old official guide, which she kept in her desk and never consulted anymore. If she could help it, her students would not leave this room in June without improving their penmanship and spelling, without acquiring some new skills in math, reading, and writing, and without discovering some American history and science. At about ten of eight in the morning, before the children arrived, she stood at the chalkboard, coffee cup in her right hand, a piece of chalk in her left. One of her own grade school teachers had slapped Chris's sinister hand when she'd used it, but Chris remained a lefty. The chalk rattled, never squeaked, as she wrote down the word of the day in penmanship under the lists of children who owed her work. Her own handwriting was indeed exemplary, slanted to the right and curvaceous. Sometimes she chose a word to suit her own mood ("fancy") or the weather ("puddles"). Other days she wrote the names of historical figures whom she wanted to discuss ("Benjamin Franklin," "Martin Luther King") and once in a while a word that the children would not know ("eugenics")—she hoped thereby to train them to use the dictionary.

At eight, a high-pitched beep from the intercom announced math, which lasted an hour. Some children left her room for math, replaced by some children from the room next door. For math and reading, children were "levelized," which means the opposite of "leveled"—they were grouped by abilities. Her lower math group began the year with a review of the times tables and her top group with decimals. She would take each group as far as she could, but every child had to improve in problem solving, every member of the low group had to master long division at least, and all of the top group should get at least to the brink of geometry.

A half hour of spelling followed math. For fifteen minutes, Chris would talk to them about their spelling words. Responses were unpredictable.

"What's a cyclone? Arabella?"

"Like a ride?"

"What does 'abroad' mean? Anyone? Robert?"

"A woman," said Robert.

Then came fifteen minutes of study, during which teams of two children quizzed each other. Chris paired up good spellers with poor ones. She also made spelling an exercise in socialization, by putting together children who did not seem predisposed to like each other. She hoped that some would learn to get along with classmates they didn't think they liked. At least they'd be more apt to do some work than if she paired them up with friends. Her guesses were good. Alice raised her eyes to the fluorescent-lit ceiling at the news that she had Claude for a spelling partner. Later she wrote, "Today is the worst day of my life." Clarence scowled at the news that he had Ashley, who was shy and chubby and who didn't look happy either. A little smile collected in one corner of Chris's mouth as she observed the reactions. "Now, you're not permanently attached to that person for the rest of your life," she said to the class.