by Tracy Kidder
"Page ten," Al read at that first faculty meeting. "When you're ready and you have your weekly schedule, you're to block this off. When do I have math, when do I have reading, when do I have health, when do I have art."
Out in the audience, a teacher near Chris muttered, "When do I have coffee?" Chris smiled.
Al often ended meetings by saying—the logic wasn't always clear—"But. We're doin' a good job."
When Al said that, Chris worried that he might at last be on the verge of denying the real problems all around them in the school. Almost no one involved in education says the outrageously wrong thing. Plenty do it. But Chris thought Al was almost an opposite case. On really important matters, he usually did what was best for the students. Somehow he always seemed to find the money for new books or materials or field trips. She thought Kelly's classes remained small partly because of Al's clever budgeting. She gathered that Al sometimes fell out of favor on Suffolk Street, school administration headquarters, but she thought it significant that during the first crucial year of desegregation, Suffolk Street had sent Al to Kelly, to soothe the white parents who had demanded proof that their children would be safe down in the Flats. Al, with a great deal of help from the chief secretary, Lil, kept the school running smoothly. The office of the Director of Bilingual Education for the city was situated in Al's school. At least once a year Al would pick a fight with that department over some small administrative matter. The director insisted, though, that he could easily forgive Al because of the way Al ran Kelly School.
These were a couple of the ways in which Al described himself: "One of the better skills I have is organization: How." "One thing you're gonna learn about me, I'm not gonna change." He could be brusque, even with Chris, who was one of his favorites. Chris attributed most of Al's mannerisms, the ones that irritated her, to his being short, a condition that she understood. If in the morning he walked right past her hello, he would show up in her room later on, ostensibly to chat about something of small importance, and this was, Chris realized, Al's way of apologizing. He was teasable. She found him coming out of his office one morning, jingling his huge bunch of keys. "The more keys, the more power," she said.
"Not at all," Al answered, implying what he often said directly about his job, which was: "This isn't easy, hey."
Al could be gracious. He'd sent thank you notes to her and the other teachers who had come in before school started to prepare their rooms. Chris appreciated the gesture; she didn't get many thank you notes. Al wasn't fastidious about every little rule. He wasn't one of those principals who made a hard job harder. And she was glad that he wasn't a "Mr. Mealy Mouth." Around Kelly School the threat of a trip to the principal's office had weight. When she sent a child there, Al almost always took some action. Unlike some principals she'd heard about, he never declared that he was off duty. Some teachers disliked Al, but Chris would stand behind him, if a little off to one side.
Al was Chris's government, all the government she knew. But Al did not imagine himself expert in instructional theory and practice. Mostly he visited the classrooms of new teachers who needed help in keeping order. This year he'd observe only one lesson taught by each of his veteran teachers. After watching Chris in action, he'd say little more than that she was doing a good job. Chris appreciated Al's restraint, but she thought she'd like more advice.
She didn't get much advice of any sort from her students' parents. Research shows that, typically, teachers in affluent school districts complain of too much parental interference, while those in poor districts, such as Holyoke, complain that parents don't get involved enough. These days, Chris always had a hard time persuading some of her students' parents to visit her, even for the scheduled biannual conferences. This year she would receive just one note from a parent that contained a request about her teaching. The note came from the upper-class Highlands, from Alice's mother. It read: "Alice seems to be having trouble with her math homework. Would you please go over her work with her in class."
Chris felt grateful for the message. "I'd like to have one year of parents pushing me," she said. "Just one year."
She had always pushed herself. Over the years she had volunteered for almost all of the extra training that the school system occasionally offered. She had a reputation, not to all minds flattering, for signing up to serve on committees—the School Improvement Council and the Language Arts Curriculum Committee were her current ones. In the past, Chris had gotten some push from other teachers, swapping ideas and tips about instruction. Once in a while, she had taught classes jointly with other teachers. The opportunities for that kind of collegiality always arose by accident, when like-minded teachers were placed in the same grade as she and had similar schedules. The arrangements were always informal. They seemed precious because they resembled acts of free will, and because in her experience they were relatively rare.
Some evenings that fall Chris called up teacher friends—Candy or Mary Ann or Debbie—to discuss ways of handling Clarence. In between lessons during the day, she often conferred with Debbie about strategies for teaching reading. But the faculty did not routinely discuss academic matters when groups of them on the same schedules met over coffee and lunch in the Teachers' Room. In there, banter and complaints were more common than shop talk. Snatches of Teachers' Room conversation suggested that a few might have lost their enthusiasm for the job, but Teachers' Room conversation proved nothing. The real test of a teacher was her conduct in class, and Chris had never seen most of her colleagues at work in their classrooms. One lunchtime, the conversation drifted onto the dangerous subject of troublesome students. One teacher, new to the school, remarked, "I think you have to be patient with children." And another, a veteran, replied from the side of her mouth, " Some you don't have to bother with." Chris wondered if she shouldn't stick up for the new teacher, but Chris held her tongue. "If I worry about what everyone else is doing around here, I'll go out of my mind," she told herself as she headed back for the lonely but safe and sealed-off domain of her own classroom.
Teaching is an anomalous profession. Unlike doctors or lawyers, teachers do not share rules and obligations that they set for themselves. They are hirelings of communities, which have frequently conceived of them as servants and have not always treated them well.
Take, for instance, the plight of the female teacher in not very distant times. As the number of public schools burgeoned in the late nineteenth century, teaching became overwhelmingly a female occupation. The dream of universal education required lots of teachers, and women could be hired much more cheaply than men. Nature, educationists reasoned, fitted women nicely to the role of surrogate mothers. If they became actual mothers, they weren't allowed to continue teaching in many districts. That fact alone guaranteed that many teachers would soon quit. Those who stayed on were apt to be subjected to extreme isolation. The classic sociological study of teaching—written by one Willard Waller and published in 1932—contains the terms of a contract that female teachers in "a certain southern community" had to sign in the early 1930s. The contract obligated the teacher to engage in "all phases of Sunday-school work," to get at least eight hours of sleep while maintaining a healthy diet, and to consider herself "at all times the willing servant of the school board and the townspeople." She had to promise not to go out dancing, not to "dress immodestly," not to be in the company of "any young man" outside Sunday school, and not to "encourage or tolerate the least familiarity from her male pupils." The contract also contained this provision:
I promise not to fall in love, to become engaged or secretly married.
Even for its time, that contract was extraordinary, but it was not atypical in spirit. In general, America has invested an enormous amount of faith in the idea of education, but not much in teachers. Today, teachers get four years of college and better occupational training than they did in the first half of the century (which is to say that they get some training). Tenure has alleviated one major source of insecurity—and has also r
emoved one major tool of quality control; in many places it is virtually impossible to fire a teacher who hasn't committed a criminal offense. And nowadays teachers are allowed to fall in love. Their social status has not improved immensely, though. Male teachers and perhaps increasingly female ones, who now have other options, are still regarded by many people as belonging to what Waller in the 1930s called the "failure belt." People teach, this theory goes, because they can't do anything else. There is a modern stereotype—it has not been quantified, but every teacher knows about it—that depicts teachers as numbskulls who work short hours, get long vacations, do lousy jobs, and then walk picket lines, whining about how badly they are treated.
Teachers' salaries have increased some in the 1980s, but _ generally remain low. Al got paid $37,597 a year. Chris had reached the top of the local salary scale and was being paid $25,532 this year. Pay scales vary from district to district, but the national average places teachers lowest on all lists of presumed professionals. As a sociologist named Dan Lortie puts it, America has always chosen to secure an adequate number of teachers, not with money or status, but by making it easy to become a teacher. America has never really tried to make teaching an attractive lifetime occupation.
Like everyone else, teachers learn through experience, but they learn without much guidance. One problem, of course, is that experience, especially the kind that is both repetitious and disappointing, can easily harden into narrow pedagogical theories. Most schools have a teacher with a theory built on grudges. This teacher knows that there is just one way to conduct a lesson; she blames the children and their parents if the children don't catch on; she has a list of types and makes her students fit them; and she prides herself on her realism—most children come to school, she knows, to give her a hard time. Current research holds that most teachers get set in their ways, both their good and bad ones, after about four years of learning by experience. Many teachers don't last that long.
Studies suggest that many of the best teachers quit soonest. If they stay in education, they tend to move on to administrative jobs, which represent the only real form of professional advancement in this profession. Not surprisingly, public education has always suffered from high turnover in faculties, rates as high as 50 percent, in some schools, in some eras. Lortie speculates that this flux led long ago to what he calls "cellular structure" in schools. A complex and collegial arrangement—teachers sharing many duties—would not have accommodated a large turnover in faculties. So instead, schools have traditionally been arranged in modular fashion: each teacher to her own room and her own duties. The arrangement makes teachers conveniently interchangeable in the administrative sense, and also gives an institution a ready-made system of damage control—watertight bulkheads, as it were. When problems arise, they are isolated from the start in individual rooms. The doors to the rooms of incompetent and inadequately trained teachers can always be closed.
Almost two and a half million people teach in public schools. Many of them work in curiously insular circumstances. Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside their classrooms. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid. Chris had nearly absolute autonomy inside her room. In that narrow, complicated place, she was the only arbiter of her own conduct. Sometimes she felt very lonely. "The worst thing about it," she once said, "is you don't even know if you're doing something wrong."
Al sympathized with his teachers, in his own way. "I always tell people if you want to see anything, come here. We got it. Because a lot of schools don't have the little curly-haired white kid. You have it all here, the doctor's, the lawyer's. Then you get your middle-of-the-road kid, and then your poverty kid. You get Hispanic kids dressed to a T. The parents own a grocery. Chris has to deal with it all. Alcoholic parents, you name it." Al went on: "Kids come in at seven-thirty and ask for a Band-Aid. They just came from home and they had the cut already, but they have to get the Band-Aid here. It's tough, it really is. I say to everybody on the staff, Do the best you can. But remember, you're not the lawyer, you're not the psychologist, you're not the social worker, you're not the doctor."
But to be a teacher implies parts of most of those roles and of some others, too. Decades of research and reform have not altered the fundamental facts of teaching. The task of universal, public, elementary education is still usually being conducted by a woman alone in a little room, presiding over a youthful distillate of a town or city. If she is willing, she tries to cultivate the minds of children both in good and desperate shape. Some of them have problems that she hasn't been trained even to identify. She feels her way. She has no choice.
Homework
At the end of the day, after the intercom had announced, "We have some birthdays," and had named the birthday children and then had sent everyone home, first the ones who went on buses and then the walkers, Chris would gather up her own homework and go to the door. She'd look back one last time, to ask of Room 205 if she'd forgotten something, and shut off the lights. She'd head down the hallway, past half a dozen doors like her own. She'd shove her keys in her mailbox in the office, and often she would stop a moment to exchange pleasantries with the chief secretary, Lil, who would be standing behind the long, motel-like reception desk.
Grandmotherly, white-haired Lil was the only person in the school whom everybody liked. Her admirers included the children who chronically ended up sitting in the bad-boy chairs—these children were mostly boys—outside the principal's office. While they sat there waiting to get yelled at by Al, Lil would talk to them. "I'm very disappointed with you." They'd smile sheepishly. In the middle of one day that fall, Chris came through the office and found Lil leading a group of tough-looking boys in song. She had them singing "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean." It was a most improbable scene, Lil behind the counter wearing a small smile, and the tough-looking boys in their muscle T-shirts sitting there with heads thrown back, belting out that song. Sometimes at the end of the day, Chris would find Lil dealing calmly with the typical sort of unpredictable problem, as on the afternoon that fall when, around two o'clock, a drunk staggered into the office saying he had to pick up somebody or other at noon, and it had to be explained to him that he had come to the wrong place at the wrong time. "Thank God for Lil," Chris often thought. Chris wondered if the school could function without her.
Chris would head out to the parking lot, her pocketbook and her bulging blue bookbag bouncing. She usually appeared to be in a hurry even when she wasn't. She'd stride toward her small yellow station wagon. It had a baby seat in the back. As a girl, Chris had imagined herself driving such a car, a station wagon equipped for children. She had foreseen a bigger one with wood on its sides, like the cars that mothers drove on the wholesome TV shows of her youth.
To the west, the top of a crane in the Sullivan Scrapyard poked up above the chain link fence along Bowers Street. To the south were flat-roofed factory buildings. In the small park to the north beside the parking lot, the trunks of saplings were still wrapped in cloth, like racehorses' legs. There weren't many other trees in sight. Beyond the park stretched a weedy patch of vacant lots, and then old red brick apartment buildings with wooden porches, laundry hanging on clotheslines on those porches.
Kelly School is in an old industrial and residential part of Holyoke, a neighborhood long known as the Flats. Yankee investors, mostly from Boston, invented Holyoke in the 1840s out of the whole cloth of a small farm town. Immigrant Irish laborers built the city, damming the Connecticut River at its falls and making it flow through what would become the Flats, along an ingenious network of canals that fed falling water to the turbines of long blocks of tall brick mills. Holyoke was sométhing new in America, one of the nation's first planned industrial communities, and the Flats was an essential part of the cit
y's engine. For a time, around the turn of the century, Holyoke produced more paper than any other city in the world, staining the wide Connecticut a variety of colors all the way down to the city of Springfield.
Chris Zajac—née Christine Padden—spent the first two years of her life in this neighborhood. Her apartment building had stood just a couple of now half-demolished blocks to the north of the school. Her father worked about a half mile away, in the mill of a giant paper company called National Blank Book. He was a section leader, a subforeman, in the shipping and receiving department. He had walked to work among shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of men with lunch boxes, down streets that old-timers remember as having been clean. Perhaps they were cleaner in memory than they ever were in fact, but back then, in the late 1950s, the Flats still looked like a thriving part of a thriving city. But even by then Holyoke's industries had fallen into a decline, which by the 1970s became altogether visible.
As the city's population fell, from nearly seventy thousand at the peak to about forty thousand in the 1980s, the buildings of the Flats deteriorated. Some mills were abandoned. In the name of urban renewal—and partly in order to limit the size of the growing Puerto Rican population—City Hall presided over the demolition of many old apartment blocks. Most dramatically, the Flats burned. For years, flames lit the nighttime sky over Holyoke. Fires started in old wiring. Pyromaniacs and people bent on personal vendettas and professionals interested in insurance money set fires, and several were fatal. The fires changed the landscape utterly. Although they had abated now, the phrase "burned out" was still occasionally used in the hallways of Kelly School to explain why a child had vanished from the rolls.
Lately, the state and federal governments had put up money to rebuild part of the Flats, and landlords had actually renovated some apartment buildings. The far northern section of the neighborhood made local optimists declare, "It's coming back." The place was clearly in transition, but its next direction wasn't really clear. The train station in the Flats, which H. H. Richardson himself designed, now housed an auto parts store. On many streets, vacant lots accumulating trash and weeds surrounded lone, sooty red brick apartment buildings, which had the outlines of vanished neighbors etched on their side walls. They didn't look it, but even the most decrepit of those buildings had become valuable. Because so many buildings had disappeared and inexpensive housing was scarce in the region, and because the state and federal governments guaranteed a lot of rents, real estate speculators had lately moved in on the Flats and other run-down parts of Holyoke. They'd buy a tenement in the Flats or South Holyoke or Churchill, jack up the mostly subsidized rents, refinance the building, and, sometimes, sell it for a handsome profit. So far they had not greatly improved the majority of buildings.
