Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  From here at her dining room table, the year so far with Clarence looked like a one-boy crime wave. Chris could remember a long series of incidents: the disappearance of the special pens for story writing, of the playing cards from the cabinet, of Arabella's candy at one of the class parties. Again and again, after Chris asked the class if anyone had seen those things, Clarence would say "Nope" and shake his head much too earnestly. From the moment she heard Pedro's labored breathing and saw his heavy braces and protruding teeth, she worried about other children mocking him, and sure enough—it was around the third week of school—there was Clarence in the doorway, saying to his friend Pedro, "Get out of my way, buck teeth." There was the angry teacher telling Chris about that little fourth-grade girl who was shaking, literally shaking, and crying with fright at the end of a school day. The girl was afraid to leave the building and walk home across the Flats because Clarence had told her that morning, "You're dead meat. I'm gonna get you after school." Confronted by Chris, Clarence said of the tiny girl, "She starts trouble with me!" Chris warned Clarence. He turned his face away. Clarence threatened the little girl a few more times. Then, evidently, he lost interest in that, and it stopped.

  Another day, Clarence beat up a boy in the bathroom. Clarence didn't act sorry. He gave Al a blow-by-blow demonstration in the principal's office. It might have been funny, except that the other boy was sobbing in the corner.

  Sometimes Clarence seemed intent on destroying the community of her classroom, or on reshaping it to his own liking. Clarence's vigilance over all nonacademic matters in the room had now become a routine of the class. Now he would hiss at other children to get back in their proper seats, and tell them to be quiet right before and sometimes after he had gotten up in the midst of one of Miss Hunt's lessons and wandered around, refusing to sit down. Scold or punish Clarence, and he would get even with Chris through the other children, always ones who were weaker and almost always out of Chris's sight.

  Chris, returning from coffee break, found Felipe sobbing because Clarence had kicked him and hurled him against the wall.

  Chris, returning to the room, found Arabella—cheerful, enthusiastic Arabella, who was always kind to everyone—with her head buried in her arms on her desk, her shoulders heaving. Mariposa whispered to Chris that Arabella didn't want to tattle, but Clarence punched her very hard and made her cry for no reason that Mariposa could fathom.

  Clarence, furious and feeling persecuted about being kept after school for not doing his homework, waited until Chris left the room and then took over, moving his chair into one of the aisles, playing the troll. Chris came back that time and found Clarence shoving away and threatening all children who tried to pass and get to their desks.

  Clarence had taken a fancy to Judith. One day he passed this note down the rows to her:

  Dear Judith,

  You are so pretty that I would like to ask you something I love you But if you say no I will love you OK!!

  "At least he has good taste," thought Chris when she found it a few days later. But the note was both actually poignant and an attempt to be poignant. Clarence had tried out many winning smiles on Chris when she asked him for homework he hadn't done. When smiles didn't work, Clarence sometimes tried tears. Most often he went stony. At the gentlest remonstrance, at the slightest insinuation that he could not do just as he pleased, Clarence would begin to turn away, as if on a motorized wheel, and refuse to look at Chris and refuse to answer. She felt tempted to plead for his attention then. If a less experienced teacher did plead, as Miss Hunt did early on, the suggestion of a smile on Clarence's face would give him away.

  Chris felt she couldn't let him win the little contests that he staged, and give in to his cuteness or his stoniness. However, if she spent half her time and energy on Clarence, she would cheat the other children. He was like a physical affliction. Keeping down her anger at his attempted manipulations exhausted her, and so did the guilt that followed from letting some of that anger out. He was holding her hostage in her own classroom. Sometimes she felt that way. But lately, Chris thought, she was controlling Clarence, and herself with Clarence, better.

  After school a while ago, Pam had told Chris about how Clarence had mocked Pam to her face in front of the class. Pam was searching for a general explanation of Clarence. "With a kid like him," she said, "maybe it's the structure of the school."

  "You think he should be in another environment," said Chris, her chin on her hand, gazing at Pam.

  "I guess," said Pam. "He's not really bad. He just wants to move around."

  "I know what you mean, Pam," Chris replied. "But this is what there is. There is no other place for Clarence."

  And because that was, or seemed, true, and Chris and Pam weren't going anywhere else either, Chris settled uneasily for an equilibrium dictated by Clarence as much as by herself. Sometimes Chris got some work out of him. She was very pleased with the couplets he wrote. One of them read:

  The wind is cool as cool could be

  But it is not as cool as cool as me

  "These couplets are wonderful, Clarence!" Looking at his other set of couplets, Chris added, "But no 'Beans, beans, musical fruit,' okay?"

  One of Clarence's cinquains read:

  Christine

  The best teacher

  Sometimes she is so good

  That she is so soft and cuddle

  Christine.

  Clarence, as Judith observed, could be "very sweet." In spite of everything, he was growing on Chris. She found a folded piece of paper on her desk one afternoon not long after she scolded Clarence gently—she was certainly trying to be gentle—for not doing his work, I LOVE MRS ZAJAK, the anonymous note said. The handwriting was unmistakable. Alice whispered to Judith that Clarence was just trying to butter up Mrs. Zajac, but Chris felt moved. "Thank you, whoever wrote this," Chris said.

  She could remember peaceful afternoons with Clarence, such as the one Chris didn't want to wreck by making a fuss because Clarence had forgotten both grammar book and homework again. "Why is it," Chris said to him, leaning her elbows on her desk (Clarence now sat at the desk closest to hers), "that I have to remember fifty thousand million things, and I'm an old lady, and you can't remember one book?"

  Clarence turned around in his chair and looked at Chris. "Old?" he said.

  "Yes! I'm an old lady," said Chris.

  "You don't look like it," said Clarence, solemnly shaking his head.

  One Friday afternoon, she peered into Clarence's desk, putting on her stupefied look, her mouth agape and tongue lolling out, at the chaos inside. "I'd hate to put my hand in there," Chris said to Clarence. "It might get bitten off by the animal that's back in there."

  Clarence looked up at her and shook his head. He grinned, revealing the slots where his eyeteeth would be. "Nah," said Clarence, "it don't bite."

  Chris gazed down at him. "Clarence," she said. "You are an original."

  But Chris didn't imagine she'd begun changing Clarence's life. Not long ago he jettisoned one of his spelling books on the playground, to get even with Miss Hunt—there were no small children around for him to hurt that time. The soggy book was discovered, and Chris sent him to the office for destroying school property. Afterward, Clarence, suddenly the most prolific of writers, had composed this rough draft of a story:

  Hunten house

  There once lived a witch her name was Mrs. Zazac and she was a very bad witch and never like no body there was a boy name Clarence she didn't like and she lived in a hunten house an it was bad no one will go in there then one day Clarence went in there was bats all over the place and Alice Judith Felipe Dick and they say watch out look beside you and the witch saw their eyes lid up and the children ran and Clarence look behind him there was Mrs Zazc the witch I didnt believe it and she came right after me than the goust starad to come after me i was right in the corner they haged me up and i was about to di into Judith came she had an big ax to cut down the rope it was to late then we all got trap in
a cage where ghousts lives and pretty soon we got batter to them they helped us out then we were called goustbusters and put on our lazer guns we killed our teacher and alice judith felipe and i started to cry and we sad we did what we had to do and that was the end of the wicked witch, the End.

  Chris had talked to the class about setting a scene. To his story, Clarence had appended:

  part two

  About the wicked witch she died outside it look it was and a nice gradering big color tree big brown rocks and

  Perhaps the school psychologist would want to see the story. Chris put it in one of her desk drawers and said to Clarence, "I'm sorry you think I'm a witch, but I wasn't the one who threw away your spelling book." And that was the end of it.

  Their truce was of the sort then raging in Lebanon. Chris preferred not to send children to the principal's office, except for violent, dangerous behavior. But she had taken Clarence there many times already. If on one day Chris decided that Clarence's behavior really had improved at last, and it was time for her to find new ways to get him to do more schoolwork, on the next or the day after the next, she would be marching down the hall toward the office, her arms swinging high and hands in little fists—her taking-a-kid-to-the-office walk, as one colleague called it.

  Clarence would be trailing some distance behind, his face sullen, his hand running down the grooves in the cement block wall. Chris would turn back to wave Clarence onward. "Do you remember yesterday, when we talked about consequences? This is the consequence, Clarence, when you don't control your temper."

  Clarence would answer angrily, saying of the usually more innocent Felipe, "He starts the trouble!"

  For Chris, Clarence's life outside school seemed too distant even to imagine. She knew only that Clarence lived in the Flats with his mother. She'd have taken action if she'd seen any physical signs to support the schoolhouse rumors about Clarence being beaten, but she had been keeping a lookout and hadn't seen any. She couldn't do anything about his life away from school, whatever it was like. She told herself, "Let's face it. I as a teacher have to deal with things as they are in the classroom, whatever the situation is at home."

  When AI suspended Clarence, Al would send along a message that Clarence's mother had to come to school the next day to get her boy reinstated. This inverted form of kidnapping always worked. The first time Al used that strategy, during the first weeks of school, Chris excused herself from her class in order to confer with Clarence's mother in the vice principal's office. His mother was a big woman, much taller than Chris, and was dressed in slacks and sandals. "Okay," she said, looking out the window, when Chris had finished describing Clarence's latest offense.

  Chris set up the old homework-signing deal. And maybe, said Chris, Clarence's mother could come to school every two weeks or so to talk to her about Clarence?

  "Okay," said his mother. She had a deep, musical voice. "I'll give it a shot. I did it last year."

  "It's only September," said Chris. "But he's sliding, and we've got to stop it now. He's not a happy kid. I think he comes to school with a chip on his shoulder some days. How is he at home?"

  "He's good," said his mother. "He plays good outside." She sighed. "Well, can't give up."

  "Oh, no!" said Chris. "He's much too young for that! If we work together, we can help him have a good year."

  "Yeah, well, give it a shot," said his mother, looking again toward the window.

  But she could not have checked Clarence's homework any more often than Robert's mother checked his, because Clarence, too, almost never did any. Clarence's mother did not come to see Chris again that fall. She did come to Kelly periodically, to get Clarence reinstated. Once, Chris saw her in the hall, and for a moment could not remember which infraction Clarence had committed this time. Lately, Chris had all but stopped sending Clarence to the office, although he still gave her cause. Sending him there, or home, hadn't done any good.

  Thinking about Clarence tonight didn't lead to any new strategies. She'd just go on trying to ignore small offenses and to get him to do his work. She'd keep on trying to talk to him. Maybe she had made some progress. She still heard bad stories from other teachers who dealt with him. But he was behaving fairly well now for her, or at least better than in September. That was a start maybe. He'd done well on this social studies test. There was always reason for hope.

  Chris put the social studies tests in piles. There were four A's, four B's, four C's, two D's, four F's, two absent. "I don't want that to happen. I want the majority to be in the A's and B's. But Clarence. I've really got to praise him. And Ashley, who I didn't think was paying any attention, she got a C. So did Claude." Propping up her chin with her hand, Chris gazed into her kitchen at the clock on the wall. "Oh, what am I going to do about those four who flunked? Jimmy. Well, maybe if I move his seat..."

  It was past bedtime.

  Chris's parents had always recited the rosary at night. Sometimes Chris did, too, while trying to get to sleep. Her reasons were less pious, she guessed. Chris thought of prayer as a better way of counting sheep, and of keeping her students' faces out of her bedroom. If she failed, she wouldn't sleep well, and all the next day her voice would sound to her like branches snapping.

  Discipline

  Passing by the door to Room 205, Chris's best teacher friend, Mary Ann, heard screams and a thudding like soldiers tramping. Chris and Pam were sitting at a table down in the library, working on lesson plans. Mary Ann called down from the balcony, "Chris, you can't believe what your class sounds like. Are they supposed to be doing that?"

  "They're having music," Chris called back. "And, Mary Ann, I don't want to hear about it."

  A little later, Mary Ann called down again. "Chris, it's getting worse."

  "It's not my problem, Mary Ann."

  Late on Wednesdays, as a gesture toward integrating Spanish- and English-speaking children, half of Chris's class went to the bilingual room next door and half of the bilingual class came into hers, and while Chris went outside with her texts and planning book, the children had art, which often entailed the teacher's screeching for quiet and often ended, a half hour later, with the children sunk into a sullen, grumbling obedience. Then the children in Chris's room had music, which was different from art.

  The music teacher was cheerful and buxom. She had a lovely soprano voice. Lifted in song, it commanded attention. Lifted to declare, "I'm in a mean mood today, children," it lacked credibility. The music teacher said those words once at the start of her lesson, and Clarence jumped up, flexed his biceps, and yelled, "Me, too!" The music teacher would arrive out of breath, with a bongo drum under one arm and, in her other hand, a satchel stuffed with cowbells and maracas, the ends of flutes and recorders and xylophones sticking out of the bag. It sometimes seemed as if she were bringing equipment for a riot. When they were reminded that they had music today, the children would emit soft purrs. They'd cheer when she appeared in the doorway to supplant the art teacher.

  When the music teacher walked in that afternoon in October, to deliver the lesson that alarmed Mary Ann, Clarence jumped up from his chair and ran furiously in place for a few seconds. Then he put the eraser of his pencil to his lips, as if it were a rap singer's microphone, and cried, "Everybody clap your hands!"

  The music teacher didn't seem to notice. She explained to the class—she had to raise her voice to be heard the minute they spied all the instruments and the big tape recorder—that she wanted to celebrate Halloween by making a recording of spooky sounds. Today, she would hold auditions to see who could do the best imitations of ghostly moans, rattling chains, loud footsteps, door creakings, and window slammings. "And I need one person who can do a really fantastic scream," the music teacher said, her high voice raised still higher because they caught on right away.

  In a moment, the children were standing on their chairs and their desk tops, stomping their feet, while Clarence went bounding in one mighty leap over a desk and then sprinted twice around the room. Felipe r
olled around on the carpet, wrestling with a chubby boy from the bilingual class and crying out, "Get off me, you starving pig!" Some children tried to outdo each other's moans, and others tried to outdo each other's screams, and even good Arabella was using the maracas both to imitate chains and to bonk her friend Kimberly on the head.

  "Time out! Time out!" cried the music teacher, but she didn't sound angry.

  Judith and Alice were the only two sitting down, in their usual seats. They clutched their stomachs and alerted each other to various sights. "Look at Clarence!"

  He had mounted the cart of encyclopedias and sat on top, a grinning emperor on an elephant, while another boy wheeled the cart around. Clarence was pounding the encyclopedias against the metal shelves to imitate heavy footsteps.

  "I guess we can't do this, boys and girls!" cried the music teacher, but she still didn't sound angry at all.

  "Hey, teacher! Hey, teacher! I got a door slammin'!" yelled a boy who was vigorously kicking the metal cabinets near the window. Another boy executed somersaults. Clarence dismounted, and did a somersault, too. Children strutted to and fro, stiff-legged, imitating Frankenstein. Clarence disappeared under desks. His head popped up, grinning at Judith and Alice. Someone was beating the bongo drum, and the music teacher's voice was growing hoarse.

  "Children! Children! Sit down in your seats. Or else we can't do this."

  They crowded around her and the tape recorder instead, and finally, though it was impossible to say how it happened, they all quieted down for a while. They had just finished the recording when Mrs. Zajac opened the door. Before her lay the aftermath of music: the slightly sweet odor of children's perspiration, the flushed faces, and the form of Clarence still crouched beneath a table, Clarence's huge eyes and white grin lurking in the shadows. The children were ignoring the music teacher's cries of "Sit down in your seats!" when Mrs. Zajac entered and said, "I don't think some of you heard. Get in your seats."