Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  In early February, Clarence and Robert, who had threatened each other for months, got into a fistfight outside the nurse's office. The yearly lice epidemic had hit the school. The nurse inspected the children's heads. Robert said, "Clarence got bugs," and Clarence started swinging and kicking. Robert got in only a couple of swings before Chris had both boys by suddenly limp arms, a tableau that might have replaced the eagle on the Kelly School pennant, under the legend "Woman Civilizing Boys."

  Al suspended both Robert and Clarence. For the first time that year both boys were absent. Chris herself had just begun to notice how serene the room felt when one of the children said aloud, "It's quiet today."

  "Well," said Judith, "Clarence and Robert aren't here."

  Chris called a pause in creative writing for a class discussion. She didn't let them criticize Clarence and Robert, but she asked them how they felt about the room today. Many of the children said they liked the quiet. They said, in effect, that the battles between Mrs. Zajac and those boys made them feel that they were being punished when they hadn't done anything wrong.

  Chris already knew as much. She had heard Judith and some others murmur "Good" on several occasions when she'd sent Robert or Clarence to the hall for disrupting the class.

  When Robert and Clarence returned, she gave both of them lectures. Mainly, she told them what the class had said. Robert behaved quite well after his talking-to. She gave Clarence his after school. It was the same old scene. How many times had she skirmished with him in the emptied room, Clarence sitting alone, a little island of sullenness and fury among upturned chairs, while the hefty janitor passed through, collecting the trash can. Chris gazed at the boy, looking for words that might improve that empty feeling she had about him, that he was like a calendar with no numbers on it, a future without hope, already determined. She lectured him again, and softly, about consequences, about taking the better of two choices, about self-control. She told him he was smart. He could be the best boy in the class. But neither she nor the class would put up with his misbehavior anymore.

  Face averted, Clarence yelled, "What about Robert! Robert started the trouble!"

  "I gave Robert the same directions," she said. She felt weary. She could hear it in her own voice. She took him all the way down the stairs to the outer door.

  Clarence shoved the door open and went out. As the door closed, Clarence turned back, showing her a face of rage and tears, and yelled, "Bitch!" Then he ran.

  Chris held on to the bar handle of the door and stared out through the door's scratchy gray plexiglass window at the factory wall across from it. The wall was white and blank. The world was picking on Clarence. That was what Clarence thought. He would go on thinking that, and would say it to his next teacher, and then to his boss, and then—she just couldn't help thinking so—to the police. Then to his probation officer. "Well, you didn't catch him sellin' drugs. You're just pickin' on me." And yet, she thought, she liked him. She really liked him.

  Chris used the word "love" cautiously with children. She reserved it for her own son and daughter. She would keep her feelings and responsibilities in proper order. It would be very dangerous to feel toward strangers' children who were merely passing through her life that particular attachment and all the hopes that "love" implied. If she let a student into that special circle of her affections, she would resent him if he called her a bitch. She knew that she was a better, more objective teacher since having her own children. Too much feeling for a boy like Clarence would only get in the way of what she wanted to do for him.

  And yet Clarence seemed to have taken up residence in her mind, even to the point just lately sometimes of shoving her own children aside. And why was that? Not just because he was cute to look at. Felipe was as cute. And it wasn't just because Clarence demanded her attention. Felipe demanded it, too, and she didn't often go home worrying about him. Felipe didn't need her as much. Maybe that was the reason. None of the children could charm or infuriate her as thoroughly as Clarence. And Clarence, like Judith, seemed acutely alert to her inner moods, as if he'd known her a long time. Tomorrow, probably, he'd make a drawing for her, or write her an anonymous love note, and for a while tiptoe around her, saying his pleases and thank-yous. He was often like that on days after storms. He liked her, too, and he needed her.

  "But what about the rest of the class?" she asked herself. She had let Clarence affect the atmosphere and tempo of events in her room far too much. The class had in effect told her so. The rest of the class needed attention from her, too. Even the ones who didn't seem to need her as much as Clarence had a right to her attention. The strain of trying to give it to them, while always having to keep an eye on Clarence, had accumulated. He was much more difficult than Robert, who only hurt himself and whom she could usually silence with a look. She felt angry now when she had to stop a lesson or some special tutoring for one of the other needy children, such as Julio or Pedro, in order to try to get Clarence to do some work or in order to deal with another of his eruptions. If she yelled at Clarence, the other children felt distressed; she could see it in their faces. But keeping in her anger left her feeling exhausted, sometimes too exhausted to get to sleep on time and too drained to work up the enthusiasm she needed in order to be as good a teacher as she wanted for her class. Clarence was wearing her down. Either that, or he was getting worse. Or both.

  Clarence reappeared after February vacation with his brown jacket torn all the way up one side. White stuffing showed. When she saw the jacket, Chris felt newly worried. Children often changed slightly over vacations, and the torn jacket seemed to depict an alteration in Clarence. He had never defied her openly, except when he was angry. Now, not once but several times, he was casually, airily fresh to her, and seemed almost indifferent, surly without being angry, when she called him to her desk and said, "Give me one more smart answer like that, and you're not lasting in this room."

  "I'm controlling him a lot and teaching him a little. Very little," Chris thought, watching Clarence saunter back to his desk. Would this more rebellious Clarence be impossible even to control?

  3

  The core evaluation of Clarence that Al had ordered in the fall was scheduled for a Wednesday in late February. Chris hadn't requested the core. She didn't have to get involved. But she feared that if she didn't, the usual pat plans would be put in place, and Clarence would end up going to the already ridiculously overcrowded Resource Room for an hour a day. That would do no good. She'd keep Clarence with her for the rest of this year, and do her best, but she wanted to ask that a realistic program be laid out, one that might really help him.

  She had not wanted to hear about Clarence's past in September, but by November she had begun to ask for information. She got most of it from his teacher last year, who knew Clarence well and liked him. Chris knew her to be a gentle and trustworthy judge of children. Her Clarence stories troubled Chris, because they resembled the ones that she had been telling Billy after school all year long, except that Clarence now was even more unruly and less studious. More nearly violent, too, and now, it seemed, right on the verge of open defiance. She'd keep trying this year, but she didn't want to close her eyes and simply pass him on to another teacher. She didn't know the right program for him, but maybe the experts would.

  She was tired when she got to school the day of the core. She hadn't slept well again—and events of that morning wore her out. She felt ready with her arguments for the core, but the meeting was postponed. The woman in charge of running cores came to the room no fewer than five times that morning: first to tell Chris that Clarence's mother hadn't arrived, then that the mother still hadn't arrived, then that the core couldn't be held today, then that it might be rescheduled for tomorrow, and finally that it would take place tomorrow, with or without the mother, as the law allowed. Chris felt testy all day. Once, she scolded Clarence when she really shouldn't have.

  The room was full of eyes. That morning of the aborted core, Clarence was especially watchfu
l.

  "Mrs. Zajac!" he whispered.

  Mrs. Zajac looked at him.

  He pointed to the doorway, at the woman from the office.

  Every time that woman from the office showed up, Clarence was the first to spot her in the doorway.

  That woman kept coming back. Mrs. Zajac kept saying "Excuse me" and bustling out to the hall. From inside the room, the words the two women said were just murmurs, Mrs. Zajac and the woman standing outside the door, Mrs. Zajac's hands flying every which way, now and then Mrs. Zajac going silent and her jaw dropping, now and then her head turning to look back into the room at him. Clarence watched from his desk, eyes fastened on the doorway. His mouth hung open. The two women kept looking at him. Then Mrs. Zajac called his name.

  "Clarence? Is your mother coming in today?"

  "I I don't know."

  Clarence looked worried. Had someone told on him about the twenty dollars he had hidden, from the money he'd taken out of his mother's purse?

  The woman stopped coming finally. But then Mrs. Zajac yelled at him for not raising his hand when he wanted to tell her he didn't understand. That wasn't fair. She always said to tell her if you didn't understand. But Clarence didn't feel like pouting. In a minute, he figured out what Mrs. Zajac wanted. She wanted them to copy down something from the board. He wrote fast. Then he stopped. He'd made a mistake. He raised his hand, and this time he waited to be called on.

  "Ca ca can we put Thomas Jefferson?" Clarence said very rapidly.

  Mrs. Zajac blinked. Alice and Margaret giggled. But Clarence didn't look angry about that, the way he did when he thought someone was laughing at him. He didn't even seem to notice the giggles. He looked up expectantly at Mrs. Zajac. She looked puzzled for a moment. "Oh," she said. "Can you put Thomas Jefferson instead of President Jefferson? Sure."

  And Clarence let out the breath that he'd been holding in.

  Story writing commenced. Yesterday, Mrs. Zajac had told him she'd keep him after school if he didn't get to work on his story. So he'd written this:

  I hate Someone in this class and it start with a Z and 1 time when she was reading my brother Sam. I rised my hand she didn't say anything and she saw me rising my hand and when 2 girls walking in the door she stop reading and stop for them that why i hate her today i don't know what to write. And she told me to turn around and i started to write about her.

  Mrs. Zajac had seen this story yesterday and had told him it was fine, he should just keep writing. But now Clarence got it out of his desk and tore it up and dumped it in the wastebasket, fast, when Mrs. Zajac wasn't looking. He began to write a new story, bending over the paper, designing the words carefully, his tongue sticking out of a corner of his mouth. Mrs. Zajac was nearby. He made little glances to make sure.

  Then suddenly, she wasn't there! Clarence looked up, and Mrs. Zajac was heading for the doorway again! In the doorway stood the school psychologist, the woman who had taken him to a room in the office a while back and given him a lot of tests. She was nice.

  Clarence stopped writing. He gazed at the doorway with his mouth hanging open.

  The school psychologist was about Chris's age and a little taller, with large, inquisitive eyes, which she kept trained on Chris's face. Chris did likewise to her. Chris felt suspicious of psychologists, especially of their lingo, which she thought was designed to obfuscate and not to explain. She hardly knew this psychologist at all, but Chris was a good reader of eyes, and as the talk proceeded, she realized that this woman was no fool. They talked in lowered voices, and both talked fast, right in each other's faces. Evidently, the psychologist had thought that Chris wanted Clarence taken from her room. When Chris said that she had every intention of keeping Clarence for the rest of this year, the conversation pivoted. The psychologist smiled broadly, looking into Chris's face as if she'd just discovered Chris. She wondered if maybe she could help Chris with Clarence. "If, on occasion, you found him doing something well, he loves praise."

  "I do praise him," snapped Chris.

  "Oh, I'm not saying you don't!"

  "No, no," said Chris. "I'm just self-evaluating."

  Chris was talking on, explaining herself, when that sense of another presence, that feeling of something out of place on the periphery, stopped her, and she turned, and there was Clarence standing just inside the doorway, a few feet from her.

  "Mrs. Zajac," Clarence said. "Felipe's drawin' pictures of me on the wastebasket."

  Clarence tattling when he wasn't in trouble himself—that really was unlike him.

  The first thing Chris noticed, after lunch on the day of the aborted core, was how placid Clarence had become—a complete turnaround from the first two days of the week, when she'd thought that he was edging his way toward open defiance. She thought, "I think he knows something's up."

  Judith had observed Clarence when she was feeling bored, and she had come to this conclusion a while back: "What I think about Clarence is that he hides behind his funny things. He's like, he's afraid to come out and say he doesn't understand something. So he hides behind the things he does. But he cares. I know that. Sometimes he doesn't understand the work. That's what I think. He doesn't understand the work, and he hides behind the things he does, to make himself funny, he hides behind it."

  At the end of the day, Clarence sat quietly at his desk, trying to fill out the form Chris had given the boys, an application to become a Boy Scout.

  "Mrs. Zajac?"

  "Yes, Clarence?"

  "What do a-d-d-r-e-s-s mean?"

  "Address," said Chris. She thought he simply couldn't read the word.

  But Clarence knew less than that. He said, "Yeah. What do 'address' mean?"

  Chris looked at him. Had he ever openly confessed to such basic ignorance before? She was surprised. She said offhandedly, "Where you live." And Clarence went back to filling out the form to be a Boy Scout.

  He didn't know what "address" meant? Well, children sometimes had surprising gaps in their basic knowledge. Chris didn't give the episode much thought just then. But, in Judith's terms, Clarence had begun to come out of hiding. It had been a long day for Chris, and a terrifying one for Clarence.

  4

  It is remarkable how much of the time of how many adults in a school one child can command simply by being difficult. The meeting happened Thursday. Past the long desk in the office and into the windowless, overheated conference room at a little before noon went a parade of five experts on troubled children. Chris went in, too. The only person missing was Clarence's mother, though she had been officially notified again.

  When, about an hour and a half later, the parade came out of the conference room, Clarence was no longer a member of Chris's class. The news traveled quickly through the office. Clarence would go to an Alpha class as soon as paperwork permitted. Chris was flushed, all the way from her forehead to the collar of her blouse. The fringes of her black hair were damp. Her face looked grim. She hurried toward her classroom.

  As she thought of it later on—and it was a long time before she could stop thinking about it—the situation was impossible. Nobody had told her ahead of time that Clarence might be sent to an Alpha class this year. She hadn't had time to find a settled attitude. But even after the decision was made and she had all too much time to think, she still didn't know how to feel.

  Chris worried about Clarence. She had reason. To send him away was to tell him the same old news: he was a problem; he had failed. And to help Clarence by placing him in a special class among a number of other notoriously unruly children—might as well say his behavior would improve if he was made to join a street gang. She couldn't argue for doing that to him.

  And yet at the same time, removing Clarence from the class seemed like a just solution. He had not committed any acts of extreme violence; he hadn't thrown chairs at other children or come to school with weapons. But he did beat up and intimidate other kids. More and more since Christmas, he had begun to seem like a wrecker in the room. Was it fair to le
t one child's problems interfere with the education of nineteen other children, many of them just as needy as Clarence? When she looked back and imagined herself saying, "No! I don't want him taken away," she imagined herself feeling just as guilty as she would have if she'd said, "Yes, by all means, Alpha." In retrospect, sending Clarence to Alpha seemed like a decision to accomplish something that was probably right by doing something that was probably wrong.

  She had one awful, sinking fear. Had she wanted, deep down, to get rid of Clarence? She hadn't acted on that desire, but had she felt it? "I don't want to get rid of him. I don't!" she told Paul, the sympathetic vice principal, later. "I mean"—she looked up at Paul—"I do and I don't."

  Would Clarence suffer? Many educators feel that separating children thoroughly from the mainstream of school is never a good idea. But as such programs go, Alpha looked reasonable on paper. Clarence would go to a class of only ten children, with three adults in charge: an aide, a trained, full-time counselor, and a head teacher who was reputedly adept. Alpha classes did have an evil reputation, but everyone had taken pains to tell Chris that the class picked out for Clarence was different. The new teacher was first-rate. She'd really turned that program around.

  Chris wanted to see the class for herself. She had asked Al, in the doorway to his office, "I don't suppose I could go and see that class sometime?" She had sounded at that moment like shy Juanita asking permission to go to the bathroom.

  Al had said, "No. But don't worry about it." He reasoned: "I can't allow her to do that. I can't let a teacher go up there and say, 'Oh, no, I can't send him there.' It's not for her to make that decision."

  The genius of committees is that they can make decisions that no one would want to make alone. Chris didn't have the authority to say what would be done with Clarence. She was simply the most knowledgeable witness about the boy and his effect on her class. The person who had final say, the director of Church Square and Alpha, didn't know Clarence. He had run into situations in which teachers simply wanted to use Alpha to get rid of troublesome children. But he figured that couldn't be the case here or he'd have heard about Clarence back in October, not now in March. He was impressed that Chris intended to keep her troublemaker for the rest of this year. Thinking back, the director would say, "We need more people like that, who don't want to give up on the kid."