Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  Robert's mother also paid a visit, a couple of weeks after Clarence left. At first the woman balked at the idea of a psychiatrist. Then she declared that Robert had his father's crazy genes. She ended up demanding that Robert see a psychiatrist at once. Chris wished he could, but there was paperwork involved. Robert's mother also said, "This school hasn't done nothin' for him." And Chris, who had gone out to see the woman thinking "she probably had a real bad time in school herself," came away with her neck an angry red. All the rest of that day and that evening and the following morning, too, Chris kept wishing she had said, "At least we've tried, lady!"

  The day after that meeting was the worst since Clarence. Robert tried to provoke her all morning, and succeeded just before lunch. Robert had come to school without his books again. All on his own, Jimmy had gotten up and fetched a spare textbook from the cabinet for Robert—maybe Jimmy was trying to head off noise; noise hurt his ears, Jimmy often said. At the end of the lesson, Chris asked Robert to put the book back. Robert, bouncing his desk on his knees, looked up at her with a little smirk and said, "Jimmy got it out. He can put it back."

  Chris started yelling, really thundering at Robert. Matters came to rest in the usual way: Robert at his desk, looking down at his lap, his cheeks very red, the suggestion of a small, excited smile on his face; and Chris breathing deeply, glaring down at him, and thinking, "This does no good. Yelling at him doesn't do one bit of good." She talked it all over that night with Billy and decided that in the end, though he'd given her enough cause by himself, she'd only done to Robert what she had wanted to do to his mother. She'd try not to do that again. Robert wanted her to yell at him. He wanted her attention. She had to find a way to give it to him for the right reasons. First of all, she had to make herself stop giving it to him for the wrong ones.

  A slightly sour smell of sneakers getting heavy springtime use scented the classroom. In the April sunlight that streamed in stripes between the blinds, the room often looked messy, a fragrant pile of pencil shavings under the sharpener and books and papers everywhere. But it had that feeling about it again of the craftsman's workshop. She saw Robert as the biggest problem in her room now. To herself, she said, "If Robert doesn't see a psychiatrist soon, I'm going to need one." She decided to isolate him. She had tried this tactic once before, on last year's most difficult student. It had backfired. The boy had liked being isolated. Maybe Robert wouldn't. Deep down, Chris thought, Robert really wasn't an antisocial child. She had misgivings. The tactic was harsh. But she had to do something. She warned him first. "Robert, if you make an effort, I'll give you all the attention in the world. But if you don't, I'm going to isolate you." He shrugged and turned away. She raised her voice. "And what I mean by isolate, Robert—you will not talk to anyone. You'll sit in the corner by yourself. I'm not going to put up with the behavior I've been putting up with!" She'd yelled at him again. She'd have to keep her word.

  Chris didn't have to wait long. An hour or so later, Robert refused to work on the latest story. She moved a desk under the penmanship part of the chalkboard, so that it faced the board. She made sure that desk was empty, so he'd have nothing to play with. She took away Robert's pencil and paper. She led him by the arm to the desk. "There is no way in the world I'm going to say, 'Everybody has to write except Robert.' If you won't do it, fine. But you're not going to waste my time playing with pencils."

  The situation was manageable, if a little nerve-racking. She glanced at Robert occasionally while she helped the others with their stories. He rocked and rocked in his chair in the corner. One time when she looked, he was pounding his thighs with his fists. He didn't seem any more unhappy than usual. But the next time she glanced at him, Robert looked glum. Once in a while, from the corner of her eye, she saw him looking around at her. He sneered.

  The next day when Robert started misbehaving she put him in the corner again. She left him in isolation most of that day, too. The class had begun a new set of science reports. She took the children down to the library so they could do research. As the class spread out among the brown-topped tables set up in rows beside the metal bookcases, she took Robert by the arm. His head was bowed. He was almost as tall as she. She led him to the farthest table and left him there alone. She sat down two tables away, her back to Robert, the rest of the class at the tables in front of her and off to her right. Shy Juanita had sat down alone. But Judith arose and invited Juanita to sit with her and Alice and Dick. Juanita smiled.

  There was a stillness around Chris, a library stillness that she'd always liked, with a murmuring from the children mixed in. It sounded cheerful and constructive. Good noise, she thought. A happy scene, if it weren't for Robert. Chris could feel him behind her. She was not going to look.

  "Mrs. Zajac." Alice stood at Chris's side. Alice whispered that Robert was bothering them. He was, Alice said, "doing something gross" to his hand.

  "Just try to ignore him. Okay?"

  Ignoring him was hard. "I don't know what to do," she thought. "I wish he'd just let it all out and scream at me."

  He was, but Robert screamed in his own way.

  Chris hadn't taken everything away from Robert. He had a penny. Alone at his table, he had begun to scratch the back of one hand with the dull edge of his penny.

  Robert looked at Mrs. Zajac. He scratched harder. Classmates passed by, going into the stacks. Robert held the hand aloft to show them. Then he went back to work, bending low. He dug with the penny. The copper penny turned red. It was carving a small bloody furrow in his hand. The furrow started at a knuckle. Now it reached almost to the wrist bone. He looked up now and then. He went back to digging. When the class returned to the room, he kept his hand hidden under his desk.

  Chris never saw the wound while it was fresh, and later on she never asked Robert about it. Out of her earshot, Robert said he had attacked his hand in order to get sent to the nurse, who might send him home. He had not wanted to show his wound to Mrs. Zajac, though. "I wanted her to see it herself," he said.

  The day after his second dose of isolation, Chris sent Robert back to his old desk with his books and pencils. Something quite astonishing happened then—too astonishing to trust in thoroughly. The day after he had wounded his hand, Robert came in with some homework. Then for a stretch of three days, Robert did all of his homework. In math, he got all the problems right. In reading some days, when up at the table with her, he answered her questions to the group correctly and with such alacrity that she had to ask him to give the other children a chance. Chris didn't let herself believe that she had engineered the change in Robert. It had happened too quickly, and she wasn't going to play psychiatrist. For all she knew, isolation and the change that had followed were just coincidental. She would savor the improvement while it lasted.

  On one spring Friday morning, Robert's reading group finally reached the end of the dreary third-grade basal reader. Robert had gotten every answer right on the last end-of-chapter test—he had answered every question wrong on the previous one. The other children were reading. The room was quiet. Chris leaned across her desk toward Robert and told him he'd gotten 100 on the test. "I'm proud of you," she said.

  "Huh? Who? Me?" Robert shimmied at his desk.

  She ignored that. Next week, she told him, they'd start in on the fourth-grade book. "Think you'll like that?" she asked.

  Robert looked away from her and toward the window. "I'm happy for me," he said.

  "I'm happy for you, too." She wished she could think of a way to make this moment last.

  The following Monday she said to Robert, "You're doing much better."

  "I am?" He shifted his shoulders around, his belly wobbling.

  "Don't you think you are?"

  "No." The maddening coyness of that squeaky, clipped no.

  "You don't want to hear good things?"

  "No." He was playing the burly coquette.

  "Just bad things?"

  "Yeah."

  She breathed deeply and looked away, b
ut a moment later she heard his voice saying, "Mrs. Zajac? Can I come up and work on my story with you now?"

  One morning later that week, Robert started stabbing himself with a dull scissors. But she thought his fits had diminished in number and duration. He kept on doing some of his homework. And as for her, she had kept her promise to herself and had not raised her voice at him—except just twice—since he had wounded his hand.

  3

  On sunny weekends, in windbreaker weather, Chris's infant daughter, Kate, chased robins around the Zajacs' green back yard, Kate hurrying after the birds in a Chaplinesque waddle and Chris laughing as she chased her. It was the loveliest of ages, Chris thought, watching Kate. She was interested in everything, and everything was new.

  The Zajacs went, as always, to Holyoke's elaborate St. Patrick's Day parade. The day was blustery, the sky the leaden color of the street down which, the parade wearing on, some marchers came lurching. When Senator Edward Kennedy hove into view, in tails and top hat and jauntily swinging a shillelagh, announced by many female voices up the street crying, "Teddy! Teddy! Teddy!" Chris whispered to one of her sisters, "I'm going to do it." She set her jaw, stepped off the sidewalk, and then she thought, "Oh, should I?" That cost her the chance. She'd just resumed her trot into the street when one of her elderly aunts, not hesitating for a moment, rose from her lawn chair, throwing off her lap robe, and dashed out to the senator. The aunt pumped his hand with both of hers. As the senator received the woman, with a slight bow and then a smile that he threw toward the sky, Chris veered away and trotted back to her place among her family on the sidewalk. She stood there muttering, making angry eyes at her aunt.

  Chris and Billy put on their customary St. Patrick's Day party afterward at their house, nearly all of their extended families there, lots of corned beef and cabbage and some kielbasa, too. Billy merely tolerated the parade, and around this time of year if someone asked Chris a question such as, "What does St. Patrick's Day commemorate?" Billy would say, "Beer drinking," and Chris would fulminate briefly. What about the Polish, Billy? she'd say. Was beer unknown to them? The party was wonderful. Her best friend from college came. Chris got her mind entirely off school until around midnight, when she awakened with a start, thinking, "Has Felipe dropped his instrumental music lessons?" No, he hadn't. She went back to sleep.

  Rain fell for a week. Sheets of rain swept across the playground, and the wind howled at the windows. A few blocks away the gusts were dislodging several windowpanes in Pedro's grandmother's apartment. The lights in the classroom seemed very bright. The children, Chris told Mary Ann, were "hoopy." "They're all out of it today. If we have one more day of rain, I'm going to kill myself."

  Over spring vacation, Chris would visit Puerto Rico. She thought about the trip now and then, a little uneasily, but at least the weather would be fine. She hoped for fair skies and outdoor recess sooner than that. She laughed when they loaded up the erasers with chalk on April Fool's Day, and when Judith squirted her with disappearing ink, and she slipped over her pinkies and wore all day the two rubber spider rings that Alice sneaked onto her blotter to scare her. That was a sight: rubber spiders dancing on Mrs. Zajac's slicing, chopping, circling hands. The days were flying by now, Chris felt. She must be having fun.

  The lovely uphill parts of Holyoke began to turn green. Spring travels up the Connecticut River Valley, but seems to skip the lower wards of Holyoke. On the outside walls of Kelly School, down in the Flats, a new crop of graffiti appeared, mostly in praise of rap groups: RUN DMC = FRESH. A new picture on an electrical box on the playground helped to make up for the lack of formal sex education lessons inside. Back in the fall thieves had stripped the hallways of the school's new lithographs of American scenes. The thieves had come out of hibernation. Several mornings Al came in and found the usual trails of wreckage, but, as was also usual by now, nothing of consequence stolen. Everything valuable was securely locked up, except books. "They" didn't seem to be interested in books, but kept coming back as if just for a visit. Some unidentified youths spotted a brand new red car with a high-powered engine out in the parking lot during school hours. They had the door open and were working on the ignition when someone saw them through the school windows and called the police, who chased the young men on foot and lost them in the side streets of the Flats.

  The grass on the playground turned green. City workers at last arrived and picked up all the garbage along the fence. The custodians repaired the locks and ceiling panels that the thieves broke, and painted out the swear words among the graffiti (though they failed to recognize the Spanish ones). And the attempt to equip children to express themselves on paper instead of on public walls and to get their money via jobs went on inside, in many rooms, regardless. Heading off for the Flats on fine mornings, Chris might have seemed a victim of bad choices. She should have pointed her station wagon north, toward a greener town where children scored high on Basic Skills Tests in rough proportion to their parents' incomes and years of schooling. But on most of those spring mornings she was eager to get to her room. When she thought of this class now, she saw that many were performing very well, better than ever. It was a good class, all in all. They were kind to each other usually. Nice to look at, too. "My girls are beautiful," she thought. "And the boys aren't too bad either. They're pretty cute." More than ever, she looked forward to them.

  She'd come hurrying across the parking lot at a quarter to eight, always a few minutes behind, overballasted and listing slightly under her bookbag, eyes on the front door. The top math group discovered geometry—first of all, at her direction, in the many angles they'd noticed in the room during daydreamy times: the joints in the metal trim around chalkboards, the intersecting lines of their classmates' legs under desks. The low group had finally finished with division. She had administered a final review test to make sure, and when she had gone over the last of the papers in the Teachers' Room, Chris had smiled and said, "I haven't changed Henrietta's attitude. I haven't changed Manny's. They're still going to be as obnoxious as the day is long. But they know long division!"

  The low group began to grapple with decimals, with the very question on which the top group had begun the year: "How many parts is this number divided up into?" The children of the low group seemed delighted. No more long division or other stuff for low group kids. When Chris read them the answers to that day's problems with decimals, the children made many exclamations.

  "I got a hundred!" said Jorge.

  "I got a hundred!" cried Felipe.

  Manny croaked, "I got a thousand."

  Jimmy didn't even look sleepy. "We doin' this tomorrow, Mrs. Zajac? Thousands?"

  Felipe, for no apparent reason besides curiosity, looked up the definition of ozone, wrote it out, and brought it in to Mrs. Zajac one morning. He wrote a rough draft of a story about a black hole, and, with many upward puffings at the glossy hair on his forehead, he actually started to rewrite it. There were moments during creative writing when she scanned the room and saw a scene that looked too good to be true, like a Norman Rockwell painting, this one entitled Children of Many Nations Happily at Work. Chris sat at her front table, the casement opened wide behind her, her pen poised over a child's story, her head lifted as if to distant music.

  Every child worked, even Robert. Some sat in circles of twos and threes, their voices mingling as they read each other their rough drafts. Others bent over their desks, writing assiduously. Arabella giggled aloud at her own story. Now and then a question rose above the serene babble. "Mrs. Zajac? How do you spell 'high tech'?" That was Judith. In the latest crop of stories, Chris thought she saw signs of new progress in grammar, syntax, and consecutive thinking. She sat with Judith for a long time and discussed her latest story, which was marvelous. She sat with Pedro and had him dictate his story, which eventually made sense. Ashley wrote her best so far, about a robber who had barged into her family's apartment, chased by the police. Chris made time for Alice. "Okay, Alice, that was a good story. But re
member my poem. Good, better, best. This was good, but it could be better. Maybe someone else needs to work on sentences. I want you to work on doing a little more. Why don't you write down some more ideas, and I'll help you fit them in."

  She told herself that she was witnessing real progress that wouldn't have been possible with Clarence in the room. She hoped that he was doing well, and was glad when she heard rumors that he was. She also felt relieved when she heard he'd gotten into trouble for beating up another child. "If he was behaving perfectly, what the heck was I doing wrong?" She missed him sometimes, but in the midst of missing him she'd recall sitting with him at her table, trying to get him to write a story, his face growing stonier the harder she tried. She'd remember wasting half of the hour of creative writing trying to get him to work, and wasting most of the next half hour trying to regain her composure. She would remember coming back from lunch to find Arabella sobbing, and would remember knowing at that instant that she'd have to lecture Clarence again and that doing so would mean he'd put on the stony face and cause more trouble in the room the next time she turned her back. She'd remember thinking, "All I want to do is teach. I want a quiet afternoon so I can teach." It was the kind of small remembered pain that is encouraging. The children hardly ever mentioned Clarence anymore.

  The delinquency lists rarely got very large. The actual number of disciplinary incidents remained about the same, but most didn't last long, most didn't lead to further incidents, and, Chris noticed, most didn't leave her feeling all worn out. Felipe went into an extended math sulk one day. She kept him after school to talk about it. He screamed at her, "You hate me! I know it! Why don't you just admit it!" But she kept calm outside and fairly calm within, and a thunderstorm worked wonders in Felipe. A few days later he remarked that Mrs. Zajac was "the funnest" teacher he'd ever had. On a day not long after that, the intercom announced that recess was outdoors, as it did almost every day now, and Felipe groaned, "Awww!" When Chris asked him why on earth he wouldn't want to go outside for recess, Felipe said, "Because we want to work on our spelling."