Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  Irene said, "My father quit high school and now he's going back to college."

  "My mother, too," said Claude.

  "My father dropped out in tenth grade," said Arabella.

  "I bet, Arabella, if you asked him, he would say he regretted it," said Chris. "If Jimmy goes for a job, and Jimmy has a high school diploma and Claude doesn't, the person with the diploma almost always gets the job."

  "That's not fair!" said Claude.

  "It's very fair," said Chris.

  During the ensuing argument, Alice leaned toward Margaret and said, "I want to go to Smith or Mount Holyoke."

  The next day, digressing again from Reconstruction, Chris asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. She would ask them that question many times, in the midst of other lessons and in between lessons, throughout the last weeks of the year. "You should never sit there and have no idea what you want to do in life," she said. "It might be one week you want to be an astronaut and the next week a paleontologist, but you should have some idea. I think you should start to think about that. Arnie, what do you want to be?"

  "A policeman."

  "A hairdresser," said Arabella.

  Lots of chatter followed about who was going to become what, while Claude advised Arnie on the sort of handgun he should carry as a cop—a .357 Magnum would be best, Claude thought.

  Claude said he wanted to be a professional fisherman.

  Chris smiled. "Oh, Claude, you'd be a very good one."

  She turned to Jimmy. "Jimmy, what do you want to be?"

  "I dunno," said Jimmy.

  "Jimmy, you know, you should want to be something."

  "I do," he said.

  "What?" said Chris.

  "I dunno," said Jimmy.

  She carried on with Jimmy. Getting him to write his last story of the year became the battle now. She didn't really win. She brought Jimmy up to her front table. She tried to coax ideas from him. She teased him, saying that she hoped she had him in her class next year, because now she knew how smart he was. Jimmy sat with his head on his arms and gazed toward the windows, his flourishing, healthy-looking curly hair surrounding his delicate but ashen face. She lifted him by a skinny arm and said, "Think, Jimmy, think." When she let him go, he collapsed again. She lifted him and said, "I'm going to ask for you next year, Jimmy, and boy, are you and I going to go places!" "He's such a sad case," she thought. "It's like I'm sticking a needle in him when I ask him to think." She did get him to finish the story finally. Jimmy sat right up then, all by himself, to copy it over. Then he looked alert. He looked undistractable, aiding his pen with many twistings of his mouth.

  A "pull-out" teacher, one who taught English as a second language and seemed to have a lot of spare time now that the year was winding down, had come to the door in search of some adult conversation. Chris, busy and preoccupied but ever polite to her colleagues, was standing in the doorway with the other teacher, but was looking back into the room and watching Jimmy copy his story. "He loves to copy," Chris said in a low voice to her colleague, nodding toward Jimmy. "As long as he doesn't have to think."

  "Well," said the other teacher, "he'll work at Ampad and be happy as a clam." (Ampad was a paper company with a factory nearby.)

  "It's too bad, though," Chris replied in a low voice, "because he has potential."

  "Just think," said the other teacher. "If we did our jobs the way we're supposed to, there wouldn't be anyone to do the menial jobs."

  The other teacher laughed heartily, but Chris didn't seem to hear the remark. She stared at Jimmy, the scrivener. He was one of those children, she thought, who was probably behind from the moment he'd set foot in kindergarten. She didn't think she had helped him much. But maybe she really would have him next year. There wasn't time now for a fresh start.

  The Famous Patriots still looked down from over the window, anachronisms that had long since receded into the realm of the unnoticeable. Chris didn't have time now to bring decorations up to date.

  The class in Room 205 had come to seem like a combat infantry platoon, full of ghosts and replacements. The ghosts materialized in the form of old papers and books when, for instance, a child came in without a social studies text and Chris got one from the cabinets by the window and, opening it, found on the inside cover the name of Lisette, Blanca, Juanita, or Alejandro. Or when she went looking for an extra spelling book and, finding none, thought of Clarence—for a moment she'd gaze out the window at nothing and think, "I wonder how he's doing."

  Now, the year nearly over, another replacement arrived.

  Paul, the vice principal, led into the room a slightly chubby boy dressed in dark clothes and dark glasses with straps that dangled from the earpieces. The boy looked at first sight like a sinister eleven-year-old librarian.

  "Hello! What's your name?" said Chris.

  "Miguel," whispered the boy.

  "We'll get you settled right away," said Chris. She gave Miguel the books that had belonged to Juanita and, before that, to Blanca. Miguel took to the room within minutes. He wrote in his journal that afternoon—his spelling and punctuation were impeccable: "My new teacher is Mrs. Zajac, and so far I think she's the best teacher I ever had. She doesn't talk mean to anybody in the room."

  Snatches of information that Miguel let drop about his family made Chris think he probably came from an unstable household. One day he told Chris, "I'm the first one in my family who is smart." The boy was, in fact, very intellectual. He soon began asking her questions out of nowhere, such as, "Mrs. Zajac, how much is a thousand yen?" She asked him, too, what he wanted to be when he grew up.

  "A physician," Miguel replied.

  "A physician? Would you take good care of me, Miguel?" She smiled, then said earnestly, "Miguel, if you come to school and work hard, you could be a physician." (Miguel, she'd discovered, was in the habit of skipping school from time to time.)

  But Miguel was not as smart about being smart as Judith. He didn't hide his good grades, and could not hide his academic curiosity. In the room, the other children were friendly to Miguel, but when at the ends of bright June days Chris stood at her window, watching her children from the Flats head home across the playground, she saw that Miguel was the only walker who walked home alone. She tried to cultivate a friendship between Felipe and Miguel, but the match failed.

  She had gotten a piece of good but disquieting news: Pedro had been tested at last. On an inspired hunch, the psychologist had given Pedro a test often administered to stroke victims who have lost their language, a sophisticated test involving pattern recognition. Pedro, the boy who could hardly read or speak, had scored in the near-genius range.

  Told for perhaps the first time in his life that he was smart, Pedro said, "Sometime I know things and I can't say them."

  Chris had stared at the doorway. "What have I done for him? He just vegetated in my room." She had flexed the muscles in her jaw. "But I've done a hell of a lot more than anybody else ever did."

  Now word came from the office that there would be a special class next year for children who had formidable language problems. Pedro would be enrolled. Chris asked that Julio be enrolled, too. While she was at it, she had the office call up Mental Health once again to see if Robert's mother had taken him to a psychiatrist. His mother had not. Chris filed the 51 A, saying again, "She's not going to be allowed to sit back and do nothing." She was cleaning up loose ends.

  One morning, Chris made it official—she told the class that she was going to teach sixth grade next year. A cacophony of voices, Felipe's the loudest, cried, "Can I have you?"

  Robert blurted out, "I want you," and then Robert tried to take it back.

  Robert said, "Miss Zajac's mean."

  Julio retorted, "Miss Zajac's mean? You wish."

  "I don't wish. I know," said Robert. "Every teacher in this school is mean."

  Chris sat at her desk, smiling faintly. She felt like a schoolgirl, flattered by the attentions of a boy but not sure she really wants t
hem. One year of being responsible for Robert would suffice, she thought.

  Arabella said to Chris, "Robert said he wanted you."

  Robert turned around at his desk and yelled at Arabella, "No, I didn't! Liar! Liar!" Then, cheeks flushed, he stared at his desk top. "I'm never gonna have her again in my life! She's a witch!"

  "Okay, Robert," said Chris softly. "That's enough."

  The school ran out of pencils. Chris bought some with her own money. This happened every June and was as sure a sign as grass stains on the children's sneakers that the year, too, was running out. But she hadn't lost them yet, and she didn't feel like letting go. More than ever now, she felt she had to make every hour count. The top math group had nearly finished with their text. She'd made it through the Civil War. "The Civil War is over. Who won, Jimmy?" she said. Jimmy knew, but it took him a while to say so. She did not want to stop there, or stop trying to lead Jimmy to an acquaintance with the world of deliberate, active thought. On a Friday, however, all efforts halted. The weather stopped her. August came to Room 205.

  Chris awakened at dawn with a headache. The day was already sultry when she got to school. The windows of Room 205 caught all of the morning sun. Through them, that Friday morning, the trees on the Chicopee bank of the river, over the factory roofs, looked green and cool. Sunshine sparkled for a while on the dew in the grass on the playground. Inside, though, the heat gathered. She felt it first in her ears. Warmth seemed visible. Its color was gray, approximately the color of the plexiglass in the scratched windowpanes and in the dome above the library, which, seen from the doorway, now looked like a huge eye radiating heat. By midmorning, the air in the room was at least fifteen degrees hotter than the hot air outside. By afternoon—maybe it was the combination of hazy sunlight and smoky, scratched windowpanes—the landscape seemed drained of color. At a distance, everything looked woozy. The children's faces were all moist and flushed. They stood in long lines at the water fountain at the sink. The girls plucked at their blouses, as if removing burrs from them, and everyone, even the boys, fanned themselves with spelling books and pieces of construction paper.

  "All right," said Chris. "I know it's hot."

  She shut off the lights and sat down beside Claude's desk to read aloud from a new novel about some children who get locked up in a museum at night. Afterward, she did not feel like moving.

  "Can we do social studies now?" asked Miguel.

  "No!" yelled the other children.

  Miguel cowered, smiling.

  This time, she would let the majority rule. She had come to a dead halt. Even her breathing was measured. She let them talk to her, and as they did, the children seemed to experience again that alteration of perception that had hit them when she'd come to school in jeans and sneakers for the trip to Sturbridge Village. She remembered this happening to her long ago, when she saw one of her elementary school teachers in a grocery store and felt bowled over—it had never occurred to her that teachers went shopping just like other people. Now the sight of an immobile, exhausted-looking Mrs. Zajac, sitting among them and in a child's chair, chatting with them in the overheated gloom, seemed to make the children bolder than they'd usually been with her. Many of them told her that back in September they'd heard that she was mean. They'd heard she was the witch of Kelly School.

  "Let's talk about the Civil War," said Miguel.

  Another chorus of "No!"

  Chris smiled. She asked the children, "Who else said I was mean?"

  "Everyone," said Miguel. He grinned.

  Finally, Chris told them that they could get games from the cabinets by the windows, and she wandered back to her desk and sat as still as she could.

  At the end of that hot Friday Chris gave her pitch for reading over the weekend, but it came from a Mrs. Zajac who pleaded, not demanded. The heat on Monday was, if anything, more intense. Over the weekend, two children from the lower wards but from another school had drowned in the Connecticut River. Chris gave the class a lecture about the perils of the river.

  She sent Courtney and Kimberly outside to look for a shady place where they could hold the class. But the only trees around the school were saplings, and her scouts found only a few little pools of shade, sufficient for no more than three children. So class continued inside, in slow motion, without the lights.

  3

  Near the end of a year, a teacher can't help facing the fact that there's a lot she hoped to do and hasn't done, and now probably never will. It is like growing old, but for teachers old age arrives every year. Sitting at her desk during math one hot day in June, Chris looked at Felipe and said to herself, "He hasn't mastered fractions yet. He won't do that 'til next year."

  She looked at Pedro and thought that she had done something for his future, at least, and maybe for Julio's, too. Contemplating Jimmy, though, the boy's head lying on stick-like arms on his desk top, she felt that the changes she had hoped to make in him just hadn't come to pass. He looked like a porcelain figure. He gazed toward the window, evidently lost in something emptier than daydreams. She thought of the children who had been snatched away from her this year. Handsome Alejandro didn't worry her as much as the fetching, shy Juanita, or nearly as much as Blanca. She remembered Blanca's frightened eyes, and reproached herself. That girl was probably a victim of sexual abuse, Chris decided. She hadn't done enough, she thought. But there had been no evidence. There almost never was.

  Some years ago, Chris had acquired the morbid habit of reading the police reports in the paper, hoping not to find the names of former students there. Many years she did find one or two. Every year she also heard good news about some children she had taught, but the bad news, when it came, always felt like it weighed more. It left her wondering if in the end she'd done anything for the child. She could imagine finding Robert's name in an unhappy context in the paper someday. She looked at her class now and thought, "How many backgrounds they come from. How many different sets of problems. Even if I had them for three hundred and sixty-five days, would I meet them all?" She used to believe in miracles. Now she tended to believe only in mysteries. "I guess I used to feel I could really rescue kids, that if they had a good teacher, everything would be fine. It's not that I try less now. I'm just more aware of my own limitations." Forlornly, Chris said, "But I don't think I've ever taken a really good student and wrecked him."

  She should have been more generous with herself. Teachers usually have no way of knowing that they have made a difference in a child's life, even when they have made a dramatic one. But for children who are used to thinking of themselves as stupid or not worth talking to or deserving rape and beatings, a good teacher can provide an astonishing revelation. A good teacher can give a child at least a chance to feel, " She thinks I'm worth something. Maybe I am." Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives. Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

  4

  Chris sat in a lawn chair, her students around her on the playground grass. The fifth-grade classes had assembled for Field Day on that greensward surrounded by factories. The sun shone. The day sparkled. Racecourses were in place. A volleyball net had been erected. The gym teacher presided with his megaphone.

  The class had lost the first heat of the balloon-popping relay. Felipe and Dick blew an early lead in the water-fill relay. "That's okay," called Chris. "We got the brains, not the brawn." She called through cupped hands, "Felipe, take it slow! The object is not how fast you go ... Oh, never mind." She laughed.

  "We're last in everything," said Chris under her breath. Then in a loud voice she said to the children around her, "Hey, we're slow, but good-looking."

  Time for the dress and undress relay. The class's hopes rested on Judith, Alice, and Claude. "Come on, we've g
ot to win something. You girls always look nice when you come in. You must know how to dress and undress." The children cheered, and then they groaned as Claude got hopelessly entangled in the clothes, inserting legs in sleeves, during the dressing part. Robert sat apart, plucking clover, then coiling the stems over themselves and flicking the tops at the backs of classmates. Without turning around, Chris said, "Robert, stop that."

  "Me? I wasn't doin' nuttin'."

  Robert and Ashley had declined to participate in Field Day.

  "Okay, gang, the water balloon throw. We're gonna win this one!"

  And a while later: "Oh, well."

  The long-distance run began. Chris looked up and saw that she had invested the class's honor in Jimmy and Pedro, who even at rest had difficulty breathing. "Now why did I do that?"

  Amazingly, Jimmy led his heat all the way down to the end of the playground, but then he stopped. Jimmy crossed the finish line walking.

  "Ashley, don't you want to be in something?"

  Ashley shook and shook her head.

  "Come on, Ashley," said Arabella.

  "Yeah, Ashley, come on," said Felipe.

  A little later Ashley whispered in Chris's ear.

  "You want to be in the volleyball, Ashley? Good."

  They lost the sack race. They lost their volleyball match.

  "Oh, well. We can write paragraphs around them, right?" Chris sat in sunshine. Arabella had made sure to sit right beside Mrs. Zajac's feet. Robert had made sure to sit near Mrs. Zajac, too.

  "Mrs. Zajac, why did you become a teacher?" Arabella asked. "You like kids?"

  "I like kids."

  "You like to punish kids?" asked Miguel, and he made a loud laugh.

  "There's a theory," said Chris.

  "Were you a student teacher?" asked Robert.

  "Yes."

  "Like Miss Hunt."