Among School Children

by Tracy Kidder

  "Forty. Forty-nine."

  "And what do you carry?"

  "Forty-nine?"

  "No. Think, Jimmy." She turned back to Jorge's paper. "Excellent, Jorge!" Then back to Jimmy. "And carry the what?" That question left hanging, another flash card held aloft for Felipe, she looked toward the children who stood at the board. "Very good, Mariposa. Margaret, look at the problem. See if you can figure out where you went wrong."

  "The nine?" said Jimmy at her side.

  "No, Jimmy. Think." More noise from the low group behind her. Without turning around, she extended her left hand back, snapped her fingers, and, leaving her index finger extended, said, "Manny. Henrietta. Settle down."

  "Diablo!"

  That was Manny's voice. Sometimes when he said that, Chris would bop Manny on his gorgeously curly black-haired head with a sheaf of papers, and Manny would leer up at her, and she'd try not to laugh. Sometimes from behind her she'd hear muffled sounds of an argument. Once, she turned to Manny and Henrietta, a tall black girl from the homeroom next door, and said, "Why do you two have to bicker?" A little smile slid over to one side of Chris's mouth. "If you tease each other, it must mean you like each other." "Like," to the children of Kelly School, implied matrimony.

  Henrietta gasped.

  "Diablo!" said Manny.

  "No, it don't!" said Henrietta. "I'd rather die than like him!"

  "Oh, yes, it does!" sang Chris. "When I was in school, if a boy and girl were always bickering, it meant they liked each other." That shut Manny up, but only for a while.

  Chris turned her eyes to the children solving problems on the board. "Very good, Margaret. Do you understand it now?" There was more whispering behind her. Again, her left hand shot back. "Horace, your own work." Another flash card for Felipe while she called over her other shoulder, "Henrietta, come on up here." Then she turned her head all the way around, toward the low math scholars at their desks behind her. "Horace, are you all done?"

  "No."

  "Then why are you talking to Jorge?"

  She turned back around and said to Felipe and Jimmy, "What's the matter with you two? The minute I turn my head, you have to talk? What number do you carry, Jimmy?"

  "The four."

  "Very good. Got it now? Okay, Jimmy, you can go back to your desk."

  "Ocho," said a voice behind Chris, unmistakably Manny's hoarse whiskey voice. Manny was trying to whisper to one of his buddies, but he just couldn't do it quietly.

  Chris turned. "Why don't you try Chinese, Manny? You can say it in Swahili, Manny. I still know you're giving him the answer." Chris liked them to help each other, but today she wanted to find out just how each one was faring in multiplication, so she kept saying, "Your own work."

  "Diablo!"

  "You keep it up, Manny, and I'll show you what a diablo I can be."

  Henrietta, who just a moment ago was sticking out her long, pink tongue at Manny, sat down in Jimmy's place, on Mrs. Zajac's left.

  "Okay, Henrietta, let's see what you've done," said Chris.

  "I wanta quit. It's too hard."

  Mrs. Zajac stopped everything else, and looked the girl in the eye. "Wouldn't it be great, Henrietta, if I turned around and said, 'Manny doesn't get multiplication, so I quit'?"

  Henrietta nodded in perverse agreement.

  "No, Henrietta. You can't quit. You have to keep trying. You can't just quit in life, Henrietta. Believe me, there are times when I'd like to."

  Sometimes, at such moments, feeling altogether calm, Chris would think, "In my next life, I'm coming back as an air-traffic controller." But there was always a child somewhere in the room who waited for her. If, in the afternoon during writing time, she sat at the table, bright red fingertips applied to her temples, trying to help Pedro or Julio put his ideas for a story into unscrambled English, Felipe might get jealous, even though she gave him ten minutes just ten minutes ago. Felipe would come up and stand at her side, holding his own story, saying, "Mrs. Zajac, Mrs. Zajac." She'd stick out her arm at him, the traffic cop gesture, and say, still gazing at Pedro's tangled story, "Felipe, I'm with Pedro now." Felipe would travel back to his desk looking like a little storm, and say to his neighbor Irene, "See, she hates me. I told you." Others waited more quietly. Judith always finished assignments early. She killed time by working on her novel, a feminist tale called Shana and the Warriors, or she read a published novel—Judith favored stories of teenage romance. Sometimes Judith stopped reading or writing, and lifted her eyes toward the narrow, train-like windows, and she thought about boys—handsome, religious, serious, chivalrous boys she hadn't met yet.

  Chris felt them waiting around her. She thought how much fun it would be to sit for a long time with Judith and discuss her novel. She glanced at the clock, up on the wall above the closets. Its minute hand stood still. She had a few minutes before science. But the minute hand was one of those which stored up time and then sprang the news on her all at once. It leaped. She absolutely had to help poor Pedro. "Slow learner" was the kindly term for many of these children. It implied what she knew to be true, that they could learn, but she also knew that in this time-bound world, a slow learner might not learn at all if she didn't hurry up. And if she didn't hurry, she wouldn't get to keep her promise to Arabella, who was waiting patiently for Chris to help her fix up her story about becoming a hairdresser someday.

  Usually, Chris could manage to keep most of them busy, but that was pure engineering. They always had time on their hands, and she never had much to spare.

  This is an era of blossoming research in techniques for teaching math. The new wisdom was supposed to arrive at Kelly School in the person of a representative of the publisher of the new math textbooks. He gave the teachers a lecture in a classroom after school one fall day, the representative at a slide projector and the teachers in chairs made for children. The change in perspective seemed to inspire in the teachers a form of revenge. There was a lot of whispering in the audience. Talking fast and nervously, the representative allowed that the new math texts contained "objectives" that had been "correlated" to "a computer management program." "And we've correlated them to specific objectives. So that the management guide, ad nauseam, I'm going to get this point across, it correlates the specific objectives.... Subject integration is whereby math is integrated with other subjects.... We do it through means of verbiage and through the actual algorithm itself."

  Chris sighed.

  "When you see 'Think,' that's for the above average youngster."

  "Well, I have two of those," murmured Chris to Bob, a sixth-grade teacher.

  "These are minimum assignment guides, so please follow them.... We have masters for chapter readiness. Testing. We have three forms of tests.... Computational error analysis. It not only diagnoses. It offers some remediation."

  Bob whispered to Chris, "It slices and it dices."

  The teachers didn't ask many questions. The representative seemed disappointed but not surprised. "We're not saying that this is the end-all or know-all," he said.

  Chris and Candy, another teacher friend, giggled behind their hands.

  Chris felt she could use some help. For the low math group especially, solving the simplest word problems seemed insuperable. She'd had trouble with math herself in school, but she'd been good at reading, and most of her low group weren't good readers. She taught them what she called "clue words." She made stacks of books to illustrate the meanings of those words, of "more than" and "less than" and "equal to." To make word problems palpable, she dumped change on their desks, along with the cookie crumbs that her daughter had dropped in her purse during Chris's last expedition to the grocery store. At the first marking period, Chris had noticed that another fifth-grade teacher's math students had made much better grades than hers in problem solving. She had gone to that teacher and asked how she did it. But the method mainly consisted of the teacher's solving the first two-thirds of the problems herself.

  Chris faced a bigger problem, one that looke
d impossibly far beyond her control. One Monday morning Chris asked Jimmy what time he went to bed last night. Jimmy, whose eyes looked glassy, with little bags beneath them, said he didn't know. Well, said Chris, what time did the last show he watched on TV begin?

  Jimmy said eleven-thirty.

  "Eleven-thirty?" she cried.

  Yeah, said Jimmy, but it was a special, a really good movie called Cobra.

  Mrs. Zajac had just started in on her usual speech about bedtimes, the I-don't-care-what-show-it-was-eleven-thirty's-too-late-even-Mrs.-Zajac-can't-stay-up-f/ifli-late lecture, when from the class rose several other voices.

  "I saw that!"

  "Yeah, bro, that was fresh!"

  "Remember that part where the guy..."

  "This is what I'm up against," said Chris, slowly turning her head from one child to the other to make sure each got to see her stupefied look, and finally letting her gaze fall on Judith, who smiled back and shook her head.

  Maybe the worst thing about TV is not violence or licentiousness but the fact that some children stay up until around midnight to watch it. About half of Chris's class did, at one time or another, and came to school with fewer than six hours of sleep.

  It was a Wednesday morning, the dead middle of a week in late fall. Bracing air came in the cracked-open casement behind Chris's desk, the sort of air that ought to make children frisky. The clock read a little past eight. She stood in front of her low math group. As planned, she had begun to go over last night's homework, but Felipe had no idea how many pumpkins in all were bought if two people had bought fourteen pumpkins each; Horace said he'd forgotten his book; Manny and Henrietta admitted they hadn't done the homework; Robert just shrugged when she asked where his was; and Alan, of all people, a schoolteacher's son, had a note from his mother saying that he'd lost the assignment. "I think that you think your mother fell off the turnip cart yesterday, too," Chris said to Alan. Then she came to a dead stop.

  The day was overcast. Jimmy's skin looked gray under fluorescent light. He lay with his head down on his desk, shifting his stick-like forearms around under his cheek as if rearranging a pillow. The usually high-spirited Manny gazed open-mouthed toward the window. Felipe had slid halfway down the back of his chair and scowled at his lap. "You can't make me do it. I'm not going to do anything unless you give me more attention," Felipe seemed to be saying to her. It would feel good and constructive to spank him, but that would have to wait for the pretext of his birthday. Robert was dismantling another pen. Soon he'd have ink all over his hands and his pants. His mother could worry about that. Horace was trying to do his homework now, by copying from Margaret's. At least he seemed awake. Jorge's eyes were shut, literally shut. Jorge was staying back. He had told his homeroom teacher, who had told the story in the Teachers' Room, that he'd get even by not doing any work this year, and she couldn't make him, because his mother didn't care. He wore the same set of clothes as on the first days of school.

  Chris had seen progress in this group. They would start long division fairly soon. But today even the well-behaved ones, such as Margaret, looked sleepy. Bring back Clarence from the room next door. Clarence, at least, never looked sleepy.

  Chris considered telling them she couldn't teach celery, but the eyes that were open and looking at her seemed to say that they didn't want to hear it all from her again: they'd need to know this if they wanted to move on to something new; if they didn't want to get cheated at the grocery store; if they wanted to learn how to design cars and rocket ships. They did not want to hear that Mrs. Zajac couldn't drill holes in their heads and pour in information, that they had to help, which meant, first of all, paying attention. Jimmy yawned. He didn't even bother to cover his mouth. A paper fell off a child's desk and floated down, gently arcing back and forth like a kite without a tail. She'd try something different. An old trick might work.

  Chris turned and wrote on the board:

  296

  × 78

  "All right, Jimmy, you go to the board."

  Jimmy arose slowly, twisting his mouth. He slouched up to the green board and stared at the problem.

  Chris sat down in Jimmy's seat. "I want you to pretend you're the teacher, and you're going to show me how to multiply, and I don't know how." So saying, and in one abandoned movement, Chris collapsed on Jimmy's desk, one cheek landing flat on the pale brown plastic top and her arms hanging lifelessly over the sides.

  A child giggled.

  "Gonna get my attention first, Jimmy?" called Mrs. Zajac.

  Several children giggled. Jorge's eyes opened, and he grinned. All around the little room, heads lifted. Chris's mouth sagged open. Her tongue protruded. Her head lay on the desk top. Up at the board, Jimmy made a low, monotonic sound, which was his laugh.

  Abruptly, Chris sat up. "Okay, Jimmy," she called. "I'm awake now. What do I do first? Seven times six is..."

  Jimmy was shaking his head.

  "No? Why can't I multiply seven times six first?" she said, and she pouted.

  There was a lot more light in the room now. It came from smiles. The top group had all lifted their eyes from their papers. Judith smiled at Mrs. Zajac from across the room.

  Jimmy got through the first step, and Chris turned around in Jimmy's chair and said to Manny, "You're next. You're a teacher, too."

  "Diablo.'" Manny looked up toward the ceiling.

  Chris climbed into Manny's seat as he sauntered to the board.

  "I'm gonna give you a hard time, like you give me," Chris called at Manny's back. She looked around at the other children. They were all looking at her. "When you sit in this seat, see, you've got to sit like this." She let her shoulders and her jaw droop, and she stared at the window.

  "Look out in space!" declared Felipe.

  "Look out in space," she agreed.

  The clock over the closets jumped and rested, jumped and rested. The smell of pencil shavings was thick in the air. Giggles came from all sides.

  "Boy, do I have a lot of friends helping me out! Now who wants to teach Mrs. Zajac?"

  "Me!" cried most of the class in unison.

  Crying "No!" and "No way!" at Chris's wrong answers and "Yes!" when the child at the board corrected her and she turned to the others to ask if the correction was right, the low group found their way to the end of the problem. Arising from the last child's chair she had occupied, her black hair slightly infused with the new redness in her cheeks, her skirt rustling, she turned back into Mrs. Zajac. "Okay, thank you. Now that I know how to do it, I hope you know how to do it. I'm going to put examples on the board," she said. "You are going to work on them."

  3

  Alphonse Laudato, the principal, arrived first in the morning and did not leave until long after most teachers went home. During the day, Al roamed the hallways, a short man in an oxford shirt with a clip-on necktie and, though in his forties, very trim. He had gone to college to play baseball and football, he said, and had drifted into education. He looked like an athlete. He rarely stayed still.

  Al belonged to Kelly School, and Kelly School belonged to Al. He once said, "I'm responsible for every teacher who walks in this door. Not that I'm in charge of everybody, the only one in charge. But I'm responsible. Come in, talk, and I'll decide if we're gonna do it."

  The building Al ruled is a complex place with more architectural flourish than most public schools have. A spacious library occupies the center of the classroom wing. Eleven classrooms surround the library on the first floor—Al had assigned most of those rooms to the fourth grade. The ceiling, which has a gray plexiglass dome, stands three open stories above the library. At the second-story level, a rectangle of balcony corridors leads past sixteen more full-sized classrooms, Room 205 among them. Al liked to lean on the balcony railing and gaze down at his library. He'd talk about the money he'd finagled for buying more books. "When this library's done, it's gonna be something. You see what I'm saying?" He'd look around that amphitheater-like space and declare, "This is a gorgeous school,
okay?"

  Olive carpeting covered the hallways of the classroom wing. The carpeting suppressed some noise, but the architect had made the walls between rooms collapsible and very thin. Teachers could take some solace from that. They could hear from their own rooms that colleagues had trouble getting work from their pupils and lost their tempers, too. The adjacent administrative wing had air conditioning, and the classroom wing didn't. No one who worked there knew why. Over in the administrative wing, near the school office, there were two kindergarten rooms and a huge chamber called the "cafetorium"—it served as both auditorium and cafeteria. When Chris arrived in the morning, the first person she saw was Al, standing watch over the children who waited in line for free breakfast at the cafetorium door. Al would lean slightly backward, arms folded on his chest, and bark at the first signs of mischief. "Hey, you! Yeah, you! Excuse me! Stay in line with your mouth shut!" When Chris saw Al in that stance, she thought of pictures she had seen of the Colossus of Rhodes. Al was a diminutive colossus.

  Teachers' unions had made "grieve" a transitive verb, and at Kelly School its direct object was usually Al. For example: "I'm going to grieve Al. See, Al's wife is a friend of that teacher's, and that teacher has a much better class than I do." That was the gist of the first grieving that fall. Chris thought it largely nonsense, and didn't want to get involved.

  Al dragged out meetings. Sometimes he gave his teachers printed handouts and then read the contents to them. At the first faculty meeting this year, proscribing the act of one teacher getting another to watch her kids for detention, Al formed a T with lifted hands, emitted a quick referee's whistle, and said, "Time out." He often said, "Which is fine," about something that wasn't. About the new institution of the two-day-a-week "late bus," he told his teachers, "This is a home run for us, it really is."