Dewey Fairchild, Teacher Problem Solver

by Lorri Horn

  “You mean Shawn?” replied Seraphina.

  Colin tried to take the other half of Dewey’s chocolate bar, but Dewey pushed his hand away.

  “Yeah,” said Dewey to Seraphina before he snapped a “No!” to Colin, like he was a bad puppy.

  Colin whined. Dewey broke him off half of his remaining half.

  “Maybe,” replied Seraphina. “It’s a big pain in the butt, that’s for sure.”

  Colin and Dewey both laughed.

  Seraphina then got her own unintended joke and joined in laughing as well.

  “I’m not sure, though. Seems kind of silly. Like we’d all be so upset about toilet paper? I don’t know . . .”

  “Well, I’m upset, alright,” complained Colin. “In fact, I’m going to take this to the student body. Who better than the body of the students to deal with an issue that affects the student’s actual body. Yes,” continued Colin, getting more passionate, “—it’s a student issue. It’s a tissue issue! It’s a T-ISSUE! Quick, Seraphina! This is your kind of thing. Make posters. Make a banner. Do that thing you do!”

  “Haha!” Seraphina and Dewey both laughed hysterically at this point at Colin’s tissue issue, labeled a t-issue, and just how passionate he had suddenly become about it.

  “My kind of thing?” replied Seraphina, winding down her laughter. “I’m a rock collector, not a protester.”

  “No, but didn’t you and Dewey make signs for Peewee when you found him?”

  “That’s true,” chimed in Dewey.

  “Oh, well, signs, sure. I can do signs. You want tissue issue signs? Or do you want a campaign?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know! I just know I can’t be expected to eat lunch, visit the facilities, and get to class on time if I have to partition my toilet paper one piece at a time as I clear the deck!”

  Dewey and Seraphina laughed.

  “Okay, okay,” she reassured. “Let me give it some thought. But we have bigger issues, I tell you. We need to figure out what Shawn was talking about before we get any more surprises.”

  The bell soon rang, and off to class they all went. Dewey stopped at the water fountain before going back to class. He had so many different things on his mind. He needed to sit down and focus on all of this after school today and sort it all out.

  Clapper Catcher

  That night at dinner, Dewey spoke with his parents about some of the things on his mind. At least he tried to do so.

  “Tell us about your day, Pooh.”

  “I was in the ‘Clapper Catcher’ group. I called it the Clapper Catcher. The Clapper Catcher is the big machine that takes trash to the dump. See, see, see,” she gestured with her little hands as she tried to explain, “the trash truck has a special conveyor belt that has a special shaking mechanism to sort all the paper.”

  Pooh Bear, as the family still called her more often than her given name, used to have a speech problem with her Rs, so she’d have pronounced something more like, “Clappoh Catchoh” last year. But she’d been working on it a lot over the summer, and now she spoke pretty well. The problem, thought Dewey, is she never shuts up.

  “Yeah, that’s great,” interrupted Dewey. “Listen. Mom, I think som—”

  “We found a green bin we want to use for the truck, and next time, ’cause we don’t get to meet tomorrow because the Clapper Catchers are going to be in a cooking group. That’s gonna be fun because I like to cook. I hope we get to make cookies! Last time, they said we might not get to ’cause Heather is glue-free, and she couldn’t eat them.”

  “I think you mean gluten-free,” explained Dad. “That means she can’t eat certain kind of flours and wheat and things.”

  Pooh Bear laughed. “Oh, Daddy! You’re funny! Nobody eats flowers! Mommy, Daddy thinks glue-free people can’t eat flowers!”

  Both of Dewey’s parents laughed now as Pooh fed herself penne pasta one tube at a time like coins into a slot machine. Her sparking blue eyes, the only blue ones in the family, served as a reminder of genetics as another kind of slot machine. It was funny how Dewey’s eyes looked more like theirs than Pooh’s.

  Dewey exhaled a short hard breath and served himself some more rice. Even with his older sister, Stephanie, out at a friend’s house for dinner, he still couldn’t seem to get a word in edgewise.

  That’s a funny expression. What did it mean to get a word in edgewise? he wondered as Pooh continued. Dewey pictured a whole bunch of words spilling out all over the place, filling up the air space. More and more and more words tumbled out, getting more and more crowded—and as Dewey tried to get his own words in there, he would have to turn them over sideways, on their edge and slip his words in between all of hers.

  “Dad. Dad? I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Yes, Dewey. Yes. Tell us about your day,” his mother encouraged.

  “Oh, my day. I don’t know. It was okay, I guess. But when you’re teaching your math class, how do you make sure the kids aren’t bored?”

  Dewey’s dad laughed. He’d just started his student teaching at the middle school across town this fall. One of the most enjoyable aspects for him so far was how other people’s kids seemed to love the things that his own kids rolled their eyes about at home.

  “Well, I sing a little, dance a little. You know . . .”

  “That sounds about right,” laughed Dewey’s mom.

  “In math class?!” exclaimed Dewey, his eyes opening wide along with a mouth full of dinner.

  “Sure! Sometimes random things just happen. I have that microphone there, and some kid will be funny with it, and then we riff on that for a few minutes as they are settling in. It works.”

  “Hmm,” replied Dewey. He closed his mouth and began chewing again, trying to picture that scene and then trying equally hard not to picture it.

  “Sometimes, I tell them a little story about myself, right in the middle of what we’re doing. They like that. Or I’ll start off class telling them something they think is totally off topic and before they know it, I’ve slipped math right in under their noses.”

  Hearing about his dad teaching, simultaneously made Dewey feel kind of proud and mortified.

  “We found a green bin that we could use for the truck. Next time we meet we’re gonna fill it with water and trash and . . .”

  Pooh Bear’s words began to fill the air again, but this time, Dewey’s thoughts turned back inside his own head to William’s teacher problem. He needed to figure out how to help Mr. Nisano not make his students want to head for the hills running.

  “Dewey? The salt, please?” his mother seemed to have been asking him already, and he’d missed it.

  “Oh, sorry!” he replied, picking up the small round snow globe with the snow white polar bear. The pepper shaker was a matching snow globe with a black bear inside. When Dewey was little, they’d had to put the globes away on a top shelf because he would snow salt and pepper all over the house and their food. Pooh Bear, however, seemed much more “mature” when it came to the salt-and-pepper snow globes, and they’d been able to put them back on the table again.

  Dewey, on the other hand, still couldn’t stop himself. He salted the table a bit as he passed it over to his mom.

  “Dewey,” his mom admonished.

  “Sorry!” Dewey flashed her a smile and wiped the salt off the table into his hand.

  He took the salt and sprinkled it on Pooh’s plate.

  “Mommy!” she objected loudly.

  “Dewey!” This time his mother seemed to be losing patience with him.

  “She’s done eating,” Dewey defended himself and gave Pooh Bear the stink eye for telling on him.

  “Nonetheless,” his dad chimed in.

  “Sorry, Pooh,” Dewey uttered remotely.

  He felt annoyed with everyone right now. It was just a little salt. He asked if he could be e
xcused and cleared his place. It was Stephanie’s night to help do the dishes, but she wasn’t here, so he’d probably get stuck doing it.

  “Do I have to stay and do dishes? I’m super tired and have some work to still do,” he submitted for consideration.

  “Go ahead,” his mom patted him on the hand and motioned with her chin for him to be excused.

  That tight knot of annoyance in his stomach loosened.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Yup,” she said.