The Life and Times of a 5th-Grade Teacher

Chris Zajac was 34. She wore a white skirt and yellow sweater and a thin gold necklace, which she held in her fingers, as if holding her own reins, while waiting for children to answer. Her hair was black with a hint of Irish red. It was cut short to the tops of her ears, and swept back like a pair of folded wings. She had a delicately cleft chin, and she was short--the children’s chairs would have fit her.

Although her voice sounded conversational, it had projection. She had never acted. She had found this voice in classrooms.

Mrs. Zajac seemed to have a frightening amount of energy. She strode across the room, her arms swinging high and her hands in small fists. Taking her stand in front of the green chalkboard discussing the rules with her new class, she repeated sentences and her lips held the shapes of certain words, such as “homework,” after she had said them.

Her hands kept very busy. They sliced the air and made karate chops to mark off boundaries. They extended straight out like a traffic cop’s halting illegal maneuvers yet to be perpetrated. When they rested momentarily on her hips, her hands looked as if they were in holsters.

She told the children “One thing Mrs. Zajac expects from each of you is that you do your best,” she said. “Mrs. Zajac gives homework.” I’m sure you’ve all heard. The only meanie who gives homework.” Mrs. Zajac . It was in part a role. She worked her way into it every September.

She didn’t let her students get away with much. She was not amused when, for instance, on the first day, two of the boys started dueling with their rulers.

On nights before the school year started, Chris used to have bad dreams: Her principal would come observe her, and her students would choose that moment to climb on their desks and give her the finger or they would simply wander out the door. But a child in her classroom would never know that Mrs. Zajac had the slightest doubt that students would obey her.

There were 20 children. About half were Puerto Rican. Almost two-thirds of the 20 needed the forms to obtain free lunches. There was a lot of long and curly hair. Some boys wore little rattails. The eyes the children lifted up to her as she went over the rules--a few eyes were blue and many more were brown--looked so solemn and so wide that Chris felt like dropping all pretense and laughing. Their faces ranged from dark brown to gold, to pink, to pasty white, the color that Chris associated with sunless tenements and too much TV.

The boys wore polo shirts and T-shirts and new white sneakers with the ends of the laces untied and tucked behind the tongues. Some girls wore lacy ribbons in their hair, and some wore pants and others skirts, a rough but not infallible indication of religion--the daughters of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Pentecostals do not wear pants.

There was a lot of prettiness in the room, and all of the children looked cute to Chris.

Bending over forms and the children’s records, Chris watched the class from the corner of her eyes. The first day she kept an especially close eye on the boy called Clarence.

Clarence was a small, lithe, brown-skinned boy with large eyes and deep dimples. Chris watched his journeys to the pencil sharpener. They were frequent. Clarence took the longest possible route around the room, walking heel-to-toe and brushing the back of one leg with the shin of the other at every step--a cheerful little dance across the blue carpet, around the perimeter of desks, and along the back wall, passing under the American flag, which didn’t quite brush his head. Reaching the sharpener, Clarence would turn his pencil into a stunt plane, which did several loop-the-loops before plunging in the hole.

Chris had received the children’s “cumulative” records, which were stuffed inside salmon-colored folders known as “cumes.” For now, she checked only addresses and phone numbers, and resisted looking into histories. It was usually better at first to let her own opinions form.

But she couldn’t help having heard what some colleagues had insisted on telling her about Clarence. One teacher whom Chris trusted had described him as probably the most difficult child in all of last year’s fourth-grade classes.

Chris wished she hadn’t heard that, not the rumors about Clarence. She’d heard confident but unsubstantiated assertions that he was a beaten child. These days many people applied the word “abused “ to any apparently troubled student. She had no good reason to believe the rumors, but she couldn’t help thinking, “What if they’re true?”

She’d try to ignore what she had heard and deal with problems as they came.

Clarence’s were surfacing quickly. He came to school the second morning without having done his homework. He had not done any work at all so far, except for one math assignment, and for that he’d just written down some numbers at random.

She’d try to nip this in the bud. “No work, no recess,” she told Clarence late the second morning. He had quit even pretending to work about half an hour before.

The afternoon of that second day of class, Chris warned Clarence several times that she would keep him after school if he didn’t get to work. Detention seemed like a masochistic exercise. Sometimes it worked. It was a tool she’d found most useful at the beginning of a year and after vacations.

In her experience, most children responded well to clearly prescribed rules and consequences, and she really didn’t have many other tangible weapons. The idea was to get most of the unpleasantness, the scoldings and detentions, out of the way early.

And, of course, if she threatened to keep Clarence after school, she had to keep her word. Maybe he would do some work, and she would have a quiet talk with him. She didn’t plan to keep him long.

After school, Clarence sat alone at his desk, surrounded by upended chairs. He had his arms folded on his chest and was glaring at her. The picture of defiance. He would show her. She felt like laughing for a moment. His stubbornness was impressive. Nearly an hour passed, and the boy did no work at all.

Chris sighed, got up, and walked over to Clarence.

He turned his face away as she approached.

Chris, sat in a child’s chair, and, resting her chin on her hand, leaned her face close to Clarence’s.

He turned his farther away.

“What’s the problem?”

He didn’t answer. His eyelashes began to flutter.

“Do you understand the work in fifth grade?”

He didn’t answer.

“I hear you’re a very smart boy. Don’t you want to have a good year? Don’t you want to take your work home and tell your mom, ‘Look what I did?’ ”

The fluorescent lights in the ceiling were pale and bright. One was flickering. Tears came rolling out of Clarence’s eyes. They streaked his brown cheeks.

Chris gazed at him, and in a while said, “OK, I’ll make a deal with you. You go home and do your work, and come in tomorrow with all your work done, and I’ll pretend these two days never happened. We’ll have a new Clarence tomorrow. OK?”

Clarence still had not looked at her or answered.

“A new Clarence,” Chris said. “Promise?”

Clarence made the suggestion of a nod, a slight concession to her, she figured, now that it was clear she would let him leave.

Her face was very close to his. Her eyes almost touched his tear-stained cheeks. She gazed.

She knew she wasn’t going to see a new Clarence tomorrow. It would be naive to think a boy with a cume that thick was going to change overnight. But she’d heard the words in her mind anyway. She had to keep alive the little voice that says, Well, you never know.

What was the alternative? To decide an 11-year-old was going to go on failing, and there was nothing anyone could do about it, so why try? Besides, this was just the start of a campaign. She was trying to tell him, “You don’t have to have another bad year. Your life in school can begin to change.” If she could talk him into believing that, maybe by June there would be a new Clarence.

“We always keep our promises?” Chris said.

He seemed to make a little nod.

“I bet everyone will be surprised. We’ll have a new Clarence,” Chris said, and then she let him go.

But Clarence didn’t improve.

By the third week of school, she had started the paper work for a core evaluation of Clarence.

Actually, it was Al Laudato, the principal not Chris, who insisted that Clarence be “cored.” Then if Clarence did something truly bad, Al could prove that the school had already taken some action.

Once in a great while, a core ended up with a child’s being sent to one of the special so-called Alpha classes, which were notorious.

Al said, “Clarence isn’t an Alpha kid. He isn’t a killer.” Chris didn’t think a core was what Clarence needed, but it wouldn’t hurt. Anyway, nothing would come of it for months.

But it wasn’t long before the year with Clarence looked like a one-boy crime wave.

An angry teacher told Chris about that little fourth-grade girl who was shaking, literally shaking and crying with fright at the end of a school day. The girl was afraid to leave the building and walk home across the Flats because Clarence had told her that morning, “You’re dead meat. I’m gonna get you after school.”

Confronted by Chris, Clarence said of the tiny girl, “She starts trouble with me!” Chris warned Clarence. He turned his face away. Clarence threatened the little girl a few more times. Then evidently, he lost interest in that, and it stopped.

Another day, Clarence beat up a boy in the bathroom. Clarence didn’t act sorry. He gave Al a blow-by-blow demonstration in the principal’s office. It might have been funny, except that the other boy was sobbing in the corner.

Clarence also tried out many winning smiles on Chris when she asked him for homework he hadn’t done. When smiles didn’t work, Clarence sometimes tried tears. Most often he went stony.

At the gentlest remonstrance, at the slightest insinuation that he could not do just as he pleased, Clarence would begin to turn away, as if on a motorized wheel, and refuse to look at Chris and refuse to answer. She felt tempted to plead for his attention then. If a less experienced teacher did plead, as her student teacher Miss Hunt did early on, the suggestion of a smile of Clarence’s face would give him away.

Chris felt she couldn’t let him win the little contests that he staged, and give in to his cuteness or his stoniness. However, if she spent half her time and energy on Clarence, she would cheat the other children. He was like a physical affliction. Keeping down her anger at his attempted manipulations exhausted her, and so did the guilt that followed from letting some of that anger out. He was holding her hostage in her own classroom.

(From “Among Schoolchildren,” by Tracy Kidder. Copyright, 1989, by John Tracy Kidder. Reprinted by permission from the publisher, Houghton Mifflin.) COMING UP

WEDNESDAY: Zajac’s ongoing battle with her most troublesome student, Clarence, came to a head in late February when a committee of experts on troubled children decided to take action.

THURSDAY: Clarence was gone, but other students in Zajac’s class had serious problems. Claude, for example, was a little boy lost in daydreams and in conversations with imaginary friends. Zajac had to turn him around or he might be lost all his life. FRIDAY: The high point in a fifth-grader’s year at Kelly School is the May science fair. The event also illustrates the stark contrasts between the educational experiences of middle-class students with interested and involved parents and poor students whose parents pay little attention to their school work. SUNDAY: After Clarence, Robert was Zajac’s most troublesome student. But Zajac had liked Clarence. She didn’t especially like Robert. On the day of Kelly’s science fair, she would learn how badly she had failed Robert.