A Troublesome Child Must Go, but Fifth-Grade Teacher Still Agonizes

The core evaluation of Clarence that Al Laudato, the principal of Kelly School, had ordered in the fall was scheduled for a Wednesday in late February.

Chris hadn’t requested the core. She didn’t have to get involved. But she feared that if she didn’t, the usual pat plans would be put in place, and Clarence would end up going to the already ridiculously overcrowded Resource Room for an hour a day.

That would do no good. She’d keep Clarence with her for the rest of this year and do her best, but she wanted to ask that a realistic program be laid out, one that might really help him.

She felt ready with her arguments for the core, but the meeting was postponed. The woman in charge of running cores came to the room no fewer than five times that morning: first to tell Chris that Clarence’s mother hadn’t arrived, then that the mother still hadn’t arrived, then that the core couldn’t be held today, then that it might be rescheduled for tomorrow, and finally that it would take place tomorrow, with or without the mother, as the law allowed.

The first thing Chris noticed, after lunch on the day of the aborted core, was how placid Clarence had become--a complete turnaround. She thought, “I think he knows something’s up.”

The meeting happened Thursday. Past the long desk in the office and into the windowless, overheated conference room at a little before noon went a parade of five experts on troubled children. Chris went in, too. The only person missing was Clarence’s mother, though she had been officially notified again.

When, about an hour and a half later, the parade came out of the conference room, Clarence was no longer a member of Chris’ class.

The news traveled quickly through the office. Clarence would go to an Alpha class as soon as paper work permitted. Chris was flushed, all the way from her forehead to the collar of her blouse. The fringes of her black hair were damp. Her face looked grim. She hurried toward her classroom.

Chris worried about Clarence. She had reason. To send him away was to tell him the same old news: He was a problem; he had failed. And to help Clarence by placing him in a special class among a number of other notoriously unruly children--might as well say his behavior would improve if he was made to join a street gang. She couldn’t argue for doing that to him.

And yet at the same time, removing Clarence from the class seemed like a just solution. More and more since Christmas, he had begun to seem like a wrecker in the room. Was it fair to let one child’s problems interfere with the education of 19 other children, many of them just as needy as Clarence?

She had one awful, sinking fear.

Had she wanted, deep down, to get rid of Clarence? She hadn’t acted on that desire, but had she felt it?

“I don’t want to get rid of him. I don’t!” she told Paul, the sympathetic vice principal, later. “I mean”--she looked up at Paul--”I do and I don’t.”

Clarence might have been a model pupil, if someone could have staged the commotion of a core around him every week or so. For most of the next week, Clarence didn’t know what was happening to him, but he sensed danger.

For the first time this year, Clarence did all of his homework two days in a row. She looked at Clarence playing the little scholar, working on his penmanship without being reminded, his tongue pinned in the corner of his mouth. He made his cursive especially neat--she’d always praised his handwriting back when she had to search for ways to praise him.

She would have to tell him soon.

She had waited all week for the old Clarence to return. He had not. He had been trying to make up in a week for all the lessons he had missed in his six years of school. He looked happy now and mischievous, rocking in his chair and chewing gum openly, and she was glad.

How frightened the boy must have been in this past week and a half! She thought. And what amazing instincts he had.

She gazed at Clarence. She wished she could think that others had made the decision to send him away. She had tried to believe that all week.

Well, in fact, they had. She had not argued for Alpha. But she hadn’t really argued against it. She had made the decision not to try to prevent the decision.

“I let him down in a way,” she thought. “That’s why I can’t sleep.” There. She’d faced it all.

Friday morning, Clarence sat right down and asked her if he could work on his essay instead of penmanship.

I don’t know how to tell him, she thought. Oh, God.

“Clarence, come here a minute.”

Clarence took his usual stance, leaning on the edge of her desk. Pitching her voice low for this private talk, she said, “We had a meeting about you, and I was therrrre and some other people were therrrre. . . .”

She heard in her own voice the exaggerated cadence adults use to coax little children off to sleep, a voice that rarely works, of course. Perhaps the strangeness of her cadences put Clarence on his slowly turning wheel. He was standing sideways to her by the time she had managed to tell him that he was going to a new class.

She had her old voice back at least.

“So anyways, I don’t know when you’re going there, but I want you to know that’s where you’re going. I also want you to know that you’re not going there because of the way you’ve behaved or anything like that. Mrs. Zajac isn’t sending you there for a punishment. She’s sending you there because I think it’s going to help you. I think you’ll like it, as a matter of fact.

“You’ll probably like it more than this school, because there are only 12 kids in the room and the teacher will be able to give you more attention. What do you think of that?” She waited.

He wouldn’t speak. His eyelashes fluttered. No other part of him moved.

He walked slowly back to his desk. He sat staring at the board, mouth ajar. Then, in a flurry of movement, he pulled out pencil and paper and started working on his essay.

The next Friday was Clarence’s last day.

Felipe had made a card. “Goodby, Clarence. Good luck, Clarence,” it read. It was elegantly lettered.

“I could have made a better one if I had more time,” Felipe said.

Clarence grinned. He was washing the boards, his back to the class. Children gathered around Felipe’s desk and signed their names.

Robert, keeping to his own desk, piped up, “I ain’t signin’ it. I hate Clarence.”

Chris wheeled on him. “Robert, things that we do to others come back to hurt us twice as bad.”

Robert wore a faint grin.

“Think about it.” Her voice was low and fierce. “That’s not a very generous or nice thing to do, and I’m extremely disappointed in you.”

She took a deep breath. Below her, Robert laid his head to one side and fiddled with a pen. Color rose in his cheeks. It rose in blotches on Chris’ neck.

“Someday, Robert, somebody’s going to make you sad! Right now, I don’t like what you just did. At all! I don’t think it’s funny, cute. Nothing. And I’m disgusted!”

Chris took another deep breath and went back to her desk. She glanced at Clarence, who was still washing the boards.

She looked at the children signing the card. She grabbed her pocketbook and rummaged through her change purse. She grabbed the tape dispenser.

Inserting herself into the crowd around Felipe’s desk, Chris hurriedly taped seven quarters to the card, the children murmuring, “Oooooh.” It was a bribe of sorts. She wanted to make sure that Clarence would accept the card. Clarence examined the card.

Jimmy said, “A dollar twenty-five!”

Felipe said, “Two dollars.

Judith, detaching herself slightly from the throng, said, “A dollar seventy-five.”

Clarence put the card in his pocket.

Clarence turned back to the board. He stood next to the spot where she wrote the word of the day for penmanship. Now Clarence took up a piece of chalk and wrote carefully, laboriously, “C-Clarence.” Mrs. Zajac smiled.

Clarence stood beside her. He touched her arm, and inclining his head toward his name on the board, he said to her, “Do dat?”

“Yes, Clarence,” said Chris. “We’ll do that on Monday. I promise.”

Chris grabbed him from behind, in a gentle head lock, and moved him around in front of her, which made the children giggle.

Clarence grinned in her embrace and looked off to one side.

“Clarence, you have a nice time, OK? And work real hard, like I know you can do?” She gave him one more squeeze--”and have fun?”--and let him go.

She stopped and looked at Clarence’s name on the board, in the penmanship postion. The boy had style. He had left his mark. At least he hadn’t gone away angry.

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

COMING UP

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.