A Teacher’s Patience Pays Off With Small Gains--but Will They Last?

In the Teachers’ Room early the following week, a colleague asked, “Is your room different without Clarence?”

“Night and day,” Chris Zajac said.

Her classroom was different, wasn’t it? It was certainly quieter, she thought. Maybe too quiet.

The first days of that week dragged by.

She kept imagining Clarence at the Alpha class.

She fretted about the Basic Skills Tests. Several of the students from her low math group of last year had flunked. What had she done wrong? She brooded on the general question: Why did the poorest children seem to learn the least in school?

How many in this class would flunk the Basic Skills Tests next year?

Chris conjured up the faces of several who had slacked off lately in their work, and she thought, “They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to miss Clarence.”

Then she thought of Claude.

He had not slacked off. He had never started.

When she contemplated Claude, Chris thought of his school days going slowly by while a stronger current ran beneath. She imagined Claude at his desk, daydreaming about fishing as if he had all the time in the world, and she thought, Claude has only a little more than year now to start learning how to put his mind to a task and get a little organized.

If she didn’t help him do that, he would be--she could see Claude there--wandering around lost, picking at his lips, in the halls of junior high.

She knew several Claudes. One of them amused her--the absent-minded boy of many ailments. He came to class once with his hand wrapped like a mummy’s in a giant Ace bandage that covered a tiny cut on his thumb. Sometimes he walked past the classroom door by mistake. He would rush to the closet and forget what he’d gone for when he got there, all the while discussing his confusion out loud. “What was I lookin’ for? I know! That paper. It’s here someplace. Whew! Here it is.”

The sad, lonely Claude wore pants that still had little bunches of thread where the price tag had been.

This Claude was so out of touch with what his peers thought was “fresh” or “def” or “toy” that he told the whole class about his imaginary friends, Hebert and Herberta, who kept him company when he was lonely. Claude got laughed at for that, of course.

Out at recess, he tried to get the other children’s attention by taking an old piece of 2x4 he’d found in the grass and swinging it perilously close their heads. He would step on classmates’ heels, and would turn around at his desk and try to show Julio, who did not like Claude, a card trick that didn’t quite work.

One time, Claude came in from recess and tried to make conversation with beautiful Alice by saying, “I met someone who says he hates you.”

There was, finally, the maddening Claude, who was sneaky and quick-witted. He had a perfectly good mind, Chris thought.

All three Claudes came together almost every day, at homework excuse time.

Why hadn’t he done his homework again?

“The only kind of paper we have at home is the kind where there’s no lines,” said Claude.

“I did it,” he had said to Chris the other morning.

She had asked him for his spelling homework.

Don’t ask, she thought. Don’t let him get started. But as usual she couldn’t resist. Oh, well, she thought, this is some of the most creative work Claude does all day.

“OK, Claude, where is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Claude, looking up at her earnestly. “It could be anywhere .”

She’d have to get his mother in again. Talk about basic skills . She hadn’t done enough about Claude. It was high time she had a look inside Claude’s book bag. I’m almost afraid to look, Chris thought. “Claude, let me see that book bag.”

Claude presented his book bag dutifully. He stood up at the front table next to Mrs. Zajac. He was being helpful, holding the bag open while Chris groped around inside it. She pulled out of Claude’s knapsack a great disordered fistful of crumpled construction paper folders and half-finished homework assignments, some from the fall.

“What’s all this?” cried Chris. She plunged in her hand for more. Another fistful of papers. Then a bunch of books with papers inserted among the pages and sticking out every which way. She pulled out a store-bought binder of the kind that is marked as an “organizer.”

“This is a nice organizer, Claude. Do you know what the word organize means?”

Claude nodded earnestly.

Out came the ancient remains of a sandwich, a test on the Revolutionary War, an Advent calendar.

“Claude! Look, Claude, let me give you some advice. Every day you have some papers to show Mom and Dad. Don’t leave them in your bag. Use your organizer.”

Claude looked at Chris very earnestly and declared, “I got another organizer in my desk, too!”

“It doesn’t organize itself, Claude,” Chris said, and immediately regretted it. Several children tittered.

Chris pursed her lips and looked around her. The important thing at that moment was protecting Claude. Any minute, the rest of the class was going to find this searching of the knapsack all too enjoyable.

Claude’s problem was much worse than she’d imagined. “I’m disgusted with myself for letting it go on this long. Maybe I should just give up on Claude.”

Having imagined surrender, she perked up a little. She’d keep after him. Strategies rarely worked at once, and no strategy worked all the time. Little steps, she told herself. Be patient. Just keep on working on him. She’d get his mother to visit again.

Chris sent many notes home with Claude. The mother came in.

“Sometimes,” Claude’s mother said to Chris, “I want to criminate him.”

She had a thick French-Canadian accent. Chris wasn’t sure exactly what Claude’s mother meant, but understood the general meaning. Chris smiled and said, “To be honest, so would I sometimes.”

Claude’s mother had a harried, worried air. She said to Chris, “I don’t know what to do any more. We do care what happ -ens but I cannot quit my job.”

Chris got her hands moving like the wheels of industry and laid out a plan for Claude’s after-school hours: the old homework-signing deal, the time and the place where Claude should study at home, the hour at which his father should check the work.

Chris herself sometimes felt a great desire to glue Claude’s glasses to his nose, shake him by the shoulders, and say, “Forget the illnesses, forget the fishing, forget the excuses, concentrate on what you’re doing right now!”

She had to keep on him. But she had to do it gently. The boy was enough of an outcast as it was.

Chris taped an index card to the top of Claude’s desk: “DON’T FORGET TO COPY YOUR ASSIGNMENT!” Claude was very happy with the card and kept fingering it, but he didn’t usually follow its command, at least not yet.

Chris kept lecturing him, but she did it quietly and in private.

First thing in the morning, she would call Claude to her desk, ask him for the work he owed, and then tell him she was disappointed. He was a smart boy. She couldn’t force him to learn. She would help him. But she wouldn’t pay any attention to him if he didn’t try. Day after day, she issued that threat.

Until one spring morning, after the usual lecture from Chris, Claude got almost all of the questions right on a science paper.

A few days later, Claude asked Chris if he could collect the spelling homework--a request never granted to a child who hadn’t done his--and in Mrs. Zajac’s room a customary way for a child to tell her that he had.

Then Claude actually finished a story.

Chris read it at her desk. “It’s about fishing again. But it all makes sense for once!”

And on top of that, Claude, with a solid F average in social studies, did quite well on a social studies test.

Claude stared at the paper when Chris handed it back at the end of the day. His eyes went wide. “Eighty?” he said. “That’s the best score I ever got!”

He wanted to show Julio, who wasn’t interested. He showed Judith, who was. The intercom called Claude’s bus.

He dashed to the door, the test paper in hand. He stopped. He remembered he’d forgotten his book bag. He dashed back into the room.

Dashing one way, then the other, Claude kept declaring, “That’s the best score I ever got!”

Chris watched the performance from her desk. She shook her head slowly. She let herself smile. Was something like organized academic desire stirring in Claude?

It was too soon to know for sure.

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