It is 3:30, that angst-filled time of day known as Staying After.
There are seven kids staying after: six naughty kids and Maria, who needs help with math. Maria is near tears as she tells Miss Smith she doesn't get it. Miss Smith tells her she will. But not today, because there are just too many other kids waiting in line. "Come in at recess tomorrow."Miss Smith turns to Ashley. During class meeting today, when the children were complimenting each other, Ashley declared the whole exercise "stupid and boring." Now Miss Smith tells her, "What you said didn't make me feel good.
"I know you are a thoughtful person. You are a very positive person. I need you to be positive. Other than what you said in meeting, I am very proud of the way you talk to people. Do you have anything you want to say to me? No, well, thank you for staying."
Ashley walks to the door. "I hate Miss Smith," she says under her breath.
How to be civilized
Miss Smith used to get angry at them when they were rude. Then she realized that's the way so many grown-ups and teenagers talk to them. Shut up. And the S word. And the F word.
One Sunday afternoon when she was at the public library getting some books for her students she came across one for herself: a book about positive discipline. Try team meetings, the book said. Teach your students how to show respect.
So now, several times a week, Miss Smith gathers the students next to her on the rug. She has a little ball, which she tosses to the person who wants to speak. No one is supposed to speak who doesn't have the ball.
At first they work on compliments and thank-yous.
"Who would like to start off?" asks Miss Smith. Rachel says, "I would like to thank Brandon and Christopher for helping me with my math." Then Miss Smith says, "What do you say when someone pays you a compliment?" and Brandon and Christopher say, "Thank you."
Billy says, "I would like to compliment Matt because he is my friend." "What do you say?" "Thank you." "What do you say?" "You're welcome."
It's as tedious as learning the violin: each compliment a squeak at first, an awkward note hanging in the air. But now, after two months, Miss Smith is beginning to hear a difference.
Fewer shut-ups. Sometimes the kindness flows by itself, without prompting, almost like a melody.
Staying After, Part II
Billy is in the back of the room fiddling with basketballs while he waits to talk to Miss Smith. His sixth-grade sister comes to the door to see when he will be ready to walk home. She has curly black hair, a turned-up freckled nose.
"Tell that f------ Pamela she better f------ wait for me before she starts walking," says the sister. Billy nods and looks over his shoulder to see if Miss Smith is ready for him. He bounces back to the teacher's desk for a pep talk about kind words.
Fourth grade, same as it ever was
Today the class practices handwriting, tracing the hypnotic loops of a capital E. When Miss Smith says, "Time to put away your cursive papers," some of the girls actually groan.
At the end of recess, when the children are lined up along the wall waiting to go back inside, it's the boys who stand with their mouths open, hoping to catch a drip off the eaves.
Rachel's brother
Today, after recess, a young man is suddenly standing at the doorway of Room 8. Rachel, the tallest girl in the fourth grade, walks toward him.
He has put up his hands in front of his chest, palms outward. Rachel holds up her hands too and their palms touch. They gaze into each other's eyes, like two actors in a B-movie.
"I came like you told me to," he says. "Did you get me some candy?"
Later you ask her who the young man is. "My brother," she says.
"No, he's not," says Heather.
"I call him my brother," Rachel explains.
Later still you ask Miss Smith. The young man is a senior at an alternative high school. Sometimes he hangs around the playground here and sometimes he smells like liquor. The principal and several teachers have told him not to enter the school grounds. They've notified the school social worker.
A month later you ask about him again. He stopped coming to the school, says Miss Smith. But Rachel may still see him. At one point she told Miss Smith that the young man and his mother lived with Rachel and her mother.
"What is your relationship?" Miss Smith asked. "We're both Scorpios and we're both left-handed and we both like black olives," Rachel said.
"Some of us are concerned that she's already. . . ." Miss Smith doesn't finish the sentence. Whenever Rachel looks unhappy, Miss Smith asks her what she's thinking. Someday Rachel is going to tell her what is really going on, Miss Smith is sure. Rachel is going to tell her something sad.
Miss Smith loses sleep
Sometimes Miss Smith lies awake at night and worries about her students. She especially worries about Rachel; and about Brandon, who is quiet and devious and strangely determined not to learn; and about Billy, who is both sweet and mean: a boy who could so easily grow into a violent man.
Already two of her most difficult students have been sent away by their parents to live with relatives in other states. One of her students has already spent part of her life as an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital.
So one day you ask Miss Smith which student in her class has the most innocent life. She thinks of Ashley. And then she remembers that Ashley's mother has cancer. She mentions Christopher. But then adds: "His father was killed last year."
Maria's mother immigrated from Romania three years ago and is raising her daughter alone. Patrick's father walked out this fall; he and his brothers and sisters are living with their mother in a run-down trailer without a phone.
Maybe it's Amy who has the most innocent life, Miss Smith decides. Two parents. A cute baby sister. And she still believes in Santa Claus.
On the other hand, Amy can't read.
Goal: every child a reader
Today Amy's team will give a report on Spain, A Foreign Country. The other kids on her team did most of the work: searching through books, copying down facts, drawing a picture of the flag and locating on a map that pink blob which is Spain.
The others did the research, but everybody on the team has to help make the presentation. This is when life gets hard for Amy, when she tries to read just one sentence aloud. She pauses and struggles over each word. When she is done, none of her listeners, and certainly not Amy herself, remembers how the sentence began.
You would like to think she can still progress. If she reads on a first-grade level now, maybe she will be at a fourth-grade level in a few years. But you fear it won't work that way. You fear she will fall further behind every year until she drops out, illiterate and unemployable.
At this school, at the beginning of the year, 20 percent of the fourth-graders read on the first-grade level. Another 20 percent were on the second- or third-grade level. The national statistics are even more terrifying. One recent study shows 75 percent of fourth-graders read below grade level.
But at this school they're trying something new this year, with a grant that allows for extra teachers and aides: 90 minutes of reading each day, each child in a group based on reading level, no more than 12 kids per two adults in the lower reading groups, each child re-tested every six weeks, each very slow child tutored one on one. The hope is that no child will fall through the cracks. The hope is that all the Amys will learn to read.
The hope is, they'll learn to comprehend. In their reading groups they listen to stories and try to predict what will happen next; they write Meaningful Sentences.
Down the hall in the highest reading group, they are talking about foreshadowing. It becomes clear from the conversation that even some of the best readers in the school don't read in their spare time.
Some can talk about foreshadowing they've seen in novels. Most talk about foreshadowing they've seen in movies.
The reading specialist says this is a sign of the times, and even more specifically, a sign of the at-risk student. They watch action movies. Reading requires too much.
Fourth-graders honor the pilgrims
The pioneers was special to us because they made Thanksgiving funer for our intire family.
I'm thankful for my life and I'm thankful for my family and for school and food and cars and gravity.
Advice for the lovelorn
Miss Smith is in the habit of eating lunch in her room. She makes herself available to children who need help with their homework or help with their lives. Today a sixth-grade girl drops by.
She introduces herself to Miss Smith. Her name is Jenny and she is in love with Juan, a boy in Miss Smith's class. Jenny is in anguish. Her friends tell her Juan wants to break up with her. He's not speaking to her, so she has no way of knowing if this painful rumor is true.
Miss Smith could mention that Jenny is 12 and Juan is only 10. She could, in fact, start laughing. Instead she says: Tell Juan you need to talk to him.
A few days later, Jenny comes back. She has an unsigned note. She wants Miss Smith to identify the handwriting. The note says, "Meet me at the flagpole after school." Miss Smith confirms the handwriting is Juan's.
The next day, Miss Smith asks Juan to drop by at lunch time. She tells him Jenny has been to see her and was upset. Juan says, "I tried to talk to her, but she didn't come to the flagpole."
"I don't want to interfere," says Miss Smith. "But I'll try to help if you want me to." Juan seems relieved by her offer. "Tell Jenny we aren't going out any more," he says.
Miss Smith delivers the message as gently as she can. "Juan is not ready for a relationship yet," she tells Jenny at lunch the next day.
Miss Smith often thinks about some of the little girls in her class, the ones who still think boys are icky, the ones who invent elaborate rules for their girls-only clubs.
Snapshots of Carlos
Carlos takes a spelling test: Miss Smith is reading off the answers. Suppose, she says. S-U-P-P-O-S-E. Carlos is kneeling in his chair. After each word he gets right, Carlos sits up rigid, sticks his left arm straight out and plays five seconds of body-convulsing air guitar.
Carlos gets his library books: During Silent Reading, Carlos goes to the back of the room, fishes through his backpack, finds his library books and starts back toward his desk. Wait! Suddenly the books have become machine guns. Carlos mows down the enemy, then moves on.
Carlos worries about his future: Today the kids have been teasing him about his handwriting. Carlos stays after, of his own free will, to tell Miss Smith how hard he tries to have neat writing. He tries hard in everything, he tells her. Then he begins to cry.
He and his mom are alone. Just the two of them. They don't have much money. All he wants, Carlos tells Miss Smith, is to do well in school and get a good job as soon as possible and give money to his mother.
Miss Smith tells him he will outgrow his twitchiness. That most of the world's geniuses have bad writing. That he can make his dreams come true.
Carlos cleans out his desk: A few days after Christmas, Carlos announces that this is his last day. He and his mother are moving. Miss Smith is sad to see him go. So far this year, nine of her students have moved away.
"What difference does it make?" the children ask her. "You'll get another student." She doesn't try to explain why there could never be another Carlos.
`OK, work on your Meaningful Sentences'
This is where push comes to shove, where the rubber meets the road. This is where, if you don't know what a word means, the teacher will be able to tell.
"OK," says the teacher. "Write a Meaningful Sentence for the word thin." The procedure is this: Write a sentence, then draw a box around the vocabulary word and underline the word that helps define it.
Sam gets it. The cat was so thin everyone called him Toothpick, he writes, putting a box around thin and a line under Toothpick.
That's good, says the teacher. Toothpick is something skinny.
James writes: The thin boy stomped through the forest.
Well, says the teacher. She wonders if he can add something that helps us understand what thin means. Buzz with your neighbors, she says. His neighbors buzz, obligingly. But they don't seem to be in any position to help him.
By the end of reading class he has come up with this: A thin boy stomped through the forest at 3:30 p.m.
Now it's the teacher's turn to struggle with meaning. She wants to be encouraging without actually using the words good or correct.
"Wow," she says. "You've extended your ideas!"
Today the vocabulary word is disease.
My brother had a disease that included chicken pox, diarrhea and Kleenex.
Very good sentence, says the teacher. But I'll only write diarrhea on the board if you can spell it.
OK, how about, My brother had a disease that included chicken pox, fever and a runny nose.
Teacher writes this on the board but everyone can see that, although it is Meaningful, the new sentence is not nearly as excellent, in a fourth-grade way, as the one about diarrhea.
Matt sharpens his pencil
The pencil sharpener sits on the wall by the door, its metal gleaming. It is the only mechanical gadget in the room and therefore irresistible, a force of nature more powerful than a child's will.
Today Matt sharpens his pencil so much that it's almost too short to hold onto. Today the whole pencil, eraser and all, nearly slips into the hole.
"Oh, man," he says, pulling the pencil out, blowing off the shavings, inspecting it, rejecting it, pushing it into the sharpener again. He takes the top off the sharpener and inspects the machine's innards, the intriguing spiral now coated with pencil shavings.
Then he goes back to his seat, gets a longer pencil, and makes another trip to the sharpener.
Staying After, Part III
Matt is last in line. Finally it is his turn to get a lecture and have Miss Smith write a number on his daily behavior report. By the time she is ready to talk to him, Matt has been silently sobbing for 10 minutes.
Miss Smith looks at his wet face and says, "Does this score today determine whether or not your mother will let you go to Cub Scouts?" Matt nods. He needs a 4 or a 5 to be allowed to go to tonight's meeting.
"I know I'm not going."
"OK. That seems pretty fair," says Miss Smith.
"No it doesn't," says Matt.
"Do you think you deserve a 5?"
"No."
"Do you think my having to talk to you a couple of times - and I had to take two items away from you today, two things you were using to make noise - do you think maybe you deserved a 2 today and maybe I am being nice to you by giving you a 3?"
Matt doesn't answer. He turns his head away.
Miss Smith continues. "I know you can do it. I have given you many 5s. I will call your mother if you want me to. I am not going to call her to try to make her let you go to Scouts, because I think her decision is right on. But I will call her if you want me to tell her anything?"
Matt whispers a reply, in a grieving voice. Miss Smith reads him the note she has written to his mother. She says, "Matt acted out a lot today, but he also did a super job in math."
The principal comes by Miss Smith's room in time to hear the note being read. She sees Matt's eyes. "It's a hard lesson sometimes," she says.
Miss Smith finishes her little talk the way she always does. "Is there anything you would like to say to me?" She pauses.
Matt says, "I would really like to go to Cub Scouts."