Seventh period was Carmen’s period for preparation. Neil dragged Joaquin and Jesse by the arm to her door and knocked by kicking the door frame. She came quickly, irritated, and instantly took in the gravity of the situation. She took over his class while Neil marched the combatants up to the office.

It was a long afternoon. Hector was called in. He was in tears, now that his anger had faded. All he could say, over and over, was how sorry he was to have hit Neil. He seemed completely unaware of having fought with Jesse; that had faded into insignificance in his mind beside the mortal sin of striking a teacher. Nothing Neil could say to him would ease his guilt.

Humberto and Aaron were called in and put to one side to sweat it out. The busses came and went, and phone calls went out to all the parents whose children were involved so that they would not panic when their children did not get off the bus.

Mrs. Herrera was the first to arrive. She had just walked in the door from work when the phone call came. Mr. Navarro came in next, yelled at Humberto for five minutes, then went out to sit in his truck and await the verdict.

Neil met Mrs. Herrera’s eyes as she came into Bill’s office. They were wet with tears and empty of hope. Bill Campbell was short and to the point. “We gave you and your son more chances than any child deserves, and after that Mr. McCrae took it on himself to give him still more chances. If this is the way Jesse repays us, we have nothing further to say to each other. Take you child and leave. Don’t bother bringing him back next year. You have the legal right of appeal, but I assure you now that appeal will be denied. Just take him and get out.”

Then Bill took a deep breath and relented enough to say, “When you get Jesse enrolled in another school, remember this incident. Get some help at once before he repeats it.”

Mrs. Herrera walked out of Neil’s life dragging Jesse behind her. He never saw either of them again.

# # #

Joaquin, Aaron, and Humberto were suspended for a week. Bill wanted to call a board meeting to consider the fact that Hector had struck a teacher, and it took Neil ten minutes of pleading to get his punishment reduced to a week’s suspension.

When the last student had left in the hands of his angry parents, it was nearly seven o’clock. The late winter sun was down and it was growing dark outside. Bill Campbell looked gray and haggard. Neil realized that he must be close to retirement age. The buoyancy and good humor which made him look younger had deserted him now and he looked old.

He got up and drew two cups of coffee from the unit on a cabinet behind his desk. Neil felt a moment of deja vu; Bill had done exactly the same thing in the middle of his employment interview. Only this time the coffee was stale and bitter. It matched their mood.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Bill said, “You really screwed up this time.”

“I know.”

“Didn’t you learn anything from your sex scandal?”

“I learned a lot; a whole bitter great deal.”

“You apparently didn’t learn when to go to someone for advice. You went into this whole Jesse Herrera matter with your eyes closed and you made a bad situation worse. Then you compounded your error by trying to hide things from me.”

Here it comes.

“The day Jesse Herrera ran home right after he came, did you think that would go unnoticed?”

Neil shrugged. “I guess I did.” more Monday

“She wears too much make-up though.”

Neil had thought so himself; it was thick enough to make Neil suspect that she had some facial disfiguration she was trying to cover up. Still, this seemed a strange observation for her daughter to make.

“She didn’t used to wear so much, until her latest boyfriend came to live with us.” Lisa’s voice was shocking in its bitterness; then she bolted away, touching her mother on the shoulder as she came up to help her.

Another brick fell into place, and Neil’s edifice of speculation came into tighter focus. The stories Lisa had written suddenly made more sense.

Had Jesse Herrera’s mother worn too much make-up during those last years when her beloved Miguel turned abusive?

Did Judith Cobb’s boyfriend hit Lisa as well as her mother? 

Neil felt his heart as a cold lump in his chest.  It was the cold of helplessness.

The children returned with the last bell. Heather Sanchez reached for a cookie and Judith fended her off with a laugh. She gave the girl a hug in passing, and three other children made mock passes at the refreshments, then drew back laughing.

Jesse’s attempt was real; he caught up two cookies, and dodged Mrs. Cobb as he made his way back to his seat. Neil barked at him and he shot Neil a dirty look. Black helplessness spread through Neil; all he had tried to do was coming to nothing!

Rabindranath snapped, “Jesse, stay out of the cookies.”

“Make me!”

Lorraine Dixon added, “Oh, stop being a jerk, Jesse.”

“Who are you calling a jerk?” Jesse stepped forward, scowling.

“You, Jerk. She’s calling you a jerk, ’cause you are one.” This was Hector Van Vliet, who hadn’t volunteered twenty words all year. A hulking thirteen year old who had been kept back twice, he was also a shy, gentle child whom the other children did not fear even though he towered over them.

In that instant, the slow building anger of the whole class came to a head. They had had enough of Jesse Herrera. Every child’s eye turned on him with brimming hatred.

Before Neil could intervene, Jesse stepped right up to Hector and spat in his face. Hector went pale. He drew back one massive fist and swung at Jesse.

Neil caught his fist in mid-air and spun him around, but Hector was fully inflamed now and continued to struggle; he struck at Neil with his fists, connecting twice. It was all Neil could do to handle him.

Jesse had cowered when Hector swung; now he rose up and punched him in the back while he was struggling with Neil.

Joaquin Velasquez cursed in Spanish and tackled Jesse. As they went down, Humberto and Aaron joined him, kicking and punching at Jesse as he and Joaquin rolled on the floor.

Neil shoved Hector back and shouted, “Stop it!” at the top of his lungs. The room reverberated, but the boys struggling on the floor were too far gone to stop. Neil grabbed Humberto and then Aaron and tossed them back, then dragged Jesse and Joaquin up and held them both at arm’s length.

Slowly the class grew silent. Judith Cobb stood wide eyed with shock. The children’s eyes were steady and flinty hard; the eyes of a lynch mob; and they were all directed at Jesse Herrera.  more tomorrow

===============

I promised an honest novel, and this post may seem excessively melodramatic. I have never had a free-for-all in my classroom, although I’ve broken up plenty of fights on the playground. I also spent several months teaching my class while listening with one ear for problems in the special needs classroom through a connecting door. There was a child in that classroom whom we knew to be violent. He eventually exploded and I had to go in and pull him off his teacher. I was young and male; his teacher was old and female. He was expelled.

Nothing in this post is unrealistic for thirty-plus young mammals jammed into a tiny classroom for months on end.

Mrs. Herrera promised to institute the punishment they had discussed, and to keep him home until after the weekend. But she was crying again when Neil left, and he knew she did not have the strength to follow through.

# # #

Jesse’s blowup and informal suspension came on Wednesday. That night Neil and Carmen went out to dinner. They no longer went on formal dates. Their relationship had progressed beyond that, and now they spent all their spare time together. That night, she asked him if he had given any thought to Valentine’s Day. He had not. She said that the sixth graders were still young enough that they would miss having a holiday celebration, and since he was their main teacher, it would be up to him to provide one.

Neil shook his head. “Carmen, if there is anything high school did not teach me, its how to give a Valentine’s Day party for little kids.”

“So don’t give one,” Carmen laughed. “Get Stephanie Hagstrom and Lisa Cobb and their mothers to head a committees for your two classes, then stand back. You won’t have to do a thing.”

For the next two days, Neil’s afternoon class moved as smoothly as a well oiled bearing. It was amazing what the absence of one child could do. When Saturday rolled around, Carmen took Neil for a ride without giving him a hint of their destination. She had packed a picnic basket, and she set a course that circled northward across the river, then eastward toward Riverbank.

It was February eleventh. In the midwest, there was a foot of new snow on the ground, but spring had come to California. Almost overnight, the almond orchards had come to full blossom. Everywhere Carmen took him, the trees were covered with pure white flowers, and already the wind was shaking the first of them free to cover the ground like a fragrant snowfall.

They stopped half a mile up a dirt orchard road. Carmen spread a blanket under the trees, in a patch of sunlight. It was just too chilly to be quite comfortable, so after they ate they put the food away and wrapped the blanket around them as they waited out the day, encircled by ten thousand acres of flowers.

# # #

On Valentine’s Day, things started out as smoothly as Carmen had predicted. Janice Hagstrom had things completely under control. She gave him the first two periods for regular work and took over the last period completely. She even had games to keep the children busy after the cards had been exchanged, the cookies and ice cream had been demolished, and they were flying around the ceiling with their veins a-clog with sugar.

At noon, Jesse Herrera came back, quiet again. Neil hoped that his mother had kept her end of the bargain, and that her efforts would be rewarded. He had his doubts about both, but the two work periods went well enough.

Judith Cobb came in as the children were streaming out for their last break of the day, and snagged Ramon, Mickey, and Jason to carry in refreshments. Lisa slipped into her mother’s arms briefly, then led her up to Neil. She introduced her politely, with a formality that has to be taught, and Neil shook hands. Then Mrs. Cobb set about arranging the party and Lisa stayed by Neil’s side for a moment. “She’s pretty, isn’t she,” Lisa said.

“Yes, quite.”

“She wears too much make-up though.” more tomorrow

As a class in literature, it had been a great success, and those who could already read had advanced far in their understanding. But those who could not read — and that was nearly half of his class — had only learned what those two books could tell them. They had made no progress toward becoming independent readers. They were no closer to being able to take a book from the library shelf and get from it what it had for them. They could understand it if someone read it to them, yes; but they could not read.

Neil thought, Damn you, Anne Marie Chang!

# # #

Jesse Herrera made it through the last half of January without raising Neil’s ire, but it was a chancy thing. Neil had to invent all kinds of in-class punishments to take the place of the regular discipline system. Now he realized what had been wrong with his decision to champion the boy. By giving him “one more chance”, he had chosen to punish himself. Jesse had used up his “one more chance” within the first week of January, and he used it up again twenty times that month. Yet each infraction was small — a paper wad here, a little shove there, a snotty comment to someone else. Neil could not bring himself to expel Jesse for one paper wad, even if it was the last action in a long series of actions. By taking Jesse on after he had already run the gamut of the normal discipline system, Neil had put himself in a no-win situation.

So it went into February. In the general atmosphere of seriousness with which the teachers and students alike approached the CAT test, Jesse had held it together for three days. When the testing was over, he went on a brief orgy of misbehavior. Neil physically carried him to the back of the room — which was quite illegal, but he was committed now to extraordinary measures — and forced him to stay there, isolated by direst threats. He called the boy’s mother, and when the day was over, he personally drove him home.

When they arrived, Mrs. Herrera was red eyed from crying. She sent Jesse to his room while they talked, and it was not a pleasant interview. Mrs. Herrera had told the counsellor of her husband’s violent last years, and the counsellor had begun to work from that angle. But he had also told Mrs. Herrera that she was making a bad situation worse by her lack of discipline.

“The boy was abused,” the counsellor had said, “but that is in the past. It is the present we have to worry about, and in the present his problem is that he doesn’t know what the limits of acceptable behavior are.” His father had “disciplined” him for everything, and now his mother was refusing to discipline him for anything. The boy simply did not know what was expected of him.

And it was getting late in Jesse’s life to teach him. At eleven, he was already much formed. If they did not get to him now, they never would.

Neil explained what Jesse had done that day, and Mrs. Herrera broke down. That was not encouraging; if she could not control herself, how could she ever hope to control Jesse? They discussed her options. Some punishment was essential, but she could not spank him. Even if she could have brought herself to strike the boy, his father’s last days had hardened him against that kind of punishment. more tomorrow

Losses

The rest of January slid by. Neil watched Lisa Cobb closely, but he could find nothing to account for the intensity of her story. Or, rather, of her stories, for he finally remembered that he had seen its like before in what she had written at Halloween. Jesse Herrera returned to class, subdued once again, and Neil never told Bill that he had sent the boy home.

The tragedy in Stockton stayed with Neil and the other teachers. It made them jumpy for weeks, and even later they retained an increased awareness of the potential disasters that hang poised over every human being, every day of his life. 

The children forgot it in three days. Then it was work, baseball, friends and enemies, chatting and bickering; their lives fell quickly back into normal patterns. Chances were that if you could ask them about the tragedy a year later, they would have a hard time remembering it at all.

The new horror on their personal horizon was scheduled for three days beginning on February sixth. CAT, the California Achievement Test, is given every year to every child in the state. It is a measurement of their progress and a means of assessing what changes the schools need to make if that progress is not satisfactory. It is an extensive test, in many parts, lasting several hours and given over several days.

It was the test Oscar Teixeira had deliberately failed the year before.

Oscar had done fairly well this year. It was not really something Neil could take credit for; it was simply that an eleven year old boy could not hold out against the pressure of John Teixeira’s displeasure. He turned in all of his papers in all of his classes and the work was always satisfactory, even if it was rarely up to the standards Oscar should have been able to achieve. As the CAT test approached, Neil caught Oscar alone crossing the playground and asked, “Are you going to do your best on the CAT this year?”

Oscar flashed him an embarrassed grin and said, “Yes,” then ran on to his play.

There was a bond of friendship between Neil and Oscar now. Neil could trace it to the day Oscar had left his room in tears, but he could not analyze its origin. It seemed that Neil had done something for Oscar that day which had given him new strength, but try as he might, Neil could not quite figure out what. That is the way of teaching; if a teacher does his best, he will have some good results, but not with all students and not always the result he anticipates.

# # #

It was a grueling test for Neil’s students. The whole school geared up for it, and every teacher participated. Neil tested his morning students; Tom Wright tested the students Neil normally had in the afternoon, and the other teachers divided up the seventh and eighth graders. The students spent a solid two hours a day in testing until it was all over.

It would be two months before the results of the tests came back, but Neil could read some of the results for himself already on the faces of his students. Those who were poor readers showed the sad, hang-dog expression of people who have been completely out of their element. They knew how poorly they had done, and once again their confidence had been bruised.

Neil had actually enjoyed his last month of teaching reading. They had gotten through two novels for children, and all of the students, except possibly Brandy and Sabrina, had understood all of the concepts and most of the subtleties. more Monday