Neil’s eyes swept the room. Duarte, Oscar, Sean, Stephanie, even Tanya. Those students he knew fairly well. He knew Tasmeen’s history and she had done nothing out of character for the person he assumed her to be, but she was too quiet, too enclosed, for him to honestly say he knew her.

Casey, Larry, Lauren, and Linda. They were all transparently easy to know. Olivia, Rafael, and Flavio were more restrained, but he had made the effort to reach out to them, and could say that he knew them. Tony he knew well, though they had an antagonistic relationship.

If they are smart or friendly, I know them. If they are notably ill behaved or stupid, I know them. But if they are ordinary, they remain strangers to me.

That was a problem to be worked on.

Oscar raised his hand and said, “I’m done.”

“Fine. Find something to read or draw quietly until everyone else is finished.”

“Can I read mine now?”

“When everyone is finished, Oscar.”

That took a while. For most of the students, most of the time, writing was a weary, difficult business. When the bell rang at the end of the second period, Neil announced that they would have no more time. Students would begin reading as soon as they came back.

As he walked out, Tony muttered, “Maybe I just won’t come back.”

Of course, he did.

When the children returned, Neil let them volunteer to read, knowing that he would not get to them all that hour. It was a trick, but not an unkind one. Those who most hated the idea of reading to the class would have to sweat out a sure knowledge that they had to read, only to be given a reprieve when Neil ran out of time. The next time, he would call on them first, before they had time to sweat.

Six hands went up immediately. Neil let Oscar read first since he had been the first to finish. He carried his paper to the front of the room and leaned back against the chalkboard. Richard Lujan, who was Oscar’s friend, whispered, “This will be good.”

It was Halloween night. Three boys named Oscar, Richard, and Rafael were going out trick-or-treating. They had costumes on. Oscar was dressed like Dracula. Richard was dressed like Ghostbusters. Rafael had on a Freddie Kruger mask. He also had popsickle sticks taped to his fingers to look like long claws.

They went to this first house and got candy. Then they went to this second house and got more candy and some gum. They went to this third house and nobody was home, so Rafael said, “Let’s egg it.”

“We don’t have any eggs, Dummy,” Richard said.

“Well, maybe there are some chickens in that little house out back,” Oscar said.

They all went out to the back where there was this old shack. Richard said he could hear chickens, but Rafael said he was nuts. Then Oscar found a nest with three eggs in it under a rose bush. 

“You can’t egg a house with only three eggs,” Richard said. But Rafael threw his anyway. It smashed against the front door and ran down the front door like slime. Richard yelled, “I’ve been slimed,” and held his throat. Rafael thought that was pretty funny. Then Richard threw his egg and it ran down the front door the same way.

Then Oscar decided to throw his egg against the window, but the window broke and the boys decided to run away. But before they could turn around a big, tall, dark guy said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“What’s it to you?” Oscar yelled, and they all ran away.

All the kids thought that was great. Rafael wanted to go next. He had taken Neil’s advice about making up his own Freddie Kruger — sort of. His villain was named Sammy Kruger. Otherwise, Neil could see no difference from the original. more tomorrow

Rafael asked, “Mr. McCrae, can mine star Freddie Kruger?”

“Use some imagination. Make up your own Freddie Kruger.”

Sabrina Palmer came up to his desk and whispered, “Can I say this . . .” and started to read her first sentence.

Neil cut her off and whispered, “Save it until you have finished. Then I’ll want to hear it.”

“Do I have to read it out loud?” she whispered. Neil nodded. She said, “But Mr. McCrae, it’s not any good.”

Knowing Sabrina, he was sure that it would not be any good, but he said, “It will be just fine. You go write it and be ready to read it.” She went back to her seat, looking worried.

Neil looked across the classroom to see how his class was getting along. For the first time in a long while, Oscar Teixeira was fascinated with an assignment. His head was down and his pencil was flying. He already had half a page done while the rest of the class was struggling with first sentences.

Tim Galloway raised his hand and said, “Listen to this!”

He started to read and Neil said, “Tim,” then again, a little louder, “Tim! Save it until you have finished.” Tim ground to a halt with a look of comical frustration on his face. Neil motioned to Tim’s desk and silently mouthed the word, “Write.” After Tim had begun to write again, Neil said softly to the class as a whole, “Don’t waste your energy and imagination on reading something that is half done. While you are hot, write! There will always be time to change things and to share after you are done. Don’t waste the creative moment.”

Larry Whitlock said, “Mr. McCrae can I say . . .”  eil just stared him down, looking patient and perplexed. Larry gave a sheepish grin and said, “I know. Write it, don’t talk it.”

Write it, don’t talk it was a phrase Neil had been drumming into their heads for two months. They all knew it perfectly well, but practicing it was foreign to their volatile natures. Like Larry, each one of them would have liked to shout out the equivalent of, “Tell me. Talk to me personally, and make me the center of your attention.” If they had been first graders, each one of them would have done exactly that.

School is about reading, writing, and math; but even more, school is about learning that you aren’t the center of the universe.

By now, they were all underway; even those who had absolutely nothing to say had their heads down faking it. Neil had at least three minutes of peace before the first student would announce, loudly, that he or she was done. He used the time to study them. It had taken him a couple of weeks to fit names with faces; now he was able to fit personalities to faces for many of them.

Some of them were still mysteries to him. Martin Christoffersen was a puzzle. Big for a sixth grader, tall, athletic, quick with his hands, friendly, at ease with the other students. At back to school night, his parents had seemed bright enough, and their language had been perfectly normal. Probably his family had been in the United States for generations. Neil could find no reason why the boy couldn’t read, except that he was as dense as granite,.

Pedro Velasquez, on the other hand, spoke only the most broken English and his parents spoke none. It was tempting to presume that that was his only problem, but after a couple of months of observation, Neil was not sure. He had just about concluded that Pedro’s inabilities would have been just as great if he had been named Johnny Smith, with ancestors who came over on the Mayflower. It was really unfortunate that he was at a small district like Kiernan; like Brandy Runyon, he needed the kind of special setting only a larger district could provide. All Neil could do was to treat Pedro humanely so that he would continue to consider himself a valuable human being; he could teach the boy nothing. more tomorrow

Neil sent Greg and Rosa to close the drapes and a hush of expectancy came upon the classroom. This was good stuff. They had expected to have to work; at best, they had expected free time. They had never expected this.

The drapes let in only a little light, certainly not enough to read by. Neil opened his desk drawer and took out a pair of candles on matching brass candlesticks that he had borrowed from Pearl. He lit them. He moved them so that they threw his face into harsh relief and projected his shadow, huge and menacing, on the wall behind him. He opened another book and read:

True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken!  and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

He read The Tell-Tale Heart through to its grisly conclusion, timing himself by the clock on the back wall so that he reached the denouncement when the narrator cried, “. . . tear up the planks! here, here — it is the beating of his hideous heart!”, just half a minute before the period ended. For those long seconds after he had finished, the classroom was tomb silent.

Then the bell rang.

Half the students leaped to their feet screaming, then broke into laughter, and went out for their break repeating juicy bits of the story to one another. Neil sat back with a feeling of satisfaction, mixed with amusement at his own self-indulgence. There was a lot of theater in Neil McCrae, but he kept it on a tight leash. He had no respect for teachers who used their classes as captive audiences to gratify their own egos.

Once in a while, though! Just once in a while it felt good to cut loose.

# # #

When the children returned, Neil said, “Now it’s your turn. I want each of you to write a Halloween story for me. It can be about ghosts and goblins or it can be about kids like you going out trick-or-treating. It can be realistic, or funny, or scary. I want you to fill at least one page, and when you are finished, you are going to read your stories to the class.”

Bob Thorkelson said, “Do we have to?”

“Yes. This is a real assignment, just like any other day.”

Laura Dias wanted to know, “Do we have to read them in front of the class?”

“Yes. I’ve been telling you for weeks now that sooner or later you had to start reading what you wrote in front of the class. This is the day.”

“Do we have to?” This was a cry of genuine distress from at least three students.

Neil nodded slowly. Tony slammed his desk top down and muttered, “That’s cheap!” Neil ignored him.

By now at least half of the class had taken out paper and begun to write. By reading a scary story to them first, he had given them both a model and an incentive. One by one, the rest of them got out paper and began, but Olivia made one last try at getting out of reading her story aloud by asking, “Mr. McCrae, will you read our stories for us?”

Neil just smiled at her and shook his head. Olivia said, “Rats!” but there was a secret smile on her face that made Neil think she would have been disappointed if he had said yes.

By this time, those who had started at once were getting into their stories. Tanya Michelson said, “Mr. McCrae, can my story take place around here?”

“Of course.”

Rafael asked, “Mr. McCrae, can mine star Freddie Kruger?” more Monday

                On October 30, 2015, I excerpted this part of Neil’s story for a post. Today it seems awkward to have a Halloween story coming at Christmas, but there was no way to coordinate what happens in Symphony with what is happening in 2017.
                I also made a ten post excerpt of the Christmas section of Symphony in December of 2015. Few people reading now were with me then, so when it comes up in late January, it should be new to most of you.
                I’ve said it before — writing a blog has many of the same paradoxes as time travel.

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

Halloween 1988

“What is Frankenstein’s favorite food?”  Lisa Cobb asked.

Neil looked up from his desk to see that she was in tutu, tights, and dancing shoes. She was taller than the average sixth grader with more maturity in her face but still flat chested, so she looked the part of a ballerina. For the last several weeks she had been coming in to spend the time before school in Neil’s room, but she rarely approached him. She just hung around with her friends Sabrina and Elanor.

Neil said, “I don’t know, what is Frankenstein’s favorite food?”

“Hallo-weenies.”

Neil grinned and she ran off, pleased with herself.

Not since May, when Neil had first come onto the campus, had it seemed so different from a high school. Most of the sixth graders were in Halloween costume, and the rest were carrying around paper sacks with costumes inside. Half of the seventh graders, and even a few of the eighth graders had followed suit. All of the periods had been shortened five minutes to allow for a half hour assembly at the end of the day when the children would vote on who had the best costumes.

All the preceding week, the children had been in a state of high and rising excitement.  It was the teachers’ misfortune that Halloween fell on a Monday this year. Little productive work would be done today, and for the rest of the week the children would be excitable and irritable until their hoards of candy ran out.

Neil didn’t care. He was high with the excitement of it himself. These children were alive to every moment.

He found that he did not miss the feigned world-weariness of his high school students at all.  He missed their conversations, and he missed the sense of camaraderie that came of teaching near-adults, but they were too staid. In their own way, following their own values, high school kids were as puritanical as any Pilgrim that ever rode on the Mayflower. Peer pressure was like the rule of the church patriarchs, looking over every shoulder, examining every action by the yardstick of current fashion. Everything not required is prohibited.

These children were in a different kind of transition. Their teachers encouraged them toward maturity, and most of the time they conformed. But on Halloween, they were all seven years old.

When the bell rang, the students came in reluctantly, and Neil chose to overlook their tardiness. He also raised his voice and spoke over their conversations while taking roll, rather than try to quiet them. Then, without announcing his intentions, he opened the book he had brought from home and began reading in rolling, sonorous cadences:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore . . .

He carried The Raven through to the end, letting his voice rise and fall with the storyline, now harsh, now fearful, and falling away to near silence on the last nevermore. When he had finished, the class was silent for a moment, then broke into conversation.

The gist of the conversation was that they liked it. more tomorrow

Interlude

Carmen had not been in San Francisco in nearly three months, and Neil had not been there for several years. It was early Friday evening; they had no school tomorrow and no deadlines tonight, and apparently Carmen had finally decided that she liked Neil. So they headed in.

It was rush hour and the commuters coming back from San Francisco were choking the lower level of the Bay Bridge, but the upper level was reasonably clear. Carmen slid skillfully through traffic, found the right lane and made the wide southward loop that would put them on Van Ness. The city lights were just beginning to come on, as the lowering sun turned the skyscrapers to brass.

They parked in the lot beside the Maritime Museum and walked out to look at the boat basin. Since Neil had been there last, the three master Balclutha had been acquired and moved in. She was silhouetted against the lights of Richmond. The Thayer was gone, but when he inquired of a passer-by, Neil found out that it was just in dry-dock for repairs.

Neil said, “I was worried there for a minute.”

“Why? What is the Thayer?”

“Haven’t you see her? She’s been tied up here for years.”

Carmen laughed. “If it has been here for years, then I have seen it, but one ship looks just like another to me.”

“How can you say that? That’s like saying when you’ve seen one woman, you’ve seen them all. Balclutha is all right; she’s pretty enough, but she has no real historical significance. The Thayer was a west coast lumber schooner. She was built on Humbolt Bay and sailed the coast of California bringing down the lumber that built this city. I think she is the only one of her kind left.”

“I think you may be the only one of your kind left,” Carmen laughed. “How did you get to be such an expert on ships?”

“My grandfather was in the herring fisheries out of Aberdeen in the twenties. When they went bust, he came to America with my grandmother, and my father in nappies. That’s diapers in American.”

“I know what nappies are. I watch PBS.”

“Anyway, my grandfather settled in Astoria, at the mouth of the Colombia, and took up salmon fishing. He was still working at it when he was seventy-five. My father grew up with the sea and hated it. He got a job as a carpenter, worked his way up to being a contractor, put me through college, and dropped dead of a heart attack at age fifty. My grandfather went to his funeral. He’s still alive, and tough as leather.”

Neil stopped talking and stared at the ships. He had said too much, too fast, and his voice had lost its lightness. He had not intended to talk about his father. It was too soon after his death to speak lightly of it and the flippancy he had tried to assume had turned to bile in his mouth.

Carmen put her hand on his and said, “I’m sorry.”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up. It just slipped out. I meant to just tell you about my grandfather.”

“When did your father die?”

“Two years ago.”

“It has been ten years since my father died,” Carmen said. “I can talk about him now, but I still have the pain. I suppose I always will.”

” ‘If it is cured by anything less than death, the chances are that it was not true sorrow.’ “

“Is that a quote?”

“Hemingway.”

“I’d rather hear McCrae.”

“I didn’t mean to be pretentious.”

“I never thought you were.”

They went up the sidewalk and around the museum to look at the shops in Ghirardelli Square. They did not hold hands because they were not lovers; but they were becoming friends. The old black guitarist with the raspy voice and the pictures of himself with the stars was playing his ragged blues as they passed by. They admired the paintings in the galleries on Beach Street. Neil like the semi-nude self portraits by Ruby Lee. Carmen thought they were self-indulgent. Neil agreed, and liked them anyway. Carmen wanted to know if he liked the art or the subject. Neil said, “Both.”

They took a cable car from the Hyde Street station and played tourist, riding the hills as the city turned on her multi-colored night face. Downtown they counted the couples, categorizing them him-her, him-him, and her-her, and found out that San Francisco was still basically a heterosexual city.

They went to Chinatown, side by side, hands in pockets; but where Neil walked, Carmen strode, heels clicking, soles twisting under the back thrust of her lean legs, with a motion that turned heads wherever they went. Neil had never seen her this way, free, relaxed, laughing, full of tasteless jokes and outrageous puns. She had shed her teacher persona. It was her night to howl.

They ended the night at the Plow and Stars, listening to Golden Bough, and caught the last cable car back to Fishermen’s Wharf. They made the long drive home in a companionable silence, broken by the sound of soft music on the radio and only occasionally by talk. Neil watched her profile in the light from the instrument panel and thought her beautiful. more tomorrow

Over in A Writing Life today, there is a post that gives the background for this part of Symphony.

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

That uncorked the bottle. Neil leaned back with a bland look of false interest as Anne Marie Chang proceeded to pounce on his words and destroy his arguments to her own satisfaction. And, to judge from the sycophantic mutterings around the table, to the satisfaction of her friends. Her discomfort and anger paid him back a little for the morning he had had to endure, and he learned a great deal about Anne Marie and the shock troops for change that she represented. 

She had, as she herself said, unfinished business with the school system. She had been leveled when she was in elementary school and she had never quite forgiven her teachers for doing that to her. She felt that they had been saying to her that she was unworthy, and she was determined that no child would ever have to go through that again.

“But you did learn to read under that system,” Neil pointed out, baiting her further.

Yes, she had, but it had been boring and repetitious, and while she had been rote learning vocabulary, the children in the advanced classes had been reading stories that were meaningful and enjoyable.

Neil pointed out, “But if you had not done the hard, rote work, you would never have made it to and through college, would never have become a teacher, and would not be in a position to push your theories now.”

That was not the point. She could have learned just as well — better — some other way.

Maybe.

They were late returning from lunch, and Anne Marie had to hurry her afternoon presentation. Carmen remained very quiet through it, and Neil knew that she was angry with him. That could not be helped. He had come here to learn, and the argument at noon had taught him a lot about the hard reality behind the slick presentation.

# # #

After the meeting was over, Neil and Carmen walked quietly out to the car together. Before she started the motor, Carmen turned to him and said, “Why did you take on Anne Marie at lunch?”

“That’s a hard question, Carmen,” he said. “There were several reasons I was aware of and maybe some subconscious reasons as well. The simplest answer is that I couldn’t take it any more.”

“Couldn’t take what? Her?”

“Sort of. Her pretentiousness was irritating, but what I really couldn’t stand was the way her followers ate up every word without thinking about any of it. I can’t stand stupidity — particularly among the well educated.”

Carmen digested this for a moment, then said, “What did you think of Anne Marie herself?”

“Before lunch, I thought she was a monstrous, walking ego without a sense of perspective. Afterwards — I still didn’t have much respect for her, but at least it was clear that she really believed in what she said. And that she really cares for kids and wants what’s best for them. Knowing that, I couldn’t quite dislike her. But if she is going to set out to be a reformer, she have an obligation to be intelligent about it.”

“You didn’t find her intelligent?”

“No. A good politician, yes; within the limited scope of selling a product, she was very skillful. But her arguments were full of holes. Why did everyone buy them?”

Neil fell to musing and missed the laughter on Carmen’s face. She said, “Maybe the smart teachers don’t go to conferences?”

“We were here, weren’t we?” he said. Then he saw the grin on her face and suddenly the world was a better place to live in. more tomorrow

Anne Marie reached over to shake his hand and said, “If you have been teaching literature in high school, then you should be right at home with what we will be doing in the elementary schools from now on. We are learning from you.”

Neil smiled and thought, “If I bag some of this, I can fertilize my garden with it.”

Anne Marie shifted her attention elsewhere, for which Neil was grateful. All of the others at the table were either her old friends or, like Carmen, were old acquaintances pretending to be friends. Since he had heard all he wanted to hear from Anne Marie already, Neil soon lost himself in his food, offering only an occasional “Oh” for politeness sake. Gradually, his attention was dragged back. The air of sycophantic attention to Anne Marie was ruining his appetite.

A heavy-set teacher named Dana was saying, “What was that poem, Anne Marie, and why was it so strange?” Anne Marie explained, and Dana went on, “That was brilliant! Now I know how my kids must feel sometimes!”

Neil winced inwardly.

The pale, skinny woman at Dana’s side said, “Can you give me some copies of that poem? I want to try that same exercise on the teachers at my school.”

Neil stopped chewing. This was just too much to take in silence.  He said, “I wasn’t impressed.”

Eight heads swiveled toward him, and Anne Marie said in a silky, poisonous voice, “Oh? Why not?”

“It was too fake. It might have impressed laymen, but not teachers who have had any experience.”

Dana gave him a look that made him wonder if he had suddenly sprouted horns and a forked tail. She said, “That is exactly what our children face. Maybe you don’t realize it because you have spent your time teaching high school, but it isn’t easy for younger kids.”

“I have noticed that,” he replied dryly. “I didn’t mean that the exercise of putting yourself in the students place was false, just unnecessary. Anyone with any imagination could do that without setting up such an artificial situation. My complaint is that your conclusions do not follow from your set-up. In fact, that exercise would make a better argument for leveling than for heterogeneous grouping.”

He felt Carmen kicking him under the table, but he didn’t care.

“Would you care to explain what you mean by that?” Anne Marie said. Her voice was level, but there was fire in her eyes. She did not like being disagreed with.

“Certainly,” Neil answered, unabashed, and pulled a folded copy of Address to the Deil out of his pocket. “Here, take a look at the first verse. There are ten words that the average English speaker of today might not know and six of them sound like modern English. The structure, allowing for the fact that it is poetry rather than prose, is the same as modern English. What a reader has to overcome here is simply vocabulary. For that all he had to do is read at a level where he does not become frustrated by guessing the meanings of too many words in one passage. That does not represent what a non-English speaker faces. That represents what an English speaking child faces as he learns new vocabulary. The answer to that particular problem is simply to give him new vocabulary at a rate he can absorb, by letting him read things that are a little hard, but not too hard. That is easily accomplished by leveling.”

That uncorked the bottle. Neil leaned back with a bland look of false interest as Anne Marie Chang proceeded to pounce on his words and destroy his arguments to her own satisfaction. But not his. more Monday

They parked at an underground garage at the hotel where the conference was being held.

Since Carmen had shown him only coldness from the first, Neil had tried to avoid thinking about her. He hadn’t had much success. She figured prominently in his erotic fantasies, and in spite of himself he always noticed what she was wearing and how she was wearing her hair. Now he studied her covertly while she took time to fluff up her shoulder length curls. Her eyes were deep brown in a cafe-au-lait face. Her nose was thin, her features were finely modeled, and her skin was smooth.

In the elevator, her perfume surrounded him. He felt sixteen years old. He felt foolish and elated at the same time.

The elevator door opened and Carmen stepped out. Neil came a bit behind, enjoying her trim figure. She wore a short, close fitting black skirt and a patterned silk blouse of many blues, with her hair loose on her shoulders and a yellow scarf at her throat. The high heels she wore exaggerated the motion of her hips. She had the look of a hot, chic, young Chicana on the prowl; and the fact that she seemed unaware of the effect she was having on Neil — and all of the other men she passed — only made her more desirable.

It was going to be hard to keep his mind on business.

# # #

The conference was titled Literature Based Learning: a New Approach to the Teaching of Reading. The hotel had set aside a long conference room with a speaker’s table at one end and rows of tables facing the front of the room. They had shoehorned nearly a hundred teachers into a space that would have comfortably held half that number. Neil and Carmen appropriated a spot near the front, then Carmen left to run some errands of her own. Neil stayed behind to listen in on the conversations around the room.

Neil liked to circulate before things started and get a feel for the crowd. That way he could pick out the dull and the pompous, and zero in on the interesting ones who remained in case he had to get into a group.

The conference was advertised for grades K through eight. All the conferences Neil had attended before had been only for high school teachers. The difference between this conference and those was striking. Those conferences had been seventy-five percent male; this one was ninety percent female. As Neil circulated, he found that most of the conversations were about other people. He heard, “He said . . .”, and “She did . . .”,  and “They went . . .”.  At the high school conferences he had mostly heard, “I said . . .”, and “I did . . .”, and “I went . . .”.

Carmen returned and they took their seats. The superintendent of a local district spoke briefly and then introduced the main speaker, Anne Marie Chang. Carmen whispered, “That is the woman who gave us a bad rating last year. Whatever you do, don’t tell her you’ve grouped your kids!”

The speaker did not look that formidable, but when she began talking it was clear that she had an axe to grind, and that she had had a lot of practice in grinding it. After a brief introduction to the new language arts framework, and a hint that she had had more than a small role in shaping it, Ms. Chang passed out xeroxed copies of something she wanted the participants to read. Once they were distributed, face down, she told everyone that they had two minutes to read the passage and then they should be prepared to discuss it. Neil and Carmen turned theirs over, and Neil chuckled. Carmen said, “What is this?” She sounded irritated. “Can you read this?” more tomorrow