“Stephanie Hagstrom, Cruz Jiminez?”

“Cruz’s gone.”

“He went back to Mexico.”

“He did not!”

“Well, he said he was going to.”

“That’s next month, you i— . . .” Stephanie, who was speaking, suddenly covered her mouth. She knew she wasn’t allowed to call anyone an idiot in class, but she was so used to calling her three brothers idiots that it was hard to remember.

Neil just smiled and continued. “Sean Kelly, Casey Kruger, Tasmeen Kumar, Tanya Michelson?”

They were all present. Rita Morales was absent.

“Linda Muir, Rafael Ortiz, Sabrina Palmer, Delores Perez, David Peterson, Olivia Pinero, Elanor Romero, Lydia Ruiz, Carlos Ruiz, Brandy Runyon?”

“Oscar Teixeira?”

“Here.” Oscar was leaning back in his chair, looking indifferent. He was the picture of a student of small intelligence.

“Bob Thorkelson. Dixie Margaret Trujillo, Lauren Turner, Larry Whitlock, Pedro Velasquez, Duarte Zavala?”

Neil closed his roll book and said, “That’s pretty good.  Only three absent today.” There was just a touch of sarcasm in his voice, but the children were unaware of it. He had been utterly unable to convince them that there was anything wrong with being absent from school.

He lost their attention momentarily as Bill Campbell went by the windows guiding a youngster by the shoulder. Bill remained so busy with discipline and paperwork that the children rarely saw him. He was the unapproachable authority figure and his rare appearances always demanded their attention. Now as he came into Neil’s room, they all fell silent.

Bill was smiling though. He said, “I’ve brought you a new student. New to you, that is; the children all know him. This is Juan Rogers. He has been in Mexico.”

The name Juan Rogers had been on Neil’s original class list the first day of school. The children had told him then that he was in Mexico, but that he would be back eventually. This transience was a thing they accepted; they had known nothing else. They would have been insulted to know how wrong it seemed to Neil.

Neil gave Juan an empty seat. He would have introduced him around the room, but it was clear that everyone knew him already. Neil got him a set of textbooks and took a moment to show him the parts they had already covered and to show him where they would begin today.

Neil had discovered early that they could understand and appreciate far more than they could read for themselves, so he always began the day by reading to them. He opened to the seventh chapter of Kidnapped and read the opening sentences:

I came to my senses in darkness, in great pain, bound hand and foot, and deafened by many unfamiliar noises. There sounded in my ears a roaring of water, the thundering of the sails, and the shrill cries of seamen. The whole world seemed now to go up and now down. So sick and hurt was I and so confused, that it took me a long while to realize that I must be lying bound somewhere in the belly of that ship, and that the wind must have strengthened to a gale . . .

A few of the students were restive, and once Neil had to pause with a hard eye turned toward Rafael until he stopped whispering to Casey; but for the most part, the story of David Balfour had them captivated. It helped that Neil had been to Scotland to see the land of his own ancestors. He did not hesitate to embellish Stevenson’s descriptions with his own experience and with explanations in terms the students could better understand. He had made a collage of pictures from a National Geographic article on Scotland for the students to study on their own time.

The students listened raptly, suffering seasickness and a head wound with David Balfour, making the acquaintance of the drunken first mate Mr. Riach, and learning that David was fated to be sold into slavery in America. more tomorrow

Like a flock of starlings, they went to earth momentarily, tossing books into their desks, and then they were gone in a body, out the door and out across the playground.

Neil sat down at his desk. Rosa Alvarez had remained behind when the other girls ran out; she stood near him, waiting to catch his attention. He said, “Hi,” and she launched into her morning story.

“Guess what happened last night.”

“What?”

“My cat had kittens. After we got home after back to school night she acted all funny, so my mother made her a box on the back porch. When I got up this morning, she had five kittens. One of them was black and white, one of them was all colors . . .” Rosa paused, searching for the right word, and twisting her shoulders from side to side as she always did when she was excited.

“Calico?” Neil prompted.

“Right. One was calico, and the others were all gray. They’re so cute!”

“What’s cute?” That was Linda Muir, who had come in for the last part of the conversation.

Rosa turned to face her new audience and said, “My new kittens.”

“You’ve got new kittens! How neat.”

“Who has new kittens?” Bob Thorkelson wanted to know, and the conversation drifted away from Neil’s desk. More students were streaming in now; the buses had arrived.

“Mr. McCrae, we won last night,” Casey Kruger announced.

Neil looked up in mock indifference and said, “Don’t you always?” Then he grinned and Casey danced around the room making batting motions. He was heavily involved in Little League. His father was a coach; supposedly Casey was good, although Neil had not yet made it to a ball game to see for himself. Neil was responsible for the boy’s nickname. Casey’s real name was Kenneth Charles — K. C. — and Neil had started calling him Casey-at-the-bat. Now he wouldn’t answer to anything but Casey.

When the warning bell rang, there were about twenty students in the room. Half of them ran out, heading for their first hour classes, and they met an incoming stream of those students who preferred to be elsewhere before school started. You could find similar groups in every room just before school; sometimes they chose their morning place because of a favorite teacher, or because their friends were there, or perhaps because of some feature of the room itself. Elanor Romero was always in Neil’s room because she loved the idea of travel and he had an extensive display of maps and pictures cut out of National Geographic. Lauren Turner always spent her mornings with Carmen, even though Carmen did not teach sixth grade, because Carmen kept games out for the children to play before school.

When the second bell rang, all the children were either in their seats, or rushing toward them. That was Neil’s rule; if you were not in your seat when he called your name, you were tardy and had to go to the office for an excuse slip. After the first week the children had gotten used to it, and it started the morning off right.

The bell rang. All the students were sitting in their places; most of them had their books ready and the rest were quietly sneaking them out of their desks. But, because Neil had taught them his rules with a balance of seriousness and gentle teasing, they were happily ready. Smiling. Not solemn, but whispering to one another at a level that did not disturb the roll call.

“Rosa Alvarez?”

“Here.”

“Tony Caraveli?”

“Here.”

“Martin Christoffersen?”

“Martin isn’t here today,” someone said.

“Flavio Dias, Laura Diaz, Greg Ellis, Raul Fuentes, Tim Galloway?”

All answered yes. Then there was a disturbance that rippled through the room like a sigh of suppressed laughter and Neil glanced up to see Richard Lujan sneaking toward his seat. Without seeming to notice, he shifted out of alphabetical order and called, “Richard Lujan?”

“Here,” came the sheepish reply, and everyone laughed. more Monday

Reading

The morning after back to school night dawned cloudy and cool. The hot season had passed nearly a week earlier. As Neil walked to his car, he almost wished for a jacket. He also realized that his attitude toward Modesto and the Central Valley had changed. His hatred for it had been three-quarters self pity, anyway. It was flat, and he didn’t like that, but the town itself was full of trees and green grass, and for the most part clean and pleasant. The countryside around the city was interesting, if different than he would have chosen. He had become accustomed to both in the two months he had been there.

He had also become accustomed to his students. He still found them frustrating, but it was not their fault they couldn’t understand Shakespeare, or that they were unable to deal with sophisticated thoughts. They were eleven years old; they were just exactly where they needed to be. He was the one out of synch.

Over the weeks he had begun to understand how to deal with them. At first, he had had to stop a dozen times a day when the confusion on their faces told him that they were not understanding him. That only happened a dozen times a week now, which was progress of a sort.

As Neil drove westward on Kiernan, he passed the Oaks and Johnson apartments. There was a cluster of Hispanic children waiting for the school bus. Some of them recognized him and waved. He waved back, and realized that after his first day’s reconnaissance, he had driven past this complex every day without investigating further. He would have to visit it eventually.

He parked his car and went to his room, dropped off the papers he had graded the night before, and picked up his textbooks. He signed in at seven-thirty in the teachers’ lounge and found that someone had made coffee. He settled in with a cup and began to review what he would teach that day.

Pearl was the next teacher in. She was heavy and always walked a little stiffly. “‘Morning, Pearl,” he said, “How did it go last night?”

“Fine. I had a fairly good crowd, and I got a chance to see some of the parents I had been wanting to talk to.”

Glen Ulrich came in and Pearl greeted him heartily; Neil tried to match her enthusiasm, but Glen’s attitude did not encourage any intimacy. Neil had discovered that he was a bitter, ingrown individual. He was the only teacher at Keirnan who did not visibly love the kids.

Tom and Fiona came in together. She waved at Neil. Their one-kiss romance had not blossomed, but at least Fiona had decided that she liked him. She had drawn him out and made him part of the group. He was profoundly grateful for her efforts; because of her, there were moments like this when his loneliness almost disappeared and his displacement did not trouble him.

At ten minutes until eight o’clock, by unspoken common consent, the teacher’s lounge emptied as they all went off to their rooms to let in the early arriving students.

As Neil approached, a small knot of girls were giggling together. Their faces came up an they piped good-mornings in their liquid, bird-like voices, smiling and brimming with life. “Good morning, girls,” Neil replied, then added, “Good morning, Rosa,” for the benefit of the round faced, solemn one who stood a little away from her companions. She rewarded him with a brief, shy smile, and a murmured greeting.

Neil unlocked the door and propped it back. They flowed around him like water, never thinking to let him in first. All the formal politeness that had characterized their first few days with him was gone now. They had accepted him completely, like family, and his room had become their second home. more tomorrow

“Of course it is, but he doesn’t disturb anyone else. He is cheating himself, but he is not interfering with any other student’s education. From my viewpoint, that is a smaller discipline problem.”

“Not from mine. All I care about is his education.”

Neil and John Teixeira locked eyes briefly. There was no way to disguise the tension that lay between them. Neil was astonished at himself; he had always prided himself on his self-control, but John Teixeira pushed all his buttons.

“I care about Oscar’s education, too. I care about the education of all of my students, and I’ll need your help if I am going to help Oscar.”

The other parents had drifted out, so Neil said, “Let me shut the door, and let’s sit down and talk about it.”

Teixeira said, “I’m tired of talking about that boy and his problems.”

His wife snapped, “John!” It was the first word she had said, and it came out sharply, like an electrical discharge. “You won’t win this argument by intimidation like you do in the courtroom. Sit down and talk to the man. He wants to help.”

So, Neil thought, there is more to this family than meets the eye. Aloud he said, “Are you a lawyer?” When Teixeira agreed that he was, it was all Neil could do to keep from saying, “I might have known.”

Once he gave in to the inevitable, Teixeira became calm and was able to discuss his son rationally. He had always been an A student; in fact, he had never made anything but As until last year. His father and mother had been proud of him and had encouraged him to do his best.

Pride and encouragement are words which seem plain enough, but Neil knew that they cover a whole range of attitudes. How had that pride been expressed — or had it? How had they encouraged him; through praise, rewards, threats, or in some other way? Neil tried to find out the answers to those questions, with very little success. John Teixeira was too practiced in his profession to let out any information that he had not personally decided was relevant.

On the surface, the conversation was fruitful, but Neil came away feeling that all of the important issues had been bypassed. John  Teixeira himself was clearly the center of the family, and in his personality and history lay the causes and the cures of his son’s problems. After an hour of conversation, Neil felt no closer to those solutions.

# # #

When he walked out after the Teixeiras had gone, Neil found the parking lot almost empty. Only Carmen’s small sedan remained. He looked around, unwilling to leave her alone so late at night, and saw her coming out of her room. 

She smiled at him as she came up, surprising him with her friendliness. “You didn’t have to wait for me, you know. But thank you, anyway.”

“No problem.”

“Why so late?”

“I spent the last hour talking to the Teixeiras about Oscar.”

“No! Really! You must have the magic touch. Last year, he wouldn’t talk to anybody about it. It must be because you are el maestro and Oscar’s last teacher was la maestra.”

Neil shook his head. “I doubt that. John Teixeira strikes me as someone who doesn’t even want to admit that he is Chicano.”

“Oh, you’re right there. He wants to seem like an Anglo; he even got himself a blonde Anglo wife. But inside, that man is the most macho Mexican you are ever going to see.”

It was a curious observation coming from someone who was so obviously proud of her Chicano heritage. Somehow it fit, and somehow it seemed to be the key to Oscar’s problems. Only Neil could not see how to use that key. more tomorrow

Anna Breshears’ parents proved to be as colorless and forgettable as she was. Lupe Ochoa’s mother came drifting through, looking everywhere and saying nothing. Neil did not even know who she was until later when he read the names on his sign-in sheet.

Shelly Gibson’s parents were dark skinned Hispanics; there was nothing but the family name to indicate any Anglo ancestry. On the other hand, Delores Perez’s pale skinned parents showed no evidence of Mexican ancestry.  Anglos and Chicanos had been intermarrying in California since long before the gold rush, and family names were poor indicators of race.

Karen Whitlock came in with Larry at her side. Only a few of the students had come, and Larry did not look comfortable being dragged along. Mrs. Whitlock bubbled her enthusiasm for the school and everything connected with it. Larry wandered around the room looking for something to do, or perhaps for somewhere to hide. When Neil gently suggested that Larry’s attitude indicated that he was not particularly interested in school, Karen Whitlock did not hear him. She had a knack for only hearing what she wanted to hear.

Many of the parents had come and gone when Oscar Teixeira’s father and mother came in. He was tall, sharp featured and very dark, with hair clipped close and wearing a conservative business suit. His wife was petite, with cropped blonde hair and blue eyes. John Teixeira walked straight up to Neil and shook hands. Neil was just getting used to Chicano shyness and slack hand shakes, but Teixeira’s grip was firm and he met Neil eye to eye.

They exchanged greetings, then John Teixeira said bluntly, “How is Oscar doing this year?” There was just enough emphasis on the word “this” to write off last year as a bad dream, and an underlying uneasiness that showed little faith in the present or the future.

Neil’s reply was equally blunt. “Badly. He isn’t learning a thing. I would say he has stopped trying, except that he is trying very hard to be dense.”

Fire flashed in John Teixeira’s eyes and for a moment Neil thought he was going to rise to his son’s defense and blame the school. But the momentary defensiveness faded as quickly as it had come, and Teixeira said something short and bitter. His wife jerked at his arm and shushed him.

“What’s the point,” he snapped at her. “The boy has gone bad.”

Most of the other parents had left; only a few were standing in knots of conversation near the door. Speaking softly, Neil said, “I wouldn’t say that. The boy has a problem that needs to be solved, that’s all.”

“No one could solve it last year. Are you that much better?”

Mentally, Neil drew back. The last thing he wanted was a fight, but John Teixeira’s voice grated on him like chalk on a blackboard and it was all he could do to remain calm and civil. Neil’s voice sounded false in his own ears as he replied, “No one person can solve anyone else’s problems. But with your cooperation — and his — we can try to help him.”

Teixeira shook his head. “Maybe. I’m certainly willing to do anything, but I fought him all last year and got nowhere. He promised me things would be better this year . . .”

“Maybe they are better,” Neil said. “I only know what happened last year from reading his folder. So far he has not been any particular discipline problem. He just won’t work. And that is such a waste, with his mind.”

Teixeira homed in instantly on Neil’s words. “You mean,” he said icily, “that not working isn’t a discipline problem?” more tomorrow

It was nice, Janice Hagstrom said, that Stephanie got to spend three periods with one teacher, and she had heard such good things from Stephanie about Mr. McCrae; Neil, wasn’t it? Was Stephanie as talkative at school as she is at home? That little chatterbox never shut up, but Janice guessed that was all right because she never let her good times interfere with her schoolwork; at least she hadn’t yet, but time would tell, and Janice hoped that this new situation wouldn’t make her schoolwork suffer, and Neil was to call her the minute her daughter’s grades slipped even a little bit, because you know how important it is to nip these things in the bud.

Neil agreed that it was best to nip problems in the bud. As Janice Hagstrom wandered off to talk to one of her friends, he wondered if her husband ever got to say anything. He remembered what Carmen had said of Stephanie before school started. “Stephanie will sound smart because she has mastered her language.” Apparently Stephanie’s mother had not only mastered the English language; she had put it in chains and was making it run on a treadmill.

Janice Hagstrom’s exit left Neil a little shell-shocked, so that he was not quite ready for the soft spoken couple who had followed her through the door. Once again the woman spoke, but this time it was because her husband had no English. Maria and Jose Alvarez; Maria was round, short, and solemn like her daughter Rosa; her husband was compact and wiry. They each shook hands with a quick, limp motion. Jose’s dark, bright eyes followed the conversation, reading their faces since he could not understand their words.

Maria wanted to know if their daughter was doing well, and could not quite believe it when Neil said that she was. She was getting Cs, and once in a while, a D, so how could she be doing well? Neil pointed out that she also got a B once in a while, and even an occasional A. He explained that she was behind the rest of the class because she had not yet mastered English, but she was getting better every day, and that they should continue to encourage her.

Jose got a little of that, and said angrily to his wife, “What mean, not speak English?”

She answered him in liquid Spanish, and Neil could only hope that she was telling her husband what he had said. For all he knew, she might be changing it around completely. He thought, “If I were going to stay in California schools, I would have to learn Spanish.”

Neil tried again to get them to encourage Rosa, but the two of them walked away arguing in Spanish and leaving Neil feeling helpless.

Tanya Michelson came in with her parents and Neil had to control himself to keep from staring. Tanya was tiny, but both her parents were six footers, and she looked like a second grader standing between them. At first Neil could see no family resemblance, but when they started talking that all changed. Tanya’s father could not complete a sentence without some interruption from his wife, and he shot his wife black looks like the ones Neil aimed at Tanya when she interrupted his class.

Neil answered their questions politely, and said that Tanya  was doing fine. Where there any problems, they wanted to know. He said that she interrupted a lot. Mrs. Michelson cut him off to say that she always had.

Ten minutes into the open house, there were a dozen parents in the room, chatting with one another and looking idly at the textbooks and bell schedule. Ramon Flores’ father had come in nodding, smiling, and avoiding conversation. Even his extreme shyness had not kept him from coming to see where his son spent his days. more Monday

“Do many parent’s show up?”

“Since you have all of the sixth graders, you can expect about thirty people to show up. In some ways, it will be the most important thirty. The ones who won’t show up for back to school tend to be of little use to you anyway.”

Neil was a little puzzled by the whole concept. “I guess I don’t quite follow you. What use are parents anyway — to me, I mean. I am not used to dealing with parents. In my old high school, I rarely even met them.”

“What did you do about discipline?”

“Discipline was between the student and me, or if it got really serious, between the student, me, and the office. The parent had little to do with it.”

“I see. Well, that might be all right for kids who are almost grown, but these students are still too young for that. Parent cooperation can still make all the difference at this age, and we try to cultivate it. That is what back to school night is really all about.”

With that in mind, Neil set about preparing. It didn’t take much physical effort. He cleaned up his room the day of the open house, wrote the bell schedule and a summary of the school rules on the blackboard, and put two name tags, one for each section, on each desk. He set extra copies of his textbooks out on the counter, and stapled some of the better student papers to the bulletin board.

The mental preparation was another story. Back to school night was scheduled for the eleventh of October. By that time he would have been teaching his students a little over four weeks. He had sixty-four students all together. How well did he know them? Could he even connect faces with names without error?

He ran his finger down his class list as he sat alone in his apartment that evening and tried to bring each face into focus. Some were easy. Tony and Jesse, his troublemakers, were engraved in his brain. So were Sean and Duarte, Rosa Alvarez and Rita Morales, Stephanie, Tasmeen and Rabindranath, Brandy, Oscar, little Randi Nguyen, and a dozen others. But the other forty were still hazy. He could put a face to most names, but for a few of them he still was not sure that he was putting the right face with the right name.

He spent the evening with his class list, as if he were cramming for an examination — and, in fact, he was.

# # #

When the night came, all his worries proved unfounded. The parents who came were unfailingly polite, and none of them were expecting miracles. He only had to jog his memory twice to bring up quiet, anonymous student faces. All the rest who came were parents of students who had made themselves known to him within the first week of class.

There was a message in that, but which way did the arrow point? Were these parents present because their children excelled and they were proud of them? Or were the children driven to make themselves known because the parents were always there expecting it of them?

# # #

The first woman to come in was tall, blonde, and confident. She stuck out her hand and said, “Hi. I’m Janice Hagstrom. This is my husband, Bill.” Bill was a bit shorter than his wife. He was young and good-looking, but he seemed a bit abashed in her presence. Janice did all the talking. Stephanie was her oldest daughter, and she always did well in school, but Janice was a little worried because this was a new situation and all, going from teacher to teacher all day, and she was glad that her daughter had at least one place to call home. more tomorrow