Neil’s eyes were blazing and both boys drew back. He knew how this kind of wrong-headedness could destroy the good feelings in a whole class, and he felt helpless to stop it. Helplessness always made him angry.

Neil sent Sean to sit against the building a hundred feet away, but in full view, then talked with Duarte for five minutes. Then he sent Duarte away and talked with Sean. It did not take long for him to find the pattern behind their actions. It had exactly the same significance as two bull elk vying for dominance in a herd. It had nothing to do with Anglo and Mexican, but both boys were seeing it in those terms. That made it dangerous.

Neil called Duarte back and tried to get the two of them to talk. He got nowhere; at eleven years old they were simply to self-involved to understand what Neil was trying to do. Finally, as the class bell rang at the end of noon recess, he warned them both strenuously and sent them on to their next class.

# # #

Rumor travels fast. When the last student had gotten on the bus that night, everyone in the teacher’s lounge knew what had happened. Fiona came to Neil and said, “I hear my son Sean gave you some trouble today.”

“Not much.”

“That isn’t the way I heard it,” Fiona said. “I saw him in science five minutes after you finished chewing him out. He was steamed. So was Duarte. There is no love lost between those two.”

“Tell me about it!” Neil laughed.

“They have been going at it off and on for at least three years. What you saw today was nothing new, and no surprise to the rest of us. Did you write them up?”

“No.”

“Well, thanks for that, anyway.”

The remark irritated him. “Fiona,” he said, “I’m half-way insulted. The fact is, I was so angry that I completely forgot he was your son. Personal loyalty had nothing to do with it. The fact that he was your son wouldn’t have mattered if I had thought he needed to be written up.”

A flash of protective anger crossed her face, but she was a rational person and a professional. Her good sense rode down her mother’s instincts, and she said, “Of course not. And I didn’t mean to insult you.”

Fiona moved away and Carmen took her place. She asked him to tell her what happened and he did.

Carmen shook her head when he had finished and said, “I had those two in a self-contained classroom in the third grade, before we were reorganized. They were separated at my request when they went to fourth grade, but apparently somebody forgot and put them together again. I should have caught that when I looked at your class lists before school started.”

“Do you mean this school bases its class lists on who can and can’t get along?”

“Of course not, but we do try to separate poison combinations. It makes life easier.”

“Does it make life better?”

“I don’t follow.”

“They have to learn how to get along with their enemies someday. Life won’t put them in compartments where they don’t have to rub up against people they don’t like. When are they going to learn to deal with that?”

Carmen snapped, “Soon enough!  They’ll learn about life soon enough.” 

She slammed her chair back as she got up, and everyone in the room turned to look. That embarrassed her. Momentary vulnerability came into her expression and transformed her. Then she spun and stalked out of the room. more tomorrow

The physical and emotionally difference between the sixth graders and the older children was strikingly apparent to students and teachers alike, and the sixth graders segregated themselves. They shared a common playground with the older ones, but they staked out those areas that the older kids did not use.

As Neil watched, a baseball game was getting under way. Duarte and Sean were the captains; they called the rest of the class one by one to make up sides. To Neil’s dismay, Duarte was choosing only Chicanos and Sean was taking only Anglos.

Neil moved closer, thinking he was getting a sad insight into racial tension at Kiernan school. Instead he heard Tim Galloway hanging on Sean’s arm whispering urgently, “Choose Rafael!” When Sean chose Bob Thorkelson instead, Tim gasped in dismay, “He can’t even hit the ball!”

Sabrina Palmer jerked at Sean’s other arm and said, “What’s the matter with you? Choose the good ball players. It doesn’t matter if they are Mexican.” To her it was not a weighty matter of prejudice; she just wanted to win the ball game.

On the other team, Oscar Teixeira threw his glove down and snapped at Duarte, “Why didn’t you get Greg? He’s the best pitcher.”

Before the teams had even been chosen, some of the players on each side had begun to wander off in disgust. Neil heard, “That’s a lousy way to choose a team,” and “What’s the matter with Duarte anyway?” and “That was cheap!”

Neil whistled and waved the kids over to him. They came reluctantly; they didn’t know him well yet and being called in from the playground usually meant that someone was mad at them.

Neil asked them, “Do you want to play baseball?”

“We did,” Sabrina said, “until Sean and Duarte screwed it up.”

“Let’s try again,” Neil said. He pointed to two of the most athletic looking boys and said, “Ramon and Carlos, you choose teams this time. And make it fair. Duarte and Sean, you two stay with me.”

Neil had chosen two Hispanics as captains — he could as well have chosen two Anglos — so this time the children were chosen by ability and there was a fair racial mixture.

Neil led Sean and Duarte away from the ball diamond and asked them, “What are you two doing, trying to start a race riot?”

Duarte shot him a black look and said, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Oh, you don’t? Well, you must be the only kid in sixth grade who doesn’t know. Your teammates knew; they were complaining and walking off before I ever got there. What’s up?”

“Well, Sean started it.”

“I did not! I was choosing fair yesterday when you took all Mexicans.”

“That’s ’cause Mexicans are better,” Duarte muttered.

“Duarte!” Neil snapped, putting boundaries on the confrontation. He continued in a softer voice, “Duarte, do you really think Mexicans are better than Anglos?”

“No. But Sean thinks Mexicans are no good.”

“I do not!” Sean replied, then muttered under his breath, “I just think you are no good.”

Duarte lunged for Sean and Sean’s reaction was only a heartbeat behind. Neil caught them each by the back of his shirt and jerked them apart, none too gently. “Stop it!” Neil’s shout echoed across the playground, and the ball players all looked up. “That will be enough out of both of you. I pulled you aside to talk to you — to help you solve your problems. If you want to fight, that’s a whole different story.” more tomorrow

September 1988

Neil’s relationship with his fellow teachers was strained for the first couple of weeks. He was naturally friendly and under normal circumstances he would have quickly fitted in, but there was one question each teacher had to ask him, for which he had no answer.

It was clear that he was not used to teaching sixth graders, and if he had any particular aptitude for the younger children, it did not show during those first weeks. So why was he here?

Neil said that he had wanted to try his hand at teaching younger children. That was not entirely a lie, since he used to think about it in that dreamy state of considering unlikely alternatives. But he would never have done anything about it, so he had a hard time putting conviction into his voice when he replied.

That answer only led to the next logical question. Why didn’t he get a job in his home town? Why move away and leave all his friends behind to make the experiment? There was really no way to answer that question.

By the second week, the other teachers knew that Neil would not talk about his reasons for being at Kiernan and his reluctance to share such basic personal information made them all pull back from him. They were unfailingly polite, but that initial friendliness had faded.

That was the situation when circumstances threw him in with Fiona Kelly.

# # #

In any school, some of the students are the sons and daughters of the teachers. Teaching some other teacher’s child can be a little unsettling; under the best of conditions there is a flavor of conflict of interest.

The children of teachers are angels or hellions or something in between, just like the children of bums and businessmen. Sean Kelly was something in between. He was not quite a top student, but close.  He made mostly As and Bs. He loved baseball and he was good at the game. He was open and friendly, and if anyone had accused him of unkindness to any of his fellow students he would have been shocked and angry at the accusation. Yet, he had a weakness; a nemesis; his own personal Dr. Moriarity.

He could not stand Duarte Zavala.

Duarte Zavala was one of the Chicano children who broke the stereotype. Duarte was not quite a top student, but close. He made mostly As and Bs. He loved baseball and he was good at the game. He was open and friendly to anyone, as long as that person observed certain conventions. If someone disliked Hispanics because they were Hispanics, then that person became Duarte’s mortal enemy.

Duarte conceived the idea that Sean didn’t like Hispanics and began a campaign against him.

Sean Kelly liked Sean Kelly a great deal, and generally thought of others as adjuncts to himself. In this, he was almost identical to Duarte but, at eleven years old, neither could see the similarity. Sean’s self-infatuation made him condescending to the other children around him, male or female, Anglo or Hispanic. Duarte saw only that Sean condescended to his Hispanic friends; he could not see that it was an equal-opportunity egotism. Nor did Duarte realize that he also condescended to the same Hispanic children that Sean did.

Eleven year olds are not particularly good at self-analysis.

A prelude to the final confrontation came during the second week of school. Neil was on noon playground duty, wandering about to see to it that none of the larger children took unfair advantage of the new sixth graders. more Monday

Finally, he circled back. The sun was hanging low above the mountains when he came back into town, but the heat had not relented. He stopped at a mini-mart, bought a liter of Seven-Up and a pint of Seagrams, and returned to his apartment.

Still, he would not face the source of his feelings. He mixed a stiff drink and turned the air conditioning on high. He wandered into his bedroom to the rickety bookcase and made a selection, went to his casette collection and made another. While Eric Clapton sang and played on the stereo, Neil drank and lay back on his couch.  He opened the book and read:

Napoleon I., whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect for tradition.

Two songs later his drink was empty, so he laid the book aside and made another. Last year he had introduced The Duel into his class for the first time. What would a sixth grader make of Joseph Conrad? Nothing! From Conrad to the insipidity of a sixth grade reader. The thought was bitter gall in his mind.

His drink was empty again and he smiled at that, almost as if he were cherishing his weakness. He had not gotten drunk one time since the whole affair began. He would feel wretched in the morning. Good enough; he was in the mood to feel wretched.

In the months since this all began, he had not allowed himself the luxury of self-pity, but he was ready for it now.

The tempo of the music had changed. Clapton was singing softly about his shy, sweet lady, and how she looked “Wonderful Tonight”. The song brought Carmen to mind. He remembered the liveliness in her face when she was with her students, and the dead stillness when she was with him. He wondered again what Campbell had told her.

Back beyond Carmen’s image was another face, and that face was the source of all his melancholy. For it was not Alice Hamilton who had betrayed him the most. She was just a foolish young woman who had owed him nothing.

But there had been betrayal. When the accusations had come, there had been one he should have been able to turn to. Lynn; a tall girl with wild hair and soulful brown eyes, who had shared his dreams, shared his bed, and who had planned to share his life.

She would share those things, but she would not share his troubles. She was a teacher, too, and she could not afford to be associated with someone accused of sexual misconduct. That was what she said, but it was a thin excuse. Now that alcohol had loosened the iron fist of his self-control, he remembered once again the look in her eyes when he had told her about Alice Hamilton. She had hesitated. She had doubted.

How could she have doubted? Was it some fault in her that prevented belief. Or was there some secret weakness in him that only she had seen.

How could he be the man he wanted to be — the man he had thought he was — if his lover could look at him in the moment of his accusation and have such doubts? more tomorrow

After lunch, Neil’s second class arrived. The temperature had passed eighty-five outside; it was hotter still in the classroom. The children were tired and cranky from a long first day at school. The bloom was off, and they were not half so eager and mild as his morning class.

This group had P. E. first hour, so Tom Wright had done all the housekeeping chores that the district required. Neil only had to explain his own rules, pass out books, and they were ready to work a full hour sooner than his morning class had been.

They read the same story the morning class had read, but this time Neil listened more carefully to their performance. The ones he had chosen by watching for readers-by-choice were quite good for their age. He dreaded finding out how the others read. When he assigned them the same writing exercise, there was a perceptible psychic flinch. They had probably done that assignment or one just like it the first day of every school year since they had been able to write. Neil realized that he would have to be more imaginative in his assignments or sheer boredom would stop their voices.

He tried to study them as they wrote, but it was hard to concentrate with sweat running down his face. The children were suffering and whining. He didn’t blame them, but it irritated him nonetheless. What they think he could do about the heat?

Aaron Garcia snarled at Mickey Kerr, and Neil snarled at both of them.

When the last break bell rang at 2:15, the children did not run out. They walked out slowly and threw themselves down on the grass in the shade of the trees.

Neil watched them. Most of them were too hot and miserable to even play. He sighed and said, “The hell with it.” He had no desire to take his class outside before they were housebroken, but in this heat anything else would be cruel. He tucked a book under his arm, followed them out, and locked the door behind him. That got him some curious stares.

The bell rang to return to class, but Neil waved the other students over and sat among them with his back against a tree trunk. He said, “Who’s hot?”

They all were and they were vehement in saying so.

“Me, too. You know, we live on a funny planet. Even though people have been on Earth for three or four million years, we still can’t find a place that suits us. Every place on Earth is either too hot or too cold, at least part of the year.”

“What about Hawaii?”

“Or Tahiti?”

“Well, most of the planet is either too hot or too cold most of the time. Right now, I would like to be back home in Oregon, surf fishing in the ocean, in the fog. Where would you rather be?”

That question opened the floodgates. Everyone had someplace they wanted to be, and all of them were cold places. In Alaska, in the refrigerator at home, in a boxcar full of chocolate ice cream, or at the North Pole with Santa Claus; everyone had a preference. It took twenty minutes to hear them all. Lorraine Dixon had written two sentences about who she was, but she spent five minutes and a hundred sentences describing how much she liked ice skating. more tomorrow

“Who are you?”

“I’m Dixie.”

Neil nodded and smiled. “I know your name, Dixie. Now tell me some more. What are your parents’ like? Where do you live? Do you have brothers and sisters? What do you like to do? Tell me some of those things.”

“Oh.”

The other hands had gone down, so Neil turned to some papers on his desk and pretended to study them. In fact, he was studying the class as they “worked”, and he found that most of them didn’t work. They stared at their papers or stared out the window or chewed on their pencils. Two of the readers-by-choice sneaked their reading texts open, looking up from time to time to see if Neil was watching. Sabrina Palmer tried to get Tasmeen Kumar’s attention, but Tasmeen was one of the few who was trying hard to write. Lauren Turner and Lydia Ruiz carried on a quiet conversation. Pedro Velasquez flipped a paper wad at Brandy Runyon and she shot him a look that could have killed.

The bell rang. Neil told the students to leave their papers on his desk, and as Pedro came by he said, “Wait.” The other students trooped by, putting their papers on the pile and watching a very uncomfortable Pedro as he waited to one side. When the last one had left, Neil asked, “What did I tell you this morning?”

Pedro shrugged. Neil waited. Finally, Pedro said, “You told me to leave Brandy alone.”

“And did you?”

“Well, she’s always bugging me.”

“And I suppose you never bug her? Pedro, in my class, every student has the right to learn. It doesn’t matter if that student makes As or Ds, he or she still has the right to learn as much as she can. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’m sure Brandy didn’t find it easy to write the paper I assigned today. Do you think you made it any easier by throwing paper wads at her?”

Pedro scuffed his feet and said, “No.”

“Pedro, if you bug people and keep them from working, you are going to be in big trouble with me. Do you understand?”

Pedro nodded.

“Okay, scoot.”

Pedro was gone like a shot.

Neil sorted out the papers of the students he had observed. On Lauren’s and Lydia’s he wrote in red, “You would have written more if you hadn’t spent all your time talking!” He made similar comments on half a dozen other papers, including, “I appreciate the way you ignored interruptions,” on Tasmeen’s paper.

When he actually started to read the papers, a chill went through him. Five of the sheets were completely blank. Another seven had no more than one misspelled and unpunctuated sentence. He counted the papers and checked them against his class list. Five students had sneaked out without turning in papers. Only thirteen students had actually tried to do the assignment, and their work started at very bad and ranged downward from there.

Richard Lujan had written: “My nam is Richrd Lujan    I am twelve years   I hav two brothers and a cat”

Rosa Alvarez had written: “My name is Rosa    My mother works for a bank and my Father works in the fields     I hav  two sisters younger than me and i don’t hav no brothers”

Oscar Teixeira, the boy who had made five years of  excellent scores and one year of zero on his yearly test, simply said: “I am Oscar Teixeira and I am very smart” 

Well, maybe. more Monday

Since physical punishment had been outlawed, Kiernan, like most school, had gone to a step system. First came verbal warnings, then more formal verbal warnings, and finally, if a student persisted in rule breaking, a detention. If a child got so many detentions, a letter went home to his parents. So many more detentions and the parents had to come in for a conference. So many more and he would be suspended. So many more and he would be suspended for a longer time. So many more and he was expelled from school for the remainder of the year.

It was a fairly effective system. Most students never got to step one, and very few were ever suspended. But every year there were a few who moved through the system to the bitter end, not caring, or pretending not to care.

Explaining the discipline system was easy. The hard part was teaching the children the rules.

One would think that a few general rules like, be kind, don’t take anything that isn’t yours, and do your own work, would be enough.  For children, it never is. Rules for eleven year olds have to be numerous and specific.

Can you chew gum? (On the playground, yes; in class, no.)

Can you go to the bathroom? (Go during the breaks unless you have an emergency. Then ask.)

Do you have to raise your hand to talk? (Yes.)

Can I get out of my seat? (To get a kleenex or a drink of water, get up quietly and don’t bother me with asking. If I am talking to the class, don’t get up. If you are working at your seats, you may get up for books or paper or to sharpen your pencil. But not to visit.)

And so forth.

The rules had to be taught over time. Within a week, the children would know most of them, but they would forget, and Neil would still be reminding them of some of the rules in June.

By the time Neil had added the names of the new students to his roll and talked about discipline and rules, the second hour was over. The children headed for recess and Neil headed for the teacher’s  lounge.

# # #

Twenty minutes later, they were together again. All of the eagerness had gone out of the students’ faces. The housekeeping chores had been no fun. He distributed the language, spelling, and reading textbooks and gave them some time to look them over. It gave him a chance to observe them. Within five minutes he had moved Duarte Zavala into an empty seat far away from Sean Kelly. Their dislike for one another was plain to see. No other deadly combinations were immediately apparent.

After ten minutes about a third of the class was still content to explore the books, another third had settled down to read, and the others had become restless. Neil did not want his non-readers to be embarrassed on the first day of school, so he had quietly noted the names of those who read by choice. When the class read a short story together, he only called on them. That made things go smoothly.

Then he distributed paper and told the class, “I want two things now. I want to see how well you write, and I want to begin to get to know you individually, so write a paragraph or two telling me who you are.”

Four hands went up. He chose one. “I don’t understand,” Dixie Margaret Trujillo said. more tomorrow

There was a diffuse groan at the mention of Ulrich’s name. It sounded genuine, so Neil pretended that he did not hear it. Then Brandy Runyon yelled, “Stop that,” and slapped the boy beside her.

Neil snapped, “Brandy!”

“Well, he’s bothering me!” Brandy’s face was red with anger and humiliation, and her eyes were wild.

Neil kept his face calm, but he was cursing fluently inside. This was something he had not had to face in high school. By that time the students with real learning disabilities had been weeded out. Until Brandy was moved out of his classroom, he had to use the same discipline on her that he did on everyone else, yet she probably would not respond as they did. It was a no-win situation for both of them. He said, “What is he doing?”

“He’s making fun of me!”

The boy, Pedro Velasquez, spread his hands and said, “I didn’t say nothing.”

Neil had no idea who was telling the truth, so he said firmly, “Pedro, if you were making fun of her, or anyone else in my classroom, I want you to stop it right now. I won’t put up with it. And Brandy, you will learn to keep control of yourself.”

Brandy muttered something unintelligible under her breath and Pedro gave a wry shrug. Neil let it go, and got another surprise. The class had ignored the whole incident. They had not waited to see what would come of it, as they had with Tony’s boundary testing. They were used to Brandy’s interruptions, and took them in stride.

They neither approved nor disapproved; they simply accepted Brandy for what she was, because she was one of them. It was a lesson in the difference between a large and a small school.

Neil had lost the thread of his thought, but Linda Muir brought it back to him with a question. “Do you mean that we all be together all day?”

“That’s right.”

“Then we will never get a chance to be in the same class with any of our friends.”

Neil smiled. “Don’t you have friends in this class?”

Linda twisted her hands together and squirmed in her seat. All of the students were getting restless. “Sure, I have friends in here,” she said, “but my very best friend is in the other section. I won’t see her all year!”

Neil tried to look sympathetic, because it was clearly a tragedy for Linda. He explained that they  would have recess, breaks, noon time, and after school together. That didn’t help. Linda said, “But that’s just not the same!”

Privately, Neil agreed, but he wasn’t about to criticize the school’s schedule in front of his class. He was saved by the bell for the end of the first period.

# # #

The children left the room like water poured out of a bucket. The echoes of the bell had not died before Neil found himself alone, and he was thankful to be alone. He could have used an hour to collect himself. Instead he had five minutes to rush to the bathroom and back.

Next came the distasteful task of explaining the school’s discipline system. Most of the students had lived under that system for years, but there are always new students, and children forget. Since physical punishment had been outlawed, Kiernan, like most school, had gone to a step system. more tomorrow