When they had run out of suggestions, Tanya said, “Now let’s choose the best ten words;” and she listed her choices. Olivia and Casey liked smelly and wanted to add it. Tanya agreed, took out one of her choices, then said, “Who’s going to write them down?” Olivia undertook that task. Then Tanya’s hand went up and she said, “We’re ready, Mr. McCrae. We made our choices.”

We? Neil thought.

# # #

Neil did no more cooperative exercises until the next day. Then he had them list as many names for characters as they could think of and choose the ten they would like best if they were writing a book. Things went pretty much as the first day until Tanya’s hand went up. Then Neil said, “Today Pedro will read your list.”

Pedro sat up, woke up, and shook his head decisively. Neil said, “Come on, you chose the names. Surely you can read them.”

Pedro didn’t think so. Neil was firm. It was sad and embarrassing to hear him stumble through the list, and throughout the room there was a hushed shuffling as previously disinterested students suddenly began reviewing the lists that they had “chosen”.

Neil learned another interesting thing. In every group but one, the names were a mixture of Mexican and Anglo. In the group that Oscar Teixeira dominated, there were nothing but Mexican names.

# # #

On the third day they read together from Fog Magic.  One advantage of cooperative learning was cost.  Neil could afford to buy nine copies of the paperback out of his own pocket, where he could not have afforded a double classroom set. The children had one copy for each group and they clustered around it as each student read in turn. Neil did not tell them that they all had to read equally, simply that everyone had to have a chance to read, so in most groups the slow readers read only a sentence or two while the better readers took over.

When they had finished, Neil chose a student from each group to read to the whole class from the part they had just finished. Sometimes he chose a good reader; sometimes he did not. Tasmeen zipped through her paragraph, but Martin Christoffersen had a terrible time. When they had finished, Neil announced that tomorrow he would take grades on their oral reading.

“You mean everybody will have to read?” Rafael wanted to know.

“Everybody will read in their group at the start. Afterward I will choose one person from each group just like I did today, and take grades from that.”

“In other words,” Oscar said, “only one-fourth of us will be graded tomorrow.”

“No, everybody will get a grade. The person who reads will earn a grade for the whole group.”

He might as well have told them that tomorrow he would teach the positive values of communism. They exploded into lamentations, but he did not respond to them and they were still complaining when the bell rang.

# # #

Bill Campbell stopped Neil as he came in from the parking lot the next morning and motioned him into his office. He said, “Is it true that you are giving grades to groups of kids based on what the lowest member can do?”

“Not exactly, but that is close enough to the truth.”

“Are you trying to get us all fired?” Bill asked, only half joking.

“Bill, I’m using techniques they taught me in that seminar you sent me to. I don’t like them, either, but I am willing to try them. Give me a week before you lynch me. Okay?”

Bill shook his head and said, “It’s okay by me, but if the parents get you before then, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” more tomorrow

Cooperation

Cooperative learning is a great deal more than just working in groups. It is a whole array of techniques to assure that students learn from one another, motivate one another, and learn to work together.

He arranged his groups so each would have one good reader. When he ran out of really good readers, he chose Lauren Turner and Rosa Alvarez for the last two groups. Then he chose one poor reader for each group and filled in the rest with children of middling abilities.

The children knew none of this. To them they were simply in groups.

The presenters at the cooperative learning conference had given Neil a load of papers to read. He worked through them over the Christmas vacation, rearranged his room, and made himself as ready as he could be to begin the new technique. It looked like a good way to teach some things. He could take a literature book for children, say Island of the Blue Dolphins, and with groups he could see to it that all the children fully understood everything that happened in the book, reacted to it, and made it a part of their lives.

But — and this was the critical problem — the non-readers and poor readers would be little closer to reading independently than when they started.

There was nothing Neil could do about that.

# # #

Since the Christmas holidays had not started until the twenty-fourth, they lasted well into January. On Monday the ninth the children returned, cranky and unwilling to go back to work. They found the desks moved and set about looking for their own.

“Hey, what’s with the desks?” Flavio asked. “I’m up front. That’s cheap!”

“Mr. McCrae, can I move? I don’t like it here,” Carlos said.

“I don’t want to sit by a girl,” Greg complained.

“Well, its better than us having to sit by a boy!” Dixie replied.

When these children had come to Neil’s room in August, they had not dared to complain about where they were seated. Now that they knew him, they hoped to sway him into putting them next to their friends. Their complaints were in vain.

Only Lauren and Lydia were happy. They were back together for the first time since Neil had discovered Lauren prompting Lydia.

Neil read the introduction and about half of the first chapter of Fog Magic aloud. It included a description of the main character’s home village. Afterward, he told the class that each group was to write a description of their classroom, and he explained how they were to go about it. First, they were to list as many words as they could think of that would describe the room. Then they were to choose the ten which best described it.

It was an insipid exercise. Neil hesitated to use it, but the presenters had assured him that even this would be too hard for some groups at the beginning. He didn’t want to believe it.

As he wandered around the room watching the children work, his education as a teacher really began.

Not one of the students he had tagged as slow had anything to contribute. He watched Pedro Velasquez. First Pedro had been disinterested, then he had looked worried when he thought he was going to have to participate. But when Tanya Michelson said, “Big, green, crowded, full-of-desks, hot, cold, neat, yucky . . .”, and would have rolled on forever if Casey and Olivia had not forced her to listen to two or three of their suggestions, Pedro relaxed again and sat back to do nothing. As usual.

Pedro thought this group stuff was going to be easy.

Neil thought, “Not if I can help it.” more tomorrow

Language was not the problem; Carmen could translate. The problem was culture. Should he sit down? Should he expect a cup of coffee? If they offered him one, would they expect him to take it or to refuse? Would they be insulted if he refused? Should he treat Carmen as an equal, or take charge of the conversation? Should he come right to the heart of the business and give the gift, or would it be more proper to talk a while first? If he were in the home of any of his Anglo kids, no matter how rich or poor, he would not have been so much at a loss.

Carmen sensed his discomfiture and took charge. She spoke to Mrs. Alvarez in Spanish. Although Rosa’s mother spoke fair English, she was more comfortable in Spanish, and it let Jose share in the conversation. Then Carmen said, “Give her the package.”

Neil held out the package to Rosa and said, “Merry Christmas.” For the first time, Rosa and her parents allowed themselves to become aware of its existence. Before that moment, only the younger children had stared at it.

Rosa held it in her hands for a long time, admiring the paper. “Its really pretty,” she said. Neil wondered if she would open it now or at Christmas, but he had no way of asking without appearing pushy.

Then Carmen said, “Go on, Rosa. Open it.” Rosa tore off the paper, pulled open the box, and extracted the jacket. Her face was full of hesitation. She loved it, but she wasn’t quite sure it was really hers until Neil said, “Go ahead, see if it fits.”

Rosa spoke to her mother — asking permission? — before she slipped it on. Her face lit up as she smoothed the fabric around her. Then she had to ask; she had to be sure. She said, “Is it for me?”

“It’s yours,” Neil assured her. He started to add that Carmen had picked it out, but his good sense stopped him. It would detract from the moment, so he remained silent while she showed it to her parents. Rosa’s father crossed to Neil and shook his hand again, mumbling something in Spanish of which Neil only caught, “Gracias.”

Rosa’s mother said, “It is really nice, but you shouldn’t have.”

Neil looked at Rosa’s beaming face and said, “I wanted to.”

Things had gone well so far; it was time to retreat before he said something clumsy to ruin everything. Neil made a tiny motion toward the door and Carmen spoke to the Alvarez’s in Spanish one more time, then took Neil’s elbow and eased him toward the door as the conversation bounced back and forth between her and Rosa’s mother.

Rosa and her mother followed them out onto the stoop, then Rosa made a quick, shy motion forward and threw her arms around Neil’s waist for a moment. She said, “Thank you, Mr. McCrae.”

Her heart was in every word and her voice made it a song.

Neil and Carmen drove away in silence. Neil was not a man to accept gratitude easily; it made him uncomfortable, and out of his discomfort he said, “Giving her a jacket won’t change her life.”

Carmen was beginning to understand him.  She recognized the source of his uneasiness. She replied, “Giving her a jacket won’t change her life, but knowing that you cared for her might.” more tomorrow

Neil was not willing to proclaim his innocence yet again; especially in view of the damage that had recently been done to Alice Hamilton’s halo. He was a tenured teacher in his old district. They could not fire him without cause, and they had been unable to find such cause. If he chose to return in the fall, he had that right.

If he went to see Hawkens now, it would be an admission that he needed his permission to return. Cooperation was one thing, but he wasn’t going to roll over on his back like a dog.

# # #

Carmen drove by to pick him up at six. His own car was packed to drive to Oregon in the morning, so he tossed the colorfully wrapped present into her back seat and they went out to dinner. Afterward, she drove him out to the Oaks Apartments.

The scene was forlorn. Neil had seen this place twice each day as he drove to and from work, but he had never turned in. Two sycamores, a giant and its still considerable smaller brother, grew in the courtyard between facing rows of small apartments. The structures were of concrete block, two stories high with an open walkway at the upper level. There were four apartments on each side in each level; sixteen in all. It looked as if it had been a motel some time in its early history. The grass was still green and trimmed, even at Christmas time. The ragged palms out front were immune to the changing seasons, but the sycamores were bare.

Someone had wrapped the swing set in tinsel garland, and there were decorations in some of the windows. No children played outside so late on a winter evening.

When Neil got out of the car, he could see his breath. It was in the forties, which was about as cold as Modesto got. It would seem mild to an easterner, but to a little girl without a jacket, it would be just plain cold. Neil reached into the back seat and picked up the package. Carmen led the way without hesitation; she knew most of the families here.

The door opened to her knock, and Maria Alvarez appeared. She spoke with Carmen in fluid, rapid Spanish, then drew the door open and motioned them in. Neil stepped into the living room and looked around. Jose Alvarez was a slim, dark man in jeans and an undershirt. He got up swiftly and shyly from his place in front of the television and looked at his wife, who said something to him in Spanish. Neil could only understand a few words. Jose offered a brief, limp handshake, yelled, “Rosa!” and spoke sharply to his younger daughter, who quickly turned down the volume on the TV.

Rosa came out of the kitchen dressed in ragged jeans and a faded sweat shirt. Her face lighted at the sight of Neil and Carmen, then fell instantly. Was she embarrassed by her house or her parents? Neil could not read her. Wherever it came from, the expression was chased away a moment later by shy happiness. Rosa took her mother by the elbow and spoke rapidly, gesturing toward Neil. Her mother nodded vigorously and smiled at Neil again. She took his hand in a longer handshake and said, “Gracias. Thank you. Rosa says you are helping her get better every day with her English. We know how important that is.”

Rosa’s little sisters were staring at him, wide eyed and unabashed. He shifted nervously from one foot to the other, painfully aware of the brightly wrapped package under his arm. The Alvarez’s were nice people; he could deal with them in a school setting where formality gave a pattern for their interaction. Here, he did not know what to do. more Monday

Now Neil’s face was hard. “Mr. Burke,” he said, “I did not mention responsibility. I am not responsible for the way Jesse acts. I feel no guilt whatsoever. I just want to give him another chance. Not because I have done anything to feel bad about, and not because Jesse has done anything to deserve it. I just am not ready to give up on him yet.”

Alan Burke frowned and said, “Mr. Campbell, do you feel that way too?”

“Personally, yes. I always feel that way when a student is expelled. But professionally, it is my opinion that his expulsion is overdue. He is wasting his teachers’ time, my time, his own time, and he is destroying the atmosphere of his whole class. For the sake of his classmates, I still recommend expulsion.”

“Is there any teacher who wants to give him another chance?”

Tom Wright said nothing. Glen Ulrich said, “He is too much disruption in my class.” Fiona shook her head.

Then Neil found support from an unexpected quarter. Donna Clementi said softly, “I don’t want him back in my classroom unless he learns to behave himself, but if Neil is willing to take him on, I say let him. Who knows what will happen if someone believes in Jesse that much.”

The teachers left before the vote was taken. The bell for the beginning of school sounded before the school board emerged, so Neil did not hear until morning recess that they had agreed to let Jesse return after Christmas. He would come to school in the afternoon, attend Neil’s class only, and then go home.

But if he got into trouble one more time, he was out.

By noon, everyone in the school knew of the decision. As Carmen sat next to Neil and opened her lunch bag, she said, “You really know how to take on the world, don’t you?”

“You don’t approve?”

“I approve very much, but I have real doubts of whether it will work. I wouldn’t have taken him on.”

Neil shrugged. After a few bites, he said, “I don’t know if it will work, either, but I felt I had to try.”

# # #

There was a letter in Neil’s mailbox when he got home that night. It was from Dr. James Watkins at his old school. It was on plain paper and the typographic errors made it obvious that Dr. Watkins had typed it himself, probably at home.

Dear Neil,

I know that Tom Lewis intends to visit you. If he has, then you know already that Alice Hamilton is going to have a baby. Her father has resigned from the school board and I have spoken with David Hawkens, his replacement as chairman. Hawkens was reluctant to consider your return after your leave of absence ends, but I showed him that he had no legal recourse. He would like to speak to you personally and hear your assurances that your behavior was without blemish. I told him that his request was insulting, but he was adamant. If you are willing to comply, and I suggest that you do, he will be available during the Christmas holidays. You will be spending the holidays with your mother and grandfather, won’t you?

Whatever you decide, come and see me. We miss you here.

Sincerely,

James Watkins

Neil lay back on his couch and read the letter twice more, trying to untangle its mixed messages. “Come home, Son, all is forgiven,” would be a welcome message if he had done anything to be for which to be forgiven. Six months ago he would have jumped at a chance to meet Hawkens, but time and experience — and pain — had stiffened his backbone. more tomorrow

“That carries us up to yesterday,” Bill said. “That was the day he got in trouble with every one of his teachers.”

“We’ll hear from them in a moment. First, I want to know why we weren’t called sooner. This kind of continual disruption simply cannot be tolerated.”

Neil had pity for Bill as he tried to answer. It was easy to see that the boy had to go — unless you knew him. Unless you stopped to think that expulsion would solve Bill’s problems and the teacher’s problems, but it would do nothing for Jesse.

The teachers told their stories next. They spoke without passion, but the extent of Jesse’s rampage came through all the more clearly for that. The board members were appalled.

Alan Burke looked at the other board members. Elaine Sanders mouthed, “Expell him,” and Dr. Hardy nodded. Their silent agreement was clear to everyone in the room.

Burke said, “OK, let’s take a formal vote.”

“No!” Mrs. Herrera shouted suddenly. “You can’t expel my Jesus. He’s just a boy.”

Burke was unmoved. “Mrs. Herrera, we have explained the seriousness of Jesus’ actions to you every time we have met. You promised to get professional help for Jesus and for yourself. You promised to go to family counseling to learn how to control his behavior. You have not done so. You leave us little choice, and Jesus leaves us no choice at all.”

“Please, I have gone to counseling.”

“You told Mr. Campbell that you hadn’t.”

“We have. We just started, but we have gone. I’m trying to help him, but if I have to drive him to some other school and still drive myself to work, I’ll have even less time for him.”

“That is precisely what we have been trying to tell you for two years,” Burke replied coldly. “You are a little late understanding it. When did you start going to counseling?”

“We went Saturday.”

Elaine Sanders cut in, “You waited until after you knew Jesus was going to be expelled to start counseling? Didn’t you think that was a little late?”

Tears were flowing down Mrs. Herrera’s face. She whispered, “It’s hard for me. I want to be a good mother. It’s hard to go to a stranger to have him tell me that I’m not.”

Neil’s heart knotted up at her pain, but Jesse’s face was stone.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Herrera,” Sanders continued, “but for me, that is just too little and too late.”

Neil said, “Wait.”

Burke looked surprised. “Yes, Mr. McCrae?”

Neil had no logical arguments to make; he simply had not been able to remain silent. Fumbling for the right words, he said, “I feel sure I know what your vote is going to be, and I can see, from your viewpoint, why you are willing to make that decision. But I would like to give Jesse a second chance.”

“This school gave Jesus Herrera a second chance in second grade and a third chance in third grade. You would be giving him a seventh or eighth chance.”

Neil stiffened his jaw against the words that threatened to tumble out. Still, some of the fire he felt inside showed in his tone of voice as he went on, “Nevertheless, I have not given him those chances. I, personally, would like to give him a second chance.”

“Mr. McCrae,” Burke continued patiently, “I realize that you may feel some responsibility for the boy because you are the one he yelled obscenities at. But believe me, after reviewing the case, I would vote for expulsion even if yesterday had never happened.” more tomorrow

Normally, Neil loved the morning, and this one was brisk, bright, and lovely. Thinking back to the cold gray December skies of Oregon, Neil realized for the first time how sunny and beautiful the Central Valley of California was. Yet for all that, Neil’s life had the flat, stale taste of defeat. He kept thinking of Alice, now quite lost, and of Jesse whom he was losing.

# # #

Even though it was only two days before Christmas, three of the five members of the board of education were able to come in an hour before school started on Friday morning to consider Jesse Herrera’s case. They met in Donna Clementi’s room because there was not enough room in Bill Campbell’s office.

The board members, Alan Burke, Dr. James Hardy, and Elaine Sanders, sat behind a table with Bill Campbell off at one side. Mrs. Herrera and Jesse sat at the other end of the table and all five of the teachers who dealt with sixth graders were there. Mrs. Herrera looked strained but composed and Jesse’s face held no expression at all.

Alan Burke opened the meeting. “We are here to act on a request from Mr. Campbell that Jesus Herrera be expelled from our school. Mrs. Herrera, were you told what this meeting was about?”

“Yes.” Her voice was small and pained. You could see that she had been crying.

“Expulsion is serious business, especially for a child as young as Jesus. It means that he can’t attend this school any more. You can petition to have him readmitted next year, but we are not obligated to readmit him. If he is expelled today, you will have to show proof that his behavior has changed before we will consider readmitting him. Do you understand all this?”

“Yes.”

“If he is expelled, that does not mean he doesn’t have to go to school. You are obligated to see that your son is in school. State law requires it, so you will have to find another school for him to attend. No other school has to take him in; only the district where you live has that obligation. If he is expelled today, you will have to convince another district to admit him for the rest of this year. Do you understand?”

A tear escaped as she said, “Yes,” very softly.

Parent and child, Neil thought. Just like Alice and her father. You can’t separate them. Mrs. Herrera is on trial as much as Jesse. And it’s no fun to face a school board. I ought to know.

Next, Burke turned his attention to Jesse. “Jesus, do you know why you are here?”

Jesse nodded.

“No one wants to punish you, Jesus, but you have to conform to the school’s code of discipline. You can’t disrupt classes because when you do, your teachers can’t teach and your classmates can’t learn. Do you understand that?”

Jesse shrugged and gave them all a black look.

Doesn’t this mean anything to him? Neil asked himself.

Burke looked disgusted with Jesse. He said, “Jesus, this isn’t the first time we have seen you. We won’t be patient forever.”

Still the boy made no response.

“Mr. Campbell, give us a summary of how Jesus’ year has gone so far.”

Bill had a pile of detentions slips in front of him. He read them off quickly: talking in class, punching another student, disrupting, accusing a teacher of hating him when that teacher stopped him from bothering his classmates, stealing another students pencil and keeping the class from working while the teacher figured out who had stolen what from whom, disrupting, fighting on the playground, disrupting class, disrupting class, destroying another student’s lunch. It made a sadly impressive total. more tomorrow