Neil sat back in his seat, faced their disbelief with a bland smile, and said, “Begin.”

Tanya Michelson looked disgusted. Casey Kruger looked over her shoulder and grinned at the humor of the situation. Tanya shoved the paper in front of Pedro and said, “You read it!” But Pedro was illiterate in both languages. Olivia Pinero led them through it.

Duarte Zavala’s group did well under his guidance. He could not read Spanish well enough to go to a Mexican sixth grade, but he could read a first grade book with ease and he took great pleasure in showing his teammates how it went.

All over the room, kids who had never been the best at anything were suddenly their group’s only hope.

Neil gave them the rest of the hour to work. When they came back from break, he called on Delores Perez and she read without error. He wrote an A on the board. He called on Lydia Ruiz; she won her group an A. Dixie Margaret Trujillo, Rafael, Richard Lujan, Olivia, and Elanor all earned As. Then he called on Oscar Teixeira.

Oscar looked stricken. He shook his head. Neil said, “Come on.”

Oscar said, “I can’t.”

“Sure you can.”

“No.”

“Come on, Oscar.”

Oscar slammed the story down on the desk and screamed, “No!” Tears streamed down his face. “I told you, I can’t!”

He shoved his chair back and bolted to his feet, then ran out the back door of the room.

# # #

Neil went straight to the office and borrowed Evelyn, the secretary, to sit with his class while he went looking for Oscar. It didn’t take long. Aside from the main building and the quad of portables, nothing broke the emptiness of the playground but a half dozen walnut trees. Oscar was sitting under one of them, still crying.

Neil squatted down beside him and waited for him to speak, but Oscar was too far gone in his misery to talk. Neil put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “Tell me about it.”

“Why did you do that to me?”

“Do what?”

“Make me look like a fool.”

“Do you think that was what I was trying to do? I wasn’t. You took me completely by surprise.”

Oscar wiped his face with the back of his hand and said, “What did you expect?”

“I expected you to read the story.”

Oscar looked at him for the first time. It was a quick, furtive  movement, as if to assure himself that Neil was not making fun of him.

“Oscar, who did I call on to read?”

“What do you mean?”

“Name them. Give me their last names.”

Oscar sobbed, “Just go away and leave me alone.”

Gently, Neil repeated, “Name them.”

Oscar looked away from Neil, out across the playground to the trees beyond. Neil tightened his grip on the boy’s shoulder and said in his softest voice, “Name them.”

“Ruiz, Lujan, Ortiz, . . .”  He named them all.

“Yes. And Teixeira. Do you hear any Anglo names in that group?”

“No.”

“Oscar, I set that whole thing up so that those Spanish speaking kids could have a moment of glory.”

“I don’t speak Spanish!” It was an admission torn from the center of his being, and in that moment Neil gained a great insight into Oscar Teixeira.

“You father never taught you? He never let you learn?”

Oscar tried to answer, but sobs rolled up from his chest and cut off his voice. He shook his head.

Neil sat beside him and caught the boy’s head in his hand, drew it to his chest, and held him while he cried. He said, “I’m sorry, Oscar. I didn’t know.” more tomorrow

Before the day began, Neil cautioned his students again, “I was serious about taking a grade for your group no matter who reads. So it is your job to see that everyone in your group is good enough to read for your grade.”

The bright students thought Neil was being cruel to them. In fact, it was the Pedro Velasquezes and Martin Christoffersens who suffered. They had to face the impact of three other students who were determined that they learn today’s lesson perfectly, or else! Oscar Teixeira had Rita Morales in tears, but when the time to read came, Pedro had never read so well in his life.

And he had never hated reading so much.

# # #

Neil had anticipated parent resistance, but he had expected it to come from the Teixeiras, the Hagstroms, or the Kumars. Instead, he got the chance to meet Toni Boyd for the first time. She was a petite brunette who was trying to raise Lee without benefit of a husband, and that left her little time to visit the school. She had to take time off from work to come in. Neil did his best to explain to her what he was trying to do. She left, unconvinced, which was only to be expected. Neil had huge doubts himself.

The next day, he took his case to the kids.

“Today,” he began, “we are going to set cooperative learning aside for once. I want to hear from each of you individually. Yesterday you got a grade for what your group did. I want you to take five minutes to think of how that made you feel, and then we’ll talk about it.”

They didn’t need five minutes. They already knew how they felt. They hadn’t liked it a bit. The top students didn’t like their grades riding on what their weaker companions could do, and the low performers did not like being singled out and made to carry the burden. They told him so vehemently and in great detail.

“It wasn’t fair!” That summed up their feelings.

“Why wasn’t it fair?”  Neil asked.

For most of them, the unfairness was self-evident. It could not be explained. It was Rafael who put it into words. “We didn’t get a grade for what we did. We got a grade for what somebody else did.”

“Actually, you got a grade for how well you had prepared somebody else. So you were getting a grade for what you did.”

“Yeah,” Oscar said, “but some of the ones who read were smart and some of them were stu–; some of them weren’t as smart.”

“Thank you, Oscar, for not finishing that word,” Neil said dryly. “What you say is true, not everyone can read equally well. Is that fair?”

“That’s just the way it is,” Oscar replied.

Neil thought, Remember you said that. Then he went on, “Well, we should have no problem today. I have a bunch of copies of a very simple story. In fact, it is from a first grade book.”

Half of the class groaned and the other half laughed.

As Neil stood up to distribute the photocopies, he said, “Remember, I am going to pick someone from your group and everyone in the group will get a grade from how that person reads.”

He dropped copies as he went, and spread a rising tide of disbelief behind him. 

“What!”

“I can’t read this!”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Mr. McCrae . . . !”

The children’s story encompassed only two hundred words. Transcribed from the picture book that Carmen had loaned him, it only took up two pages.

It was in Spanish. more Monday

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