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Title Page
Front
September
Mrs. Zajac wasn't born yesterday. She knows you didn't do your best work on this paper, Clarence. Don't you remember Mrs. Zajac saying that if you didn't do your best, she'd make you do it over? As for you, Claude, God forbid that you should ever need brain surgery. But Mrs. Zajac hopes that if you do, the doctor won't open up your head and walk off saying he's almost done, as you just said when Mrs. Zajac asked you for your penmanship, which, by the way, looks like who did it and ran. Felipe, the reason you have hiccups is, your mouth is always open and the wind rushes in. You're in fifth grade now. So, Felipe, put a lock on it. Zip it up. Then go get a drink of water. Mrs. Zajac means business, Robert. The sooner you realize she never said everybody in the room has to do the work except for Robert, the sooner you'll get along with her. And ... Clarence. Mrs. Zajac knows you didn't try. You don't just hand in junk to Mrs. Zajac. She's been teaching an awful lot of years. She didn't fall off the turnip cart yesterday. She told you she was an old-lady teacher.
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Awakenings
At the beginning of the first social studies lesson of the year, Chris asked the class, "What's the name of our country?" She made her voice sound puzzled. She didn't want to shame the ones who didn't know the answer. About half of the class fell into that category.
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Homework
At the end of the day, after the intercom had announced, "We have some birthdays," and had named the birthday children and then had sent everyone home, first the ones who went on buses and then the walkers, Chris would gather up her own homework and go to the door. She'd look back one last time, to ask of Room 205 if she'd forgotten something, and shut off the lights. She'd head down the hallway, past half a dozen doors like her own. She'd shove her keys in her mailbox in the office, and often she would stop a moment to exchange pleasantries with the chief secretary, Lil, who would be standing behind the long, motel-like reception desk.
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Discipline
Passing by the door to Room 205, Chris's best teacher friend, Mary Ann, heard screams and a thudding like soldiers tramping. Chris and Pam were sitting at a table down in the library, working on lesson plans. Mary Ann called down from the balcony, "Chris, you can't believe what your class sounds like. Are they supposed to be doing that?"
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Sent Away
Chris had been one of the model pupils whom teachers use as surrogates; the principal put her in charge of the school office for a day in sixth grade. She could still remember every time when a teacher had reprimanded her. Chris thought of her childhood as very happy, but also as constrained. She felt that she'd lacked confidence as a girl. She grew up obeying the many voices telling her what not to do, such as those of the nuns at CCD.
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Recovery
Through the salt-streaked windshield, this grimy part of town looked even grimier to Chris as she drove down to work. It was the season of muddy footprints in the classroom. Outside the classroom windows, the snow had melted. When the sun came out, it shone on brown grass, on the unburied trash lodged against the playground's chain link fence, and on a pile of glossy, bulging green garbage bags somebody had dumped out there over the weekend. Victor, from the bilingual room next door, told Chris that a couple of his students had come to school, eaten the free breakfast, and then split. In Chris's room, another of the pale ceiling lights had started flickering. The smells of packaged onion rings and cheese puffs filled the room at snack time, then lingered. In reading, a child from another homeroom mentioned that he'd found some handcuffs in his mother's bureau. A boy came into reading with snot hanging out his nose. Chris kept handing him tissues while looking away. The things that the children made in art looked discouragingly alike. The decorations in the room—last month's book report projects dangling on clothes hangers and strings of yarn, the once alluring witches' faces on the wall above the closets, the poster of the monkey, captioned "The More I Think The More Confused I Get"—all seemed worn out, like the view from an invalid's window. She cranked the casements halfway open in the morning. Sounds from the factories mingled with the hum of the heater—these were the kinds of sounds a propeller-driven plane makes; you could drift away on them.
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Isla del Encanto
Sacred Heart, a church of virtual cathedral size, dominates the once Irish neighborhood of Churchill. Driving to Mass with Billy at the wheel, through the now mostly Puerto Rican part of town, Chris huddled in the passenger seat and tried not to let her mind connect the sights of graffiti and litter with the knots of mostly dark-skinned people on the stoops and corners. She could have switched to a Catholic church in a neighborhood that didn't trouble her, but she refused to quit Sacred Heart and her favorite priests. A church is a church wherever it is, she told herself, and besides, going to one in a Puerto Rican neighborhood did her good. She'd gotten to know some Puerto Ricans while serving on parish committees. Leaving church, she usually felt less troubled, and would tell herself that she had to work harder on correcting her own prejudice.
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The Science Fair
"You're wearin' jeans!" said Jimmy to Mrs. Zajac.
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Among Schoolchildren
Thomas Jefferson imagined an aristocracy of intellect, made up in part of "youths of genius" who would be raised by public education "from among the classes of the poor."
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