Somebody Else's Kids (30 page)

Tomaso was watching me now. I smiled.

“Why do people die, Torey?”

“I’m not really very sure.”

“I wish it wouldn’t happen.”

“Sometimes I feel that way too.”

Without raising his head, Tomaso’s gaze moved beyond me to the bullfighter on the windowsill. “My father didn’t really make that for me. I made it myself at Boys’ Club.” His voice was soft, almost peaceful sounding. His attention never left the statue. “That was dumb of me to say. My father couldn’t make it. He’s away in Spain right now, looking for a home for me and him. Why, probably right now he’s found one and pretty soon he’ll come get me.”

A single tear slipped out of the corner of his eye and ran in a wet path down onto his hands.

E
dna appeared in the doorway before school on the first day of April, April Fools’. It was not a social visit. I could see that immediately.

“You show me Lori Sjokheim’s reading books.”

“I don’t have them.”

“Where are they? What are you teaching her out of? I want to see it.”

I had been hanging my down vest in the closet when she came in. Now I closed the door and leaned on the knob. “I don’t have her reading books.”

The severity of Edna’s features made her look cold. The same fear was running through me that I suppose had run through Lori on countless occasions. I felt myself shrinking, a misbehaving child called to task by her teacher. It took all my courage just to keep looking her in the eye.

“You are teaching her from the curriculum I provided, aren’t you?” Edna said. The softness of her voice belied anger held on tight rein.

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not.”

“And just who do you think you are? Lori Sjokheim is a student enrolled in my class. You have no right to interfere with the curriculum I chose for her.”

“Lori isn’t ready for reading yet, Edna.”

“Says who? You?”

Arrgh. This was no fun at all. I had had almost three weeks to work up the guts to say what I believed. And here I was, the cold sweat under my arms a nasty dispiriter to my heroics. Two sentences and I had already run out of ammunition.

“Let me tell you something and you listen good,” Edna said. “This is a school, not some baby-sitting service for your poor little morons while you bleed on them. Our job in this place is to teach. Nothing else.”

I was taking in deep breaths to keep my composure. I was afraid I was going to do something humiliating. Like cry.

“I don’t mind telling you right to your face, if these children can’t make the grade, get them out of here. Put them someplace they belong. That’s what’s wrong with this country today. Socialism. Everybody taking care of everybody else’s business. And do you know what it is?” she asked. Her shoulders were trembling as she spoke. Her face was red. “It’s cruelty. It’s cruelty letting these kinds of children think they can be like everybody else. And keeping them out to grow up and produce more of their kind. It’s in nobody’s better interest. In the name of equality, we’re forced to settle for mediocrity. How many of your children know who wrote the ‘Gettysburg Address’? How many of them would recognize
Hamlet?
How many even know the pledge to the flag?”

Silence.

“Well, how many of them, Torey?”

“Probably none of them.”

“That’s right. None. And you’re standing there daring to tell me that you will not teach Lori Sjokheim reading. What
have
you taught them? How do you even dare call yourself a teacher?” She turned. “I’ve had it with your bleeding-heart liberalism. I better find out you are following that curriculum or there’s going to be one big stink.” The door slammed.

At 9:15 Dan Marshall appeared. He beckoned me into the hallway. After giving instructions to the resource students, I went out.

“Edna’s been down in my office for the last hour, Tor, and she’s fit to be tied. She’s going on about some nonsense over the curriculum you have Lori in. She’s trying to tell me you aren’t teaching Lori reading at all.”

My stomach was knotted around the Grape-Nuts I had had for breakfast.

“Now I hate to bear tales, but I do need to find out what you’re doing in here with Lori. Edna is plaguing me about it.”

I gazed at him as steadily as my wilting spirit would let me. “She’s right, Dan. I’m not teaching Lori reading.”

His whole body sagged. “Oh gosh, don’t tell me that. Say anything, just not that.”

An anguished pause.

“Dan?”

He looked at me.

“I can’t. Lori isn’t ready for reading. She isn’t even capable of reading. Or writing. Whatever her problem is, she hasn’t matured out of it yet. But I
am
teaching her and I think we’re really doing super in those other areas. She’s a bright child; she has a lot of potential. So just trust me on this, would you?”

Good old Dan, the policy man. He was one good guy. I loved working with him. He was good-natured, easy to talk to, sincere, helpful. I found him countless times better than other administrators I had had. But basically, he was weak. He tended to make decisions in favor of whomever the most aggressive party was. I never knew what his own beliefs were on any serious issue – or if he even had any. And when things got really rough he fell back on policy. The district policy book was the bottom line on everything.

“Tor, it isn’t a matter of trust. We have obligations to these kids as students. They deserve to be taught the curriculum. And the book says …”

“Lori
can’t
do it. It’s not a case of her not wanting to. Or of my refusing to teach it to her.”

Dan shook his head. “Then what’s she doing in regular education? If you don’t think she’s capable of learning, then let’s just face the fact that she doesn’t belong here. But for pete’s sake, make up your mind, Torey. On one hand you’re going on about how normal she is and then you turn around and say she can’t learn the normal curriculum. Either she’s a regular student and she does the regular program or she goes special ed. You can’t have it both ways.”

“A full-time special ed class? Where? Betsy Kerry’s class? You want to put Lori in with a bunch of kids whose IQ’s together won’t equal hers? Come on and think, Dan. You’re beginning to sound like Edna.”

We struggled back and forth over the issue like two mongrels over a bone. Neither of us was angry and in truth I’m not even sure we were on different sides. But the issue had gotten so mucked up that we could not pull ourselves away.

I hated what I was doing. I hated standing there in the hall arguing when I should have been in my classroom with the children. I hated the way I sounded when I got upset. I hated the way it made me feel. Yet I did not know what to do. So I just kept arguing my side of it.

In the end, I think I was the one who blew it. Instead of calmly discussing the real and valid points I had for not teaching reading, and instead of showing him all the good things Lori had been learning, I became increasingly frustrated with the argument. This turned me to sarcasm when I should have remained earnest and loudness when I should have stayed soft. Dan, in response, became authoritarian.

“We’re going to have to settle this,” he said. “If that means calling Birk Jones in, I’ll do it, Torey.”

“Fine with me.”

“Okay, then.” There was a long pause while we regarded one another, both of us, I’m sure, wishing desperately that the other would soften. Then he turned and went back down the hall.

I was left leaning against the wall and watching him. Grape-Nuts continued to grind mercilessly against my diaphragm. The kids in the room were whooping and hollering like savages. Things had been blown completely out of proportion. Even in my elevated emotional state, I could tell that. And it had become serious.

What a horrible day. I could not remember any that equaled it. All the terrible things that had ever happened to me with the kids had never carried this impact.

I think what heightened the offensiveness of this entire program was my own uncertainty about the mainstreaming law, which lay at the root of our difficulties. Since it had been enacted, I had lived in an uneasy alliance with it. I found it a pathetically idealistic law. It was a stepchild of that bitterly misunderstood Constitutional phrase about all men being created equal. No one is equal. We are born human beings and with that should go the innate right to be accorded all the dignities of being human, regardless of race, religion, sex or circumstances. But none of us is equal. Unfortunately, Congress still believes that with sufficient bureaucracy, money and laws, equality is achievable.

For many children the mainstreaming law had been a godsend, particularly, those children with physical handicaps. They were “normal” children. Their disability touched only their physical selves. In the same way that some people cannot run as fast as others or jump as high, they could not see or hear or walk. To educate them away from their seeing or hearing or walking peers was to no one’s advantage in many instances. Other groups of children, however, especially the retarded and the emotionally disturbed, received more pain than benefit from the law. To try one’s hardest, to constantly be putting out one’s best effort and always be the stupidest kid in the class, as in the case of the slow-learning child, was emotionally devastating. And for kids like mine who had skewed perceptions of the world or who needed intense, provocative interactions in the classroom, there was no way this could be given them with thirty other children and a harried teacher. For them the law could be slow death.

So Lori’s case was hard for me. I objected to our placing more emphasis on reading than on the child. I objected to blaming Lori for her actions and reactions when we had induced them. But in regard to how she should be handled, I don’t think I was as far apart from Edna and Dan as I seemed. The truth was, if there had been appropriate facilities available in the district, I too would have chosen for Lori full-time special education placement. She had suffered too much because we did not know how to teach her. I would have liked to have seen her out of the regular classroom for the academic subjects until we could develop a decent curriculum for her needs, but we had no place for her to go. When I had volunteered to take her all day long, I had thought I could simulate a special education placement. The problem rested in the fact that the mainstreaming law had taken away my legality. To me, Lori was a full-time special student and needed a special ed curriculum, which I thought I was giving her. To Edna I was reneging on my duty as a resource teacher who carries out supplementary classroom work. To Dan neither of us was right. In his policy books there was nothing governing rooms like mine – special classes which, because of the law, did not exist.

I was so upset by the incident I became physically sick. All day long the children were a trial; my temper was short, my voice harsh. I had no patience at all. I even yelled at Lori until she cried. Perhaps I yelled at Lori most of all.

As I sat in the teacher’s lounge after school and drank 7-Up to calm my stomach, Billie came banging in under a huge pile of books. With a gasp she dropped them on the couch beside me.

“Whooooo-ee, am I glad to unload those,” she said. “And Lordyma, what a day! You know what Lambert Nye did to me? You know what a little twit he is anyway. We were making sound charts for the letter R and Lambert gives me this jar of glue, you know, one of those mucilage jars, to stick the pictures on with. I go put the whole damn chart full of it. Then I pick the chart up and the stupid pictures ooze right down the front and into my lap. You know what that little twit gave me?”

I shook my head.

“Honey. Honey instead of mucilage. And he says, ‘Apwil Foolth, Mith Wobbinth.’ I could have smacked him. I really could.”

I smiled.

Billie gave me a hard look. “Somebody been April Fooling you a little too much today? You look lower than a run-over possum.”

I told her.

Tenderly Billie reached out and touched my hand. She said nothing. And it made me cry.

“I just wish I could turn the clock back to this morning. I wish I could say to Edna that I’ll do anything she wants me to and that this would all go away. I’m not cut out for this sort of thing, Billie. I’m just not.”

Billie patted my hand. “Isn’t a person in the world cut out for it, honey. It takes hard work to stand up for yourself.”

“Maybe if it made you feel better, more people would try. Mostly, it just makes me feel sick.”

A loud, infectious laugh. “Hah! Well, I have a cure for that. Right over on Wallenda Street under the sign of the Golden Arches. Big Macs on me, how ’bout it?”

“Billie, I’d love to, really, but …”

“Come on.” She nudged me. “And take that run-over possum look off your face. My daddy always had a saying for times like these. Said, you got a hard problem, well, you’re either gonna live through it or you aren’t. Live through it and you’re happy. You die, you’re either gonna go to Heaven or Hell. Go to Heaven, you’re happy. Otherwise, least you got lots of company.”

I had no answer to that.

The kids made sure, however, that I never had too much time to brood. And whatever I thought the magnitude of my own problems was, they unknowingly helped me keep things in perspective.