“And people say I can’t be nice!” said Michael.
“He can’t,” said Olivia. “He’s abusive to me.”
“I’m not abusive unless you’re abusive to me,” said Michael.
I asked what abusive meant.
“When you hit me, you’re getting hit back, two times as bad!” said Michael.
I felt drained, numb, brain-dead. In the back of the room three of the remaining kids had begun playing hockey with a balled-up piece of paper, using their iPad cases as hockey sticks. “This is a long day,” I said.
“A really long day,” said Olivia. “I wish we’d start school at nine o’clock. They don’t understand how crazy I am if I don’t sleep. On Sundays I sleep till nine-thirty.”
“You talk a lot when you don’t sleep,” said Michael.
“I talk a LOT,” said Olivia. “Boys are always talking about . . . never mind.” She looked at me. “Are you new here?”
“Yes, I’m very new here,” I said.
“Do you like it?”
“Yes, I do. I like you guys. You seem like good people. Although sometimes things get a little out of control.”
“I was listening to what you said this morning,” said Michael. “You’ve got the wrong idea. Kids here are not what they seem. They spread rumors about me—bad stuff.”
“So all that clique business they were talking about is true?”
“It’s not cliques, it’s more like gang warfare,” said Michael.
“There are four girls in my class who are snobs,” said Olivia.
“DUDE, DON’T OPEN YOUR LEGS, WHATEVER YOU DO!” said one of the hockey players.
“Hah-hah, please,” said Courtney.
“Excuse me for a second,” I said. I went to the back of the room. “What is this, air hockey, brain hockey? Just crank it back, okay? Keep the volume down.”
I went back to Michael and Olivia. “So what are people snobby about?”
“Everything,” said Olivia. “They think that they have everything, and they really don’t. I’m kind of snobby myself.” She asked Michael, “How do you think I am? I can be really nice, but I am very snobby sometimes.”
I felt it was time for a platitude. “If everyone at school can find one or two people they get along with, that’s enough, right?” I took a bite of an apple.
“I hate apples,” said Olivia.
“There’s one kid, you even say something disrespectful to him, he’s going to punch you,” said Michael.
“Do you know I got grounded for punching my mom?” said Olivia.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“She was being annoying. She was behind me and I was trying to go out the door, and she pushed me, so I turned around and smacked her, and when I got home she was like, ‘You’re grounded.’ So I called the cops on her. I said, ‘My mom’s grounding me for punching her and I didn’t punch her.’ I lied about that.”
I said, “You called the cops on your mom?”
“WAVE TWO, YOU ARE DISMISSED.”
“Take it easy!” I said. They left.
I drove home. Day Five, check. At least I hadn’t bled on a whiteboard.
DAY SIX. Monday, March 24, 2014
LASSWELL HIGH SCHOOL, ED TECH
OUT COMES THE EYEBALL
ON MONDAY, Beth gave me a choice of several assignments—fourth grade, second grade, the middle school. She hesitated. “Or, there’s an ed tech spot at the high school.” I said I’d do it. I drove there slowly, stuck behind a heating-oil truck. Even so I got to the parking lot early. I parked next to a large gray snowpile and sat thinking about the strangeness of giving a kid like Shane, who seemed quite normal albeit sometimes irritating, a daily drug to control his behavior. The early sun cast interesting pink shadows on the rubble of frozen slush. I went inside.
“You are Lola St. Pierre today,” said Paulette, the secretary, as I signed in. The ed tech room was just down the hall from the main office—a small chamber with a scatter of mismatched chairs and four desks and a file cabinet and not much on the walls. I shook hands with Mr. Bowles, the affable, black-shirted, striped-tied ed tech supervisor, and told him I was filling in for Mrs. St. Pierre.
A plumpish, friendly middle-aged woman, Mrs. Meese, looked up from her desk. “Mrs. St. Pierre is out, too?”
“Everybody’s out,” said Mr. Bowles.
“I’m shocked,” said Mrs. Meese. They two of them began conferring. “Mr. Wakefield is in for Mrs. Batelle. So this gentleman here”—meaning me—“will be with Nina.” Their eyes met—clearly it wasn’t a good idea for me to spend the day with Nina. “Nina has boundary issues,” Mr. Bowles explained. Better, he thought, if Mrs. Meese spent the day with Nina, and then I’d do ed tech duty in the classes that Mrs. Meese normally went to.
Mrs. Meese handwrote her Monday schedule, complete with room numbers and the names of the kids in each class I was supposed to keep an eye on—usually they were the ones with Individualized Education Plans—and gave it to me. “Our trimester has just begun,” she said. “We’re kind of just getting our feet wet here.” The first class was English, with twenty-six students, one teacher, and two ed techs. “We both kind of police one side of the room each,” Mrs. Meese said. “What we’ve begun in that room is we’re reading a book. Mrs. Kennett has been reading and the kids have been following along.” Next was a history class, then came Financial Algebra, then an elective called Community Safety, and then came a small literacy study group, where they were working on the difference between literal and figurative language. “The kids are going to need to highlight or underline things in the story,” Mrs. Meese said. “So if you’re familiar with all forms of language you’ll be fine with that.”
I thanked her for the helpful orientation.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” said Mrs. Meese.
The English teacher, Mrs. Kennett, was about thirty, upbeat and appealing, wearing a red cardigan. Her room was painted a pale blue, and it had six six-sided, wood-grained-laminate tables in it; the chairs had tennis balls over their casters so that they wouldn’t squeak. I took a chair near the windows and she walked to the front of the class and turned sweepingly to face them. “Goo-oood morning, folks!” Mrs. Kennett said, as if she were Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam. “How are ya!”
Nobody answered. Five conversations continued.
“It’s like ten degrees outside,” said Mrs. Kennett loudly. “Who else is not okay with that?”
“I’m okay with it,” said Jared, in a blue sweatshirt.
“Come on, it’s the end of March!” Mrs. Kennett said.
“I actually lived in Alaska, so I’m okay with it,” said Steve, who looked like a football player.
Anabelle, in a Hollister shirt, turned. “Steve, you were in Alaska? When was that?”
“I was like five.”
“Five! You couldn’t have been that acclimated to the Alaskan tundra yet,” said Mrs. Kennett.
“He ran around naked,” said Jared.
“Yeah, and I slept with the dogs outside,” said Steve. “No, actually, we had a husky. Beautiful dog.”
“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Kennett. “I’m a big-dog fan. I like big dogs.”
“I forgot my book,” said Keith cheerfully.
“That’s okay, we had somebody else forget their book. Who read the three pages you had to read?”
“I didn’t!” called out a kid from the back.
“You should have!” Mrs. Kennett laughed. The book was a movie tie-in edition of Stephen King’s The Shawshank Redemption.
“I read it,” said Anabelle.
“I really think that the only way that you’re going to get the most from this book is if I read it,” said Mrs. Kennett. “And I’m willing to do that. It’s okay with me.”
“Woo-hoo!” said the kid in the ba
ck.
Mrs. Kennett said that over the weekend, she’d been to a place where they made maple sugar. “So, yeah, that was kind of cool. Anybody else do anything interesting over the weekend?”
“I worked at Market Basket,” said Brandon.
“I took a shower,” said Harmony.
“That’s interesting,” said Mrs. Kennett. “I have a feeling that’s pretty normal, though.”
“Nope,” said Brad, a joker.
Noah, an upbeat kid with motor-control difficulties, said that he watched the Johnny Carson show all weekend.
The class was not under control. Everyone was talking.
“I found out,” said Mrs. Kennett, “that I’m getting another niece or nephew this weekend!”
“We didn’t even know you were pregnant,” said Brad.
“No, so my sister-in-law is pregnant with her second. She’s due in November. ALL RIGHTY! SO! SHHH. QUIET DOWN PLEASE! Before I read to you guys today, I’m going to hand out—please hold the moans and groans—I’m going to hand out—”
“UH!”
“AGH!”
“—your first assessment.”
“MOAN!”
“GROAN!”
“This is an assessment that has to do with the narration standard that we talked about. The unreliable narrator. Knowing what it is, and using the book to talk about that.” She moved around the class handing out the assignment.
Sebastian, one of the students I was responsible for, was drinking a bottle of mango juice. He was long-limbed, and made quick, decisive turns of his head, taking in what was happening and simultaneously ignoring it.
“I don’t understand what the deal is with that,” said Mrs. Kennett, pointing at Sebastian’s mango juice. “It’s a tiny bottle, and it’s very expensive.”
Sebastian shrugged, fished out a pair of earbuds from his backpack, and began untangling their cords.
Mrs. Kennett explained the project. It was going to be due in three weeks. “This is something that you’re going to be doing as we read the book. This is a narration video journal. I was going to be really mean and have you guys actually present these things, but I know that there’s a lot of anxiety around presenting in front of the class. So you can choose to present, which I’m pretty sure not many of you will do—otherwise you’re going to be emailing them to me. It does kind of require you to use a little bit of technology as well. You’re going to be videotaping yourselves. But I’ll be the only one who has to see it.”
“Steve, you have to wear a shirt,” said Artie.
“Do the video in the shower,” said Brad.
“OKAY! PLEASE LISTEN. Using your iPad, and iMovie, record four video journal entries, one for every twenty-five pages, that explains whether the narrator is reliable or unreliable, citing specific lines of text to support your argument. That’s called evidence, and we’re trying to create an argument that the narrator is either reliable or unreliable.” Each video journal entry should be between one and two minutes, she said, and it should include a slide of each quote the student used.
Sebastian finished his mango juice, tipping his head way back and making a sucking sound to get the last of it into his mouth.
“I have a question,” said Keith. “What if we don’t have an iPad?”
“We’re going to have to work around that,” said Mrs. Kennett. “I realize that you’re not the only one who’s in that pickle. You might have to hand-write it, or type it if you have access to a computer.” She went over the assignment again: analyze four quotations from four different parts of the book, preferably on video, in order to show whether the narrator is reliable or unreliable.
Sebastian began jamming the empty mango juice bottle against his tightly closed eye.
That was the plan, Mrs. Kennett said, and on Wednesday, they would start watching the movie version of The Shawshank Redemption, assuming it wasn’t a snow day. There followed an interchange on extreme facial piercings, including one that exposed your lower teeth and made you look like a bulldog. “I have six tattoos,” said Mrs. Kennett. “But some things I don’t really get the point of, that’s all. OKAY! Let’s listen and follow along! Shhh.”
Doing my job as an ed tech, I leaned forward and whispered to Sebastian to remove his earbuds from his ears so he could hear the story.
And then Mrs. Kennett began reading from The Shawshank Redemption, taking up at the moment when the narrator and his convict friends are on the freshly tarred roof drinking Black Label beer. “That beer was piss-warm,” Mrs. Kennett read, “but it was still the best I ever had in my life.” Instantly a concentrated, listening silence descended. The class, which had murmured and joked and made mildly rude comments without stop for ten minutes, was now still and perfectly attentive. Only two things, it seemed, really got the attention of students in RSU66: the Pledge of Allegiance, and fiction read aloud.
Mrs. Kennett was a good, uninhibited reader. Some words, like coterie, Rotarians, and Nembutal, stumped her, but she didn’t hesitate over a sentence like: If there were a few weevils in the bread, wasn’t that just too fucking bad? Using his teeth, Sebastian managed, after several tries, to pry off the red plastic ring from the mouth of the mango juice bottle. Mrs. Kennett came to a passage about Shawshank’s prison leadership: “The people who run this place are stupid brutal monsters, for the most part,” she read. “The people who run the straight world are brutal and monstrous but they happen to be not quite as stupid because the standard of competence out there is a little higher.” When she got to the part about Andy setting up the prison library, she stopped reading to say how important it was for the prisoners to get their high school diplomas. “He helped thirteen inmates get their high school equivalency,” she said. “Think about that. You guys are in high school now. Can you imagine being in your thirties, or forties, and not even having a high school diploma? Or fifties or sixties?”
Brad said that his sister was twenty-six and didn’t have her high school diploma.
“Not yet, but she’s still pretty young,” Mrs. Kennett said. “You always have time to go back. You just have to go to school, it’s just part of life, you just have to do it. So let’s move on.”
There was a brief interchange about how Red was Irish in the book, whereas Morgan Freeman, who played Red in the movie, wasn’t Irish, obviously.
“He could get a hair dye,” said Dale.
“That would be a sight—a ginger,” said Brad.
“He’s got some freckles on him,” said Kaylee.
“Obama’s Irish,” said Keith.
Later, when Mrs. Kennett read about a big draft in Andy’s cell, somebody whispered, “Foreshadowing!”
Steve said, “It would be cool to have a scientific instrument that would go off whenever foreshadowing occurs.”
“Or everybody in the room just coughs when we hear it,” said Sebastian, who was making an origami crane out of green paper.
“Who wants to keep going?” said Mrs. Kennett. She read some more pages, but it was just about the end of the class now, and people were restless, getting ready to leave. “All right,” she said. “So you guys have the rest of fifty-eight, fifty-nine, and half of page sixty to read tonight. That’s like a page and a half. We can do this!”
The bell bonged. Sebastian was the first one out of the room. I thought, So this is the life of an ed tech in high school. I thanked Mrs. Kennett and went to history class.
The teacher, Ms. Hopkins, said she was just back from a conference on the teaching of history, and she was tired. She looked pale. “It takes a lot of energy to talk,” she said. She asked me to make some two-sided copies of a worksheet, which I did, using the big copier in the teachers’ break room. She passed out the sheets I’d copied, which had a list of words on them. Next to each word was a blank space to write its definition.
“I can’t even handle the stickine
ss of this desk,” said a disheveled boy, Marlon. “I spilled grape juice all over it. It’s on my sleeve.”
Cole, the kid behind him, whispered, “Shut your mouth, shut your mouth, shut your mouth, shut your mouth.”
Ms. Hopkins closed the classroom door. “I don’t want to see any technology out, put it away, we don’t need it,” she said. “We’re going to go through these definitions. I’m going to give you pretty simplified definitions, so if yours are not simplified, or close to what I say, then I need you guys to write them down. These terms are like the basis of all this class. Starting with foreign. Can anyone give me a definition of foreign?”
Josh read from his iPad, hiding it behind his backpack: “Characteristic of a country or language other than one’s own.”
“That’s pretty much right on,” said Ms. Hopkins. “The simplified version that I have is just ‘dealing with other countries.’ When we say foreign, like foreign affairs, we’re just talking about us dealing outside of our own country. Foreign affairs are not going to be unemployment— GUYS.”
Two boys had been talking. “Sorry,” said one of them.
“So if we’re talking about Russia we’re talking about foreign affairs.” She asked for an example in US history where foreign affairs popped up. There was silence.
Finally Nicholas, wearing a red hoodie, raised his hand. “Different languages?” he said.
“Different languages, right,” said Ms. Hopkins. “But tell me an example of the US dealing with another country.”
Bethanne, a smart kid, spoke. “Trade, like when we get stuff from China?”
“Right. So these are examples, and if you don’t have these you should be writing them down. Any trade outside of our country is foreign. The other issue you can put down here is war. World War I, World War II, the Cold War. Any wars that are outside of our country, that we’re involved in, count as foreign.” She paused. “A pet peeve of mine?” She wrote WW1 and WW2 on the whiteboard. “Don’t ever write that, or that. That’s not how you write World War I or World War II. You use the Roman numerals. I get some great essays in this class and they write WW2, and it just immediately makes your essay seem, like, not as good of an argument, because you don’t know how to write the war. So, random side note, please make sure you don’t do that.”