“How about two?” said Taylor.
“Not two. And when you’ve finished those, please make sure you’ve written your letter about where you want to sit.” She said the class had eleven minutes to finish the apostrophe sentences.
The sub plans said that Curtis, who had made no further progress on his crossword puzzle, had to go to the resource room at eleven-fifteen. “You’ve only got three left,” I said. “You can finish it.”
Mrs. Thurston turned in our direction. “Tyler and Curtis, did you write me a letter yet, about where you want to sit?”
They hadn’t.
Tyler thought about what he wanted to say in his letter. “I have a lot of stuff coming out of my nose,” he said. “Dear Mrs. Thurston, I want to sit at the blue table. From Tyler.”
“Very good letter,” I said. “Do you remember how to write Dear?”
“D-E-R? No!” Tyler had a revelation. “It’s D apostrophe E!”
“You don’t need an apostrophe,” I said. “It’s D-E-A-R.”
“D-E?”
“A-R,” I said.
Tyler was doubtful. “A-R?”
“A-R.”
He took a shot at Mrs. by spelling it “misis.” I showed him how to write Mrs.
“That’s merss,” he said. He had a point.
He pointed to a scab on my hand. “What’s that?” I said it was psoriasis, a problem where your skin grows too fast. It wasn’t a bad problem, I said, but it was itchy sometimes. “Does it gross you out?”
“No.”
“Good.” We began figuring out how to spell Thurston.
Mrs. Thurston came over and glanced down at our work. She said, “First thing on your paper is your—?”
“Name,” sang Tyler, “and your number.” The number was the number on his desk. Mrs. Thurston moved on. Tyler sang the name song over again happily: “First thing on your paper is your name, and your number,” to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”
“Good song,” I said. “Okay, so you’ve got T-H-R. Add a U in the middle there, just for giggles.” We had five minutes till Curtis had to take off for the resource room. “Thur-ston,” I said. Curtis wrote STIN. “Tawn,” I said. “Thurs-tawn.”
“ThursTIN,” Tyler corrected.
“I know it sounds like tin, but it’s on. It’s one of those weird words. Just stick an O in there.”
“Mrs. ThursTIN is more better than TON,” Tyler said. He refused to write the letter. He tapped his pencil on the desk and shook his head.
“What’s going on, man?” I whispered. “Write that letter!”
“Mrs. ThursTAWN?”
“Yes, and put a comma after it, and go, pshoo.”
“Okay, that is crazy. T-O-N?” He gave me a suspicious look, as if I was tricking him.
Marnie walked up and said she needed help with apostrophes. I got her started reading about the two kinds of apostrophes. Meanwhile Tyler had successfully finished writing Thurston.
“Then you write a comma,” I said.
“What’s a comma?”
I drew a comma for him. “It just looks like a little tadpole at the bottom of the line.” I showed him where to put it. “It’s kind of a neat thing, it just means a pause. All right, now, what do you want to say, real quick?”
“Dude, this is where I’m going to sit,” said Adrian.
“I want to sit with Percy and Curtis,” said Tyler.
“Good,” I said.
He wrote I want. Then he said, “Which kind of ‘to’ is it?”
Marnie was prowling nearby us, bored, confused about apostrophes, and obviously ill. She held out her paper to me. “Marnie,” said Mrs. Thurston, “that’s not one of your choices right now. You’re not to be interrupting anymore.”
“Which is the simplest one?” I asked Tyler.
“T-O?”
“Right. So what do you want to do? Sit? Fly?”
“Sit. Sit next to Curtis and Percy.”
“Tyler can’t sit next to Percy,” said Adrian.
“I’m sitting next to Adrian,” said Percy.
“Adrian!” said Mrs. Thurston. “When I see your request, I’ll see how many of those requests I can honor. Just let me know in writing what your request is—where you want to sit. Marnie, back to your work, hon.”
Tyler and I sounded out sit.
Mrs. Thurston said, “Those of you who have finished our letters and our apostrophe pages, come on down.”
Tyler and I successfully got the word next onto the page.
I raised a hand. “Is it time for them to go to the resource room?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Thurston. “Tyler and Andrew!”
“Okay, so you’ll have to finish that later,” I said. “You want to put that in your folder?” Tyler put the unfinished letter in his folder. It was a lost cause, anyway. He wasn’t going to be allowed to sit next to Percy and Curtis.
When she’d gotten the class settled and in listening mode, Mrs. Thurston opened a book. “It’s called Dear Deer,” she said. “It’s all about homophones.”
Oh, great. I walked the resource room kids out to the hall. “Do I go with you guys, or stay?”
“You stay.”
I went back to Mrs. Thurston’s room and sat down to listen. A moose had just eaten eight bowls of mousse. “Oh my god!” said Grace, shocked.
“Have you seen the ewe?” read Mrs. Thurston. “He’s been in a daze for days. A female sheep is called a ewe. When someone’s been in a daze, they’ve kind of been staring off into space.”
“Sometimes I do that,” said Lila. “I look at something and I just start to stare.”
“That’s him,” read Mrs. Thurston. “The horse who is hoarse from humming a hymn. When your voice doesn’t work as well, when you’ve got a cold, you’re hoarse. And when you’re humming a hymn, like a song from church—”
Several girls started humming.
“Shhh! Corey, MOVE NOW. You are not to be near Adrian. Ever.”
Mrs. Thurston kept reading. It was a pretty good book, if you were in the mood for homophones, or were perhaps stoned. The illustrations were cheerful, and the listeners laughed when the toad was towed to the top of the seesaw so that he could see the sea.
“One day,” said Lila, “I was walking in my driveway, and I heard a rustle in the bushes. It was a female deer. I was scared and I ran inside.”
“Usually they run away from you,” Mrs. Thurston said.
Ten minutes and the book was done. “So, thinking about homophones,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Some of them you might already know. Some of them now you know.” She put the book down. “Moving on with math. Please stop talking. If you have a comment or question, you raise your hand. Everyone needs to get their journals, and a pencil, and come on back over here.” A girl started singing her ABCs. “Uh, EXCUSE ME? You’re grabbing your journals and coming to sit back down, not standing over there in the way. Someone else is still trying to get their journal.” She got them all sitting down, with their journals open to page 180, in order to review yesterday’s activity: they’d had to hold their arms open wide while a partner measured their arm spans with a tape measure. Arms measured, they’d tallied and graphed the results and made a block chart. All this had happened under the supervision of a substitute—Mrs. Thurston had been out all day—and she wanted to know how far they’d gotten. She used her iPad to project the worksheet on the whiteboard. “All right, so you should have had this part here filled in with tally marks, right?”
Yes, they said.
“Marnie, turn your paper, you need to be on page one eighty, not one eighty-one.”
“I am on one eighty!”
“I’m still hearing talking. Ian, move. Move. Don’t argue, just go. What was the first one that you listed for your arm span, in inches?”
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“Forty-four,” said the class, reading off of their worksheets.
“How many tally marks?”
One.
“Next number was what?”
Fifty-one.
“How many tally marks?”
Four.
She went through a long series of arm-span measurements and tally marks. “So which one had the most?”
Fifty-one, said the class.
They made a chart, going from lowest to highest. “Your papers should look like that,” Mrs. Thurston said. “Yes? Hands up if you have that?”
Hands went up.
“Good.”
They reviewed the bar graph. “Did you do the graph on your own?”
Yes. No. Yes.
“Good, that was what you were supposed to do. I have to check, because sometimes when we have subs, sometimes we don’t know what’s going to happen when we come back! Marnie, you’ll need to fill in your graph.”
As he listened, Percy sometimes made little stressed coughing sounds—he had a slight nervous tic. I ate a peanut butter cracker and watched Mrs. Thurston zoom through the rest of yesterday’s math exercises. They’d had to draw five different ways to make forty-five cents, they’d had to make a ballpark estimate, and they’d had to read a thermometer. They’d had to find the “mode” in a group of numbers. “The most popular number is the mode,” said Mrs. Thurston, in review. They’d had to do some things with simple fractions. “Reed, please stop doing that, that’s not helpful. With the fractions, you’re looking at what’s colored in. One piece out of how many pieces? This is the what-do-you-know-about-fractions page. What’s this shape?”
Triangle! Rhombus!
“There it is, rhombus—thank you, Tricia. If this rhombus is one, how many of those triangles would fit into that rhombus?”
Two, said a few.
“Two. If this is one, then one triangle would only be half of what was there.”
Silence.
“We are going to do a whole lesson on that. Because on the next page starts unit eight. So it looks like, for most of you, we’re ready to advance. We’ve been practicing our double-digit addition and subtraction. We’ve been practicing graphs. We’ve been practicing some of that beginning multiplication, in arrays. We’ve been practicing reading clocks. We’ve been practicing some measurement. Right? We’ve talked about our arm spans and our jumps. We’ve talked about the median.” What was the median?
The middle, said Dale.
“The middle. The median is the middle. But you can’t find the middle until you put them in order. That’s super important. The mode is what, again? We just talked about it. The most what?”
“The most numbers in that thingamajig,” said Grace, pointing to the projected chart.
“It’s the most popular. Okay? You might think of it as the one that comes up the most. So when I look at those letters over there—that you wrote to me as to who to sit with—our mode right now for a person, as to who people want to sit with, is Dale.”
“Oh,” said Lila, smiling.
“Because right now there’s three people who have requested to sit with Dale. He’s the most popular person to sit with right now.”
“I don’t want to be popular,” said Dale.
“Oh, popular can be good,” said Mrs. Thurston.
She continued with her résumé of recent work in unit 7, paging quickly through the book. “We had some charts, we had some graphs that we read, we talked about doubles and halves, right?”
The class next door was having a motor break, loudly singing, “Wobble, wobble, wobble.” Marnie and Coral joined in softly.
“We talked about those multiplication words—when I have lots of tricycles I can count how many wheels I might have. And fractions. Which tells me that we are ready for our”—she held up a stack of papers—“test.”
No! Yay! Today?
The class got violently squirmy. Some of them were chanting along with the motor-breakers next door. Mrs. Thurston said, “Excuse me? What are you supposed to be doing? You shouldn’t be banging pencils. Still waiting for everyone to be listening. Coral. So, everyone who’s ready for our math test, we will be putting our journals away, getting yourself set up with a privacy folder and a sharpened pencil and sitting quietly.”
Pencils were vigorously sharpened. Privacy folders came out. These were tripartite, made of heavy cardboard, decorated with names and stickers, and they stood up on each desk, surrounding and fencing off every test paper, so that nobody would be distracted or tempted to copy an answer. Adrian made exploding sounds as he sharpened his pencil.
“Please stop, Adrian,” said a smart girl.
“All right, looking around I see some of you ready,” said Mrs. Thurston. “Marnie, you need to focus.” Percy looked at me over his privacy folder. “Good luck,” I said. Mrs. Thurston walked the class through the test to get them ready. “You have to read the questions,” she said. “The first one says, Three packages of paper towels, three rolls per package. How many rolls? Don’t just add them. I’m going to give you a hint. Draw a picture.”
“Do we have to?” asked Stuart.
“If you know the answer already? No. But for most of you in here, you’ll need to draw a picture in order to figure out what the answer is. The test has three of that kind of question. The ones at the bottom of the page are missing addends, just like your homework the other day.”
“Homework?” said Jayson.
“There is a word problem. Marcus is the boy in it. There’s a table to make a bar graph from, just like the table we worked on yesterday. Make the graph that comes from those numbers. Please stop making noise. There’s a find-the-rule, there’s an in-and-out, you find what the rule is. There are some three-D shapes. Do you remember what those are called?”
“Yes,” said a few kids.
“There’s another complete-the-table on the back. There’s a find-the-median-of-two-sets-of-numbers. There’s a find-the-median-and-the-mode. If you forget what those were, it tells you again: the middle number, and the most popular. Then missing numbers on the grid, using some bigger numbers than before. Last one on there is adding three numbers together.”
Percy made one of his little nervous coughs.
“All right,” said Mrs. Thurston. “Everyone’s got pencils and papers, privacy folders are out. Voices off. We should not have noises. You’re not looking around at anyone else’s paper.”
“I might look up at the ceiling once in a while,” said Stuart.
“You might look over at the number grid, you might look up at the number line on the ceiling, you might go get cubes. Okay.”
The class went to work. Mrs. Thurston came over and reminded Percy to put on his weighted vest. Silently he put it on and set a timer, which made loud beeps as he pushed the buttons. He didn’t seem to mind. Coral sang softly to herself, her pencil moving, her head held to one side. Marnie coughed and went into the bathroom and locked the door.
“Drawing a picture often makes it much easier,” Mrs. Thurston said softly, as she stepped slowly around the desks, her hands held behind her back. “I see a couple of you drawing pictures, and you’re really understanding it. That’s awesome. Reed, focus.” Mrs. Thurston asked me if I’d written anything in Percy’s communication log. I hadn’t. The question was, Did he need help at recess? I put a 1, meaning no.
I whispered that I didn’t understand why he needed all the monitoring. “He reads really well.”
“He’s done great,” Mrs. Thurston whispered. He might not need an ed tech next year, she said, because he’d done so well this year.
The room became quiet, and we could hear the teacher next door doing a math word problem with her class: “Anthony, can you read number three for me, please?” she said.
Stuart finished his test.
“If you??
?re finished, check to see if you have anything in your math journal.”
“I have.”
“How do you spell trouble?” asked a girl.
“Make your best guess,” Mrs. Thurston said. “We’re not counting for spelling. If we were testing spelling words, it would count. But we’ve not had that for a spelling word.”
Mrs. Thurston paused at the bathroom door. “Finish up in the bathroom,” she called to Marnie. “Come back and join us.” To me, she whispered, “She’s just kind of hanging out there, avoiding the work. It starts at this age and continues on.”
Marnie emerged and sat down at her privacy folder and put her chin on her fists.
More people handed in the tests. Coral continued to sing happily. Percy’s timer chirped in triplets, like a hotel alarm clock. He turned it off and put it away. He took off his vest.
Adrian read a question to himself, threw his head back, and said, “Ugh!”
“Can I go get some water?” Marnie asked.
“Go get some water, sweetie,” Mrs. Thurston said.
Adrian read another question. He made a crazy throat sound. “ULHHH!”
“Adrian,” Mrs. Thurston warned. “Shh.”
Privacy folders were folded up. Percy handed his test in. Mrs. Thurston told him to go through his math workbook and finish the pages that he’d skipped over. “You still have tons of this to do. Big chunks.” She turned more pages. “Little bits in different places. Okay?”
Percy turned the pages. “Can you please help me?” he said to me.
I pulled up my chair. He had pages and pages of half-finished math.
“Can you do that one?” I asked, pointing to a column of three two-digit numbers that were supposed to be added together. He did it. He moved on to some subtraction problems.
The spell of test-taking hadn’t lifted yet. “Those of you who are working on unfinished work,” Mrs. Thurston said. “If you’ve not finished your biography now would be a good time. If your biography’s not done you have about ten minutes to work on it.” They were supposed to be writing a biography of someone else in the class, including a colored-pencil portrait.