by Dawn Dumont
I sat up straighter. Reading? Competition? Those were my two favourite words. So when my friend Trina and I were assigned to her class, I couldn’t have been happier. Then I found out that Tyler was in the same class and my euphoria was downgraded to light happiness.
When we got home that day, Celeste and I fought over the rights to the story. We danced around our mom.
“There were new teachers!”
“I got one!”
“And I got the other one!”
“Mine is really pretty!”
“Mine smokes!”
Mom already knew because she was on the School Board. She went to a meeting once a month and from that meeting gleaned enough gossip to carry her through to the next month. At the band office she was the queen of the school news and would hold court at one of the big round tables the day after every meeting. She had learned about the new hirings a few months before and had even seen the women’s resumes. Mom implied that she had used her connections to ensure that we would be in their classes.
“They’re both smart young women and you’re lucky to have them,” she said as she set the table. “You can thank me by doing the dishes without complaining for once.”
My sister and I felt that we were on the cutting edge of education. Most of the elementary school teachers had been around for more than thirty years and people complained that the staff room smelled like an old folk’s home.
It was my first year in a split class. The grade fours would be sharing the same room as the grade threes. I wasn’t happy about this. Younger kids were always a drag, as I knew from having three younger siblings.
The grade fours — my year — sat on the right side of the room and the grade threes sat on the other side. Trina sat in front of me, Tyler to my left.
“Here we go again, Dumont,” Tyler drawled. “You must love me or something?” For the past four years, we had always been in the same classroom.
“As if.”
Trina added for good measure. “You’re gross, Tyler.”
To improve our reading skills, Miss Gramiak invented the dictionary game. I loved it. She gave us a list of words in the morning and we had a race to see who could find the word the quickest. I sped through the dictionary and found the words and wrote down the corresponding page number. I knew the competition was an important one, as I quickly needed to establish myself as the smartest student in the class.
Tyler came in second but he was good-natured about it. “Hey, Dumont, what the hell do you do with your weekends, sleep on a dictionary?”
“Yup. That’s what I do.” With another victory in my pocket, Tyler’s words could not touch me.
Just in case, Trina drew herself up to her full height; she was at least two heads taller than Tyler and looked down on him. “You have a problem with my friend?”
Tyler quickly backed away. “Hey, no need to get the whole tribe after me.”
Trina and I laughed at his ignorance. “We’re from different reserves, idiot.”
I fully expected that my wins at the Dictionary Game would win my place at the top of Miss Gramiak’s heart. I was used to being the teacher’s pet. I had been one in grade one, two and three. I knew that teachers appreciated my ability to clean erasers, monitor the other students and smile on command. I liked rules and I often took on extra work to get extra attention. I was born to be a teacher’s pet.
Miss Gramiak was different. Being a good student wasn’t enough to guarantee her love. She appreciated different qualities . . . she liked a student to take initiative, to speak up and be cunning. She loved Tyler.
Trina and I watched open mouthed, as Tyler became the most powerful student in the class. Even Tyler was surprised. “Wow, she really likes me. And she hates everyone else.”
Hate. That’s a strong word. I wouldn’t say that she hated the other students; rather she was . . . annoyed by their existence.
It wasn’t her fault. She had specifically stated that she wanted to have the best readers in the province. So why were students resisting her? The slower ones were clearly not trying to be the best; they were still sounding out words with their mouths and reaching for their phonics guides. We started to fall behind in the provincial standings. By the second month, we were in fourth place out of five schools.
Like all good competitors, Miss Gramiak saw this as a challenge, not a failure. She had declared her intentions and now she would employ her big city methods. These consisted primarily of yelling and pounding on desks. Sometimes she was forced to shake a student until the knowledge worked its way into their medulla oblongata. Other times she relied on vocal motivation such as by shouting in the face of the student: “Stop being so stupid!”
Some might say that her methods were harsh; I felt they were effective. For instance, I never, not even once, failed to do my homework. Many nights I even lay awake, my mind frantically searching for a lesson that might have been overlooked. Who needed sleep when I had stress to keep my young body going?
Everyone reacted differently to Miss Gramiak. Trina and I kept our heads down and pretended not to hear. Other students checked their dignity and self-respect at the door. Not a single class went by without someone collapsing into tears. I don’t know why: Miss Gramiak did not show pity. She would mock the crybabies by placing her head next to theirs and pretending to weep. “Oh boo hoo, I can’t do it. I’m just a little kid. Oh boo hoo.”
I felt the crybabies had chosen their reaction badly. “If they hadn’t cried on the first day, if they had just held it in . . . they wouldn’t keep crying,” I whispered to Trina. She agreed with me and we promised that no matter what happened we would not cry.
The grade threes coped by developing a group mind. They became a single entity that worked with only one goal in mind: driving Miss Gramiak insane. They were like feral beasts. They dropped their books on the floor and took two minutes to pick them up. They refused to do their homework. They kept asking to go to the bathroom at different times and, when she refused them, they would urinate at their desks.
Miss Gramiak responded by screaming louder. Pencils flew across the room. She grabbed arms and roughly pulled students out of the classroom. We would hear her spanking them — which we knew wasn’t allowed — then the kid, red-eyed and angry would appear in the doorway in front of Miss Gramiak, a tight angry smile on her face. Within minutes the pattern would begin again, this time with a different student. It was a furious little battle that continued through the day. We grade fours kept our eyes on our books and sent silent messages of thanks to the grade three Borg Collective for absorbing the weight of her anger.
Tyler, as Miss Gramiak’s pet, could not avert his eyes because her eyes often went to his for support. “Tyler, can you believe these students?” she would say and Tyler would shake his head, a huge fake smile plastered to his face.
When a boy would burst into tears, she would make a face at Tyler and Tyler would replicate it back at her. Our classmates hated him and wished all kinds of cooties upon his head. I could sense his fear. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, and Tyler’s neck looked like it was ready to snap.
I began to pee my bed. Not every night, but even once is a problem. It meant getting up in the middle of the night, changing my clothes, and then pushing my sister over onto the wet spot before falling back asleep.
“I don’t understand it,” Mom said at the breakfast table. “Celeste’s never wet the bed before.”
Celeste crossed her arms. “I didn’t do it!”
I smiled benevolently down at her. ‘Hey, it’s okay, you’re still little.”
At supper each night, our family sat around the table and discussed our days. Celeste bubbled forth about Miss Noble’s class. “Today Miss Noble took us on a field trip to pick flowers and then she made us blow on the dandelions and make wishes. I wished that Miss Noble would be my teacher forever.”
I silently reminded myself to find a dandelion after supper and make a wish of my own.
Cel
este talked about chocolate prizes, and stickers that smelled like strawberries and sunshine.
Although I had nothing good to say about my teacher, I could not let my sister take all the attention. So I made up stories about how Miss Gramiak was teaching us to be good readers. “Every day one of us sits on her knee and she reads to us while she . . . brushes our hair.”
Mom raised her eyebrows. “She has time to do that? With all of you?”
“Yes, because in Miss Gramiak’s class, time seems to last forever.”
My mom frequently told us that we got on her “nerves.” In Miss Gramiak’s class I knew what that truly meant. My nerves were shattered. I jumped every time someone slammed a door or dropped a book. When she lost patience with a student in the front row and her heels drummed from the back of the room to the front, my gut muscles would tighten until her footsteps passed my desk.
Every day I would stare at the door to the classroom willing myself to run. “Now,” I would whisper, “now.” My feet would not move. I was afraid of what would happen once I reached the other side of the door. Yes, there would be the momentary satisfaction of having escaped, but how long would that last? It would only be a minute before Miss Gramiak made it to the hallway and then escorted me back to the classroom. Even if I encountered another teacher, even if I could get my story out, what would they do? If they had ears, then they already knew what was going on in that classroom. Unless of course they thought that Miss Gramiak had discovered a new way to teach phonics — by screaming it down her students’ throats.
Worst of all, if I ran for it — Miss Gramiak would know what I really thought about her class. She would know that she was getting to me. As long as my eyes were down, we could all pretend that everything was okay.
I had made the mistake of opening my mouth, only once. I was standing beside her desk as she corrected my work with her red pen. With each stroke of her red pen, I uttered the word, “oops.” I’d said it three times when she put down her pen and stood up to address the class. “Instead of standing beside me and saying OOPS, do your work right the first time.”
My face turned red and I pretended that I was someone else, like my brother David who screwed up all the time and was loved even more for it. I tried to make my mouth into the shape of a smile; my trembling lips would allow only a grimace.
At least I had Trina. Tyler was all by himself. She would turn on him eventually and he grew nervous waiting for it to happen. He started getting sloppy. We noticed that he took longer and longer to clean the erasers and when he got back to the classroom, there was plenty of chalkboard dust on them.
Miss Gramiak noticed. “Hey, Tyler, what’s wrong? You don’t like your job?”
“No Miss Gramiak . . . it’s great!” His fake enthusiasm was becoming weaker by the second.
“Because you can always be replaced. You know that, right?”
Tyler nodded and sat down.
“It’s only a matter of time.” Trina would whisper to me, and offered to set up a pool for the date of Tyler’s upcoming downfall. I couldn’t join in the fun because I felt sorry for him.
“You feel sorry for that jerk? Even after he made Stacy Smithson cry by breaking her Strawberry Shortcake lunch kit? Even after he said that Jerrod was fat because he ate his own dog? Even after he called our breasts nibblets?”
On the playground Tyler was losing his confidence. His minions crowded around him panting for his leadership but he didn’t know what to do with them. A chubby kid would fall during a baseball game and instead of yelling, “Hey, look, Blubber hit the dust!” Tyler would walk out to the field and help him up.
One day Tyler turned towards us and blurted out, “I have to talk to you!”
Half the schoolyard turned around, and then turned back around as Tyler walked directly up to Trina and me. Trina beckoned him closer.
“Keep it down, Tyler. Everyone doesn’t have to know our classroom business.”
He lowered his voice to a quiet yell, “One of you take it. You be the pet, Dawn. You love being the pet.”
I snorted, like I hadn’t thought of that a thousand times already! “It’s not my choice, you know that.”
Trina decided to goad him, “See, this is what you get for being a suck up. Now you’re gonna suffer like the rest of us.”
Tyler turned his scared eyes to her. “Don’t you think I know it?”
It happened on a Wednesday. The day had been rough. The grade threes had been particularly rebellious. One of them had gas and was letting farts go at random. Miss Gramiak identified the student and berated him only to have another student let one go. It was only ten am and she was already hoarse.
A few of the grade threes were in tears but two of them — Hope and Cindy — had crossed over into crazy territory. They had gone where they could not be broken. She would scream at them and they would only smile. It was a demented smile and you had to turn away when you saw it.
You also had to admire them. Where they lived now, yelling, spankings and banishments to the hallway had no more effect. In fact, I envied their trips. Once you were outside the classroom, you could run to the bathroom, the water fountain or anywhere you pleased. Inside, you were trapped.
On Wednesdays it was Tyler’s job to water the plants. Miss Gramiak had a lot of them. “Plants create a joyous environment,” she said at the beginning of the year. “They are for everyone to enjoy.” As our year progressed, the plants grew listless.
Precisely at 1:20 that day, Tyler got up from his seat and went to the back of the room to do his job. The rest of us sat still in our seats as Miss Gramiak taught us about the solar system.
“The earth is the only planet in our solar system that can support life,” she intoned. “Some of the planets are composed entirely of gas.”
The grade threes snickered. Miss Gramiak glared at them.
Behind us, we could hear the water running and hitting the bottom of the plastic watering bucket. Then the water stopped running. Miss Gramiak looked back. Tyler was hunched over the sink with a plant in his hand. He smiled back at her. She returned her gaze to the board.
Then Tyler’s tight control slipped and a word escaped him. “Shit.” A normal person might have been able to murmur a profanity with no chance of detection. Not Tyler. His loud voice propelled the word across the classroom, past the front row, right into Miss Gramiak’s breathing space.
Miss Gramiak called out to him. “Everything okay, Tyler?”
Tyler did not answer. He was too busy trying to balance the heavy plant against the sink. He had over filled the plant and was trying to pour the water out.
Miss Gramiak’s eyes grew large as she saw what he was doing. She ran to the back of the room.
“Not my geranium!” She touched the fronds of the drowned plant. “Get away from it!” she hissed at Tyler.
Tyler backed away and dropped the plant on the floor. The ceramic pot broke and wet dirt sprayed across the floor over his jeans and onto her corduroy skirt. A swarm of profanities flew from her mouth into my belly making it lurch. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears but I worried that it would draw her attention to me.
Tyler held on. He nodded in agreement with her abuse. Tears were threatening but he held them in.
One of the criers sitting to my left whispered, “Just let it out, Tyler.”
I understood what Tyler was doing. Holding in our tears was all we had. It was our only flag — she had not broken us — that we could wave proudly after this was over.
Miss Gramiak wasn’t going to settle for agreement. Not today. She picked up the green plant and waved it in his face. “Look! You killed it. Are you happy Tyler? Are you happy!”
She stared at him waiting for a response. Tyler’s loud voice failed him. His shoulders began to shake, his mouth trembled and then finally the tears came rolling down his cheeks, like big fat traitors.
Even kids he’d tortured since kindergarten felt for him. Trina mumbled beside me, “He’s a jerk but he d
oesn’t deserve that.” I nodded. I dared a look across at the grade threes. They were smiling.
I told my mom about Miss Gramiak. It was hard to explain exactly what was the matter with her. I was only nine and lacked the proper similes, “She is like a powder keg waiting to go off.” “She has a temper like a rabid wolverine.” “She screams like a banshee.” Instead I was left with meager statements like, “She’s really mean and I don’t like her.”
My mom dismissed my worries and said that I was being too sensitive. Besides, Mom was too busy dragging Celeste off to specialists in Regina trying to figure out why she kept wetting the bed to concern herself with my classroom problems.
Each month meant a month closer to being rid of Miss Gramiak. The year had not made her any nicer but we had learned to cope better. For instance, twice a week a teacher’s aide was in the classroom. We would cling to her like kittens and climb onto her lap. “I’ve never seen kids be so affectionate. Especially children who are so . . . old.” We needed all the love we could get to balance out Miss Gramiak.
When there were visitors, Miss Gramiak never ever lost her temper. Her voice never went above the danger range. She kept her comments short and mostly positive. The grade threes shamelessly took advantage of her tied hands. They turned their backs to her and sat on their desks and ate their lunches. They ripped pages out of the books and wiped their faces with them.
Miss Gramiak would keep the same dead smile on her face. “Oh my grade threes, what am I going to do with you?”