City Kid

by Mary MacCracken

  I smiled back but didn’t reply. Labels meant little to me. In fact, as far as I could see, their only use was to give a name to a program so it could be funded. Nobody funded anything without a name.

  The next four sessions focused on diagnostic tests and teaching procedures. Jerry demonstrated the administration and scoring of various tests given to screen for emotional or neurologically based impairments. We, of course, did not have the skill to score the tests ourselves, but we were all amazed at how much information he was able to obtain from such seemingly simple devices.

  Our last session was on observing and charting behavior. Jerry gave us stopwatches and taught us how to use observation charts, marking down the number of incidents of a child’s disruptive behavior during short intervals carefully timed by the stopwatch.

  At the end of this session, Jerry said, “That’s it. I, of course, will be at the school scoring tests and supervising from time to time. The grant covers the rest of this year and I’ll get over as much as I can, but we’re short-handed here and you’re going to be more on your own than originally planned.

  “Anyway, good luck. I’ve enjoyed our sessions together and I’ll see you all at School Twenty-three on Wednesday.”

  How could I wait till Wednesday?

  Chapter 4

  School 23 was a half-hour drive from the college, just off one of the main streets of Falls City. It was old, like most of the city’s buildings, its dark red brick packed with city grime. The gray cement steps, worn smoothly by thousands of children’s feet, dragging in, rushing out, descended directly to the sidewalk of the small street. There was no front yard or back yard, only a macadam side lot that evidently served as teacher parking lot and play yard.

  Small, rundown houses surrounded by yards consisting of brown dirt and cracked cement lined the rest of the short block.

  I parked across from the school and started across the street. A large white dog came off the steps of one of the houses, snarling and hurling himself against the chain-link fence that surrounded the house. I shivered involuntarily and then ran back and locked the car doors before I climbed the steps to School 23, not realizing I was holding my breath until I reached the door.

  “Remember,” Jerry Cotter had warned us at the beginning of the training sessions, “the kids you’ll be working with are different than most. We call them ‘socially maladjusted with an overlay of emotional disturbance.’ What we mean is – they are tough, street-wise, and don’t give a damn.”

  The warmth inside the school was unexpected. Steam radiators clanked cheerily. Mrs. Karras, the principal, was waiting in the hall. Her handshake was strong, her smile warm, and I liked her immediately.

  Jerry arrived next and then within minutes of each other John Hudson and Shirley.

  Mrs. Karras poured us mugs of steaming coffee and we carried them across the hall to the music room and sat down around a long folding table that had been set up in the back of the room.

  “This will be your room,” Mrs. Karras said cordially. “Fortunately, or unfortunately, we don’t seem to have a music teacher this year, so the room is all yours. I’ve had those file cabinets over there cleaned out for you. I know you said you needed room for some materials.”

  Jerry nodded his thanks and then we all listened intently as Mrs. Karras described her school, kindergarten through fifth grade, twenty-eight to thirty children in each room. Many of the teachers were on the far side of fifty and tired of teaching unruly kids, but money was short and jobs hard to come by. Tenure assured these teachers their jobs at School 23, though they longed to be elsewhere.

  Mrs. Karras again added her welcome and delight we were there and then said, “Let’s not waste any more time.”

  She turned toward Jerry. “I understand you feel it’s best for each tutor to begin working with just one child at first and then gradually take on two more. Right?”

  Jerry nodded, and Mrs. Karras continued. “Here’s a list of the youngsters we’ve selected for the program. They’ve been given an intelligence test by the district psychologist. The tests are in the file in my office. Just ask the secretary for the key, their records are open to you. That’s been made clear to their families. You do understand that in ninety percent of the cases, family means a mother and, of course, other brothers and sisters. Almost all of the kids live in the low-income project, and the reason they live there is that there’s no father around to provide adequate income.

  “Norm Foster called and asked me to pick three youngsters for you to start with. I don’t know if it’s fair to you, but I picked the three worst. Seemed to me they needed help the most. Of course, it’s up to you to decide who gets who.

  “So here are my three candidates. Vernon Schofield, Lucas Brauer, and Milton Green. Vernon’s in fifth grade, Mrs. Jacobson’s class – eleven years old. He’s black, disruptive, been in several knife fights, picked up by the police for shoplifting. Has a younger brother who’s on the list as well, but Anthony isn’t as bad yet.

  “Lucas Brauer’s in second grade. German background. Luke’s hard core. Nobody gets through to him. He’s got a list of arrests as long as your arm. Been picked up twenty-four times. He’s set over a dozen major fires, stolen over fifty dollars’ worth of goods from the stores on Main Street. He’s got a hundred and two average IQ, but he’s a truant and even when he does come to school he doesn’t do any work. Just sits at his desk drawing pictures. Actually, he’s one of the lucky ones that made it off the waiting list into the clinic last year. They worked with him for six months and then discontinued, said they just couldn’t get through to him.

  “And then there’s Milt Green, black, one of eight kids. He’s in third grade, quiet, except he cries all the time and then climbs on the desk and swims like a fish.”

  “I’d like him,” Shirley said.

  “And if you don’t mind, Mary, I’d like Vernon Schofield,” said John Hudson. “I think I’d do better with a fifth grader.”

  If I had been asked, I would probably have picked Milt. It took a certain amount of something to swim like a fish on a desk in a third-grade classroom, but it didn’t really matter. I could never tell anything anyway until I saw the child.

  “Fine. I’ll work with Luke.”

  Jerry glanced at his watch. “Suppose I take each of you down to the classrooms. Let’s see, Vernon is in Mrs. Jacobson’s class, you say? That’s on the second floor, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Karras responded. “And Luke is in Miss Eckhardt’s class and Milt in Miss Fuller’s, both just down the hall. I’ll show you.”

  Miss Eckhardt’s class was first, a jumble of confusion and noise that was instantly quiet when Mrs. Karras walked in.

  “Miss Eckhardt, would you please go out to the hall for a moment? I’ll take the class. All right, class. Get out pencil and paper and copy these five words that I dictate.

  “Hen. The hen laid an egg. Hen.”

  A boy in the third row laughed out loud.

  “I’d like to see you in my office at three o’clock, Jimmy,” Mrs. Karras said. The room was absolutely silent as Mrs. Karras said, “Hen. Do you have that? All right. Your second word is ran. The dog ran after the ball. Ran.” One thing was obvious. You didn’t fool around with Mrs. Karras.

  Miss Eckhardt walked through the room, which was now absolutely silent.

  In the hall, Jerry held out his hand. “Lisa, do you remember me? Jerry Cotter from the Mental Health Clinic. We met at Bernie’s a couple of months ago.”

  “Of course, Jerry. I’m glad to see you.” Lisa Eckhardt’s voice was warm and deep dimples appeared by the corners of her mouth when she smiled. Her brown hair was cut short and it curled in disarray around her pretty face.

  Jerry introduced me as the tutor for Luke Brauer and Lisa immediately invited me into her classroom. Jerry pressed a data sheet and stopwatch into my hand. “Good luck.”

  Lisa and I went back together, and it was then that she pointed Luke out to me. He was just a l
ittle kid, I thought once again, as I watched him from my seat on the radiator.

  As Lisa took over from Mrs. Karras, she said, “Class, we’re lucky to have a visitor today. Mary MacCracken is here.”

  The kids paid no attention. A boy in the back wadded the paper he’d been writing on into a ball and, as soon as Mrs. Karras closed the door, threw it at the girl across the aisle. She yelled and the others immediately joined the fracas.

  Except Luke. He turned and looked at me as though from a million miles away, and then turned back to his desk. It was as though he looked but didn’t see me, any more than he heard the shouts and yells around him.

  At his desk, small and alone, Luke drew something on a paper. I put the stopwatch and data sheet in my pocket and moved to a windowsill near his desk.

  What was he drawing? Horses? I couldn’t quite tell.

  “The first two rows go to the board.”

  Eleven bodies crowded along the blackboard at the side of the room, grabbing chalk from one another.

  “Luke,” Lisa said, “aren’t you in the first row? Go to the board.”

  Reluctantly, Luke stuffed his picture in his desk and walked to the blackboard.

  By the time he arrived, there was no chalk left and almost no space. He wedged himself in between two other boys, looked up and down the chalk rail and then, seeing no chalk, just stood silently.

  “All right, now,” Lisa said. “I’ll call out a problem for each of you. You write it on the board, figure it out, and then we’ll check it. John, nine plus five. Ed, seven plus six. Luke, eight plus six.”

  Luke had no chalk. He could easily have asked to borrow some, or told Lisa. He did neither. He just stood, doing nothing, and then returned to his seat.

  “Luke,” Lisa called sharply. “Where are you going? I told you to write your problem on the board. Eight plus six. Go on now.”

  But Luke’s head never turned. He hunched down in his seat, turning his picture over and over.

  A boy at the board hit his neighbor with an eraser.

  “John! Stop that! Now read your answer to the class and see if they agree.” As Lisa talked she went toward Luke, then stood in front of his desk. “What’s the trouble, Luke? Don’t you feel well?”

  Luke shrugged without looking up. A boy in the back row yelled, “John’s hittin’ Ed again. Lookit him, Miss Eckhardt.”

  “John, get back to your seat, since you can’t behave at the board.”

  As soon as Lisa turned away, Luke pulled out his picture and spread it on the desk, his head bent down so that it almost touched the paper.

  I edged closer, trying to make out what he was drawing. Maybe they were lions. One large one lying down and three little ones on the far side of the paper.

  I squatted beside Luke’s desk. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Mary. Will you come with me for a minute? Bring your picture.

  “Luke and I are going to do a little work,” I said to Miss Eckhardt. “We’ll be back in about a half hour.”

  I knew I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing. I could feel the stopwatch pressing on my thigh in the front pocket of my jeans. I knew both Luke and I should still be in his classroom while I “charted” his behavior. But I couldn’t stand to waste the time. It was already clear that he did no work and his behavior was negative. What I had to know was why and I couldn’t find that out with a stopwatch. I had to listen to Luke, even when he wasn’t talking, and I couldn’t do that in a roomful of thirty kids.

  I walked down toward the music room, Luke beside me, hoping that Jerry had gone back to the clinic.

  I was glad to find the music room empty, filled only with a musty, unused smell.

  “Let’s sit here,” I said to Luke. He wiggled onto a chair at the long table and I sat beside him. He kept his picture under the table.

  “I think,” I said, “that those were tigers on your paper. Very, very tired tigers.”

  Luke’s round eyes stared at me.

  “They probably get very tired because of all the noise in the zoo and had to lie down,” I said.

  Luke turned away and we sat silently for three or four minutes. I concentrated on Luke – the ring of grime on the back of his neck, the sharp points of his elbow bones. What went on in his head when he set fires? What was he thinking right now? I felt, rather than saw, Luke move, and then slowly he brought his piece of paper up from under the table.

  “Nope,” he said in a voice so soft I could hardly hear him. “They’re lions. They got no stripes.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I should have noticed.”

  Luke got a little stub of a pencil from his pocket. “And this one’s got fur around her face,” he said, drawing whirls around the lion’s face.

  “It’s a her,” I said.

  “Yup. Even though she’s got fur like a beard.”

  “It must be a pretty big cage,” I said. “Those little lions are so far away from the big lion.”

  “It’s not a cage. It’s Africa. It’s the mother lion and her babies in Africa, and then a zoo keeper came to Africa and they got caught and he put them in a big field with a big, BIG, fence around it.”

  Luke was on his knees on the chair drawing a fence around the lions.

  “There are three babies … and –” Luke stopped suddenly, obviously surprised at himself. He wasn’t ready to trust me with any more. “That’s all.”

  It was enough for one day.

  “That’s a good story,” I said.

  We sat silently looking at the lions.

  I had no materials with me. What to do? What to do? Suddenly I remembered the stopwatch. We were supposed to use the stopwatch. I took it out of my pocket and laid it on the table.

  “Do you know what this is?” I asked Luke.

  He nodded without expression.

  “This one works like this. Press the thing at the top to make it go. See, there are sixty seconds in a minute. Press it again to make it stop. Now this little thing on the side makes the hands go back to the beginning when you press it. Try it.”

  I nudged the stopwatch toward Luke.

  Luke stared at it, then touched it tentatively with one finger. Suppose he threw it, dropped it, broke it. Suppose he did? I wanted him to know I trusted him. And I did trust him. More than that. Already more than that.

  Luke picked up the stopwatch and held it carefully in his left hand, pushed the button on the top with his right index finger. Tick, tick, tick. The stopwatch and my pulse beat together. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty.

  “Okay,” I said. “Time me. Give me something to do and see how long it takes.”

  Luke pushed the top button and then the side button. The hands returned to the top. He looked at me steadily. “What can you do?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Think of something.”

  “Can you do dition?”

  “Dition?”

  “Like pluses. Add.”

  “Oh. Sure. Addition. I think so.”

  “All right. One million dollars plus two million dollars. Write it down here. Go.”

  Luke snapped on the stopwatch and turned over the lion picture. I wrote it down.

  “Ten seconds. Twenty seconds,” Luke counted off the seconds.

  “Three million dollars. There.” I pushed the paper back.

  Luke clicked off the watch and put it down carefully on the table away from the edge. He studied my face and then, never saying anything, turned back to the paper and wrote 100 beside my dition and turned back to me.

  “You can keep it if you want,” he said.

  “Thank you, Luke,” I answered. “Listen, we’ve got to go back now, but I’m going to come down here every week, a couple of times a week or more, and see you. If that’s okay with you.”

  Luke nodded and we walked back to class without talking.

  Just outside the door, he stopped. “When you comin’?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, without thinking. “I’ll be down again tomorrow.”

&nb
sp; Chapter 5

  Time dragged the next morning. It was harder than ever to sit through Current Methods of Teaching Mentally Challenged Adolescents and Practicum in Teaching Reading to the Mentally Challenged. This was a practicum with no practice, only mimeographed sheets. Finally the clock buzzed its muted signal to freedom and I was out and on my way to School 23.

  I thought about Luke as I drove. I’d talked to Cal the night before. I didn’t understand it. Luke just didn’t seem that bad to me. Was it because I had taught such seriously disturbed children before that now Luke seemed easy in comparison?

  Partly, perhaps. Or was it his environment that didn’t give him a chance? It seemed as if people didn’t listen to him. Did Luke realize this and so didn’t bother to talk? Maybe his resistance grew into refusal to do work and he escaped into the fantasy of his drawings. I would have to get into the office and read his records carefully.

  I arrived at ten to one, and the yard at the west side of the school that served as parking lot and playground was jammed with kids. A heavy woman, with a plastic kerchief tied over her gray hair and black galoshes on her feet, stood in the center of the yard blowing short shrill blasts on a whistle. The children cheerfully ignored her, pushing, shoving, moving like a tidal wave from one side of the yard to the other, back and forth, swirling around the teacher almost without noticing her.

  Occasionally something would distract them. A fight would break out between two boys, and a small group of ten or twelve children would form a protective circle around the combatants, their cheers drowning out the agitated whistle blasts.

  A long loud bell rang inside the school and the wave of children rearranged itself.

  “Line up. Line up. We’re not going in till I see straight lines.”

  The children separated themselves into a dozen or so groups.

  “Straighten up those lines” – a few more whistle blasts. The children didn’t move at all, except to dart from their clusters to pick up a forgotten glove or book.

  “All right. Kindergarten first.” No one seemed to expect to have to form lines as they had been instructed to do, and one group after another tramped through the side door. Once again, words were meaningless.