City Kid

by Mary MacCracken

  “I asked to be transferred here. I was vice-principal on a posh school on the other side of town. The principal was retiring in a year and, as everybody kept pointing out to me, I had it made! But then this opening at Twenty-three came up and I applied and got it. That was six years ago and I’ve loved every day of it. Of course, everybody else thinks I’m out of my mind. But, you know, like the kids, we’re surviving. And unlike a lot of the schools around here, we haven’t had fires or broken windows or looting here. Plenty in the surrounding neighborhood, but not here at the school. I like to think it’s because the kids feel like the school is theirs.

  “Well, speaking of loot,” Mrs. Karras continued, “what are all the books?”

  “I got them from the storeroom to use with Luke. I also got a couple of reading and math tests from Norm Foster and gave them to Luke. It turns out his math isn’t too bad, but he’s almost a year behind in reading and spelling. But neither the clinic nor the college have any books I can use to teach Luke.”

  Mrs. Karras glanced through the books. “Well, you’re certainly welcome to these, if you want them. We haven’t used those editions in five years. One of the first things I did was get a new series in here. But if Luke is turned off now, Mary, do you really think these books will turn him on?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s a place to start. As long as you don’t mind what I do with them.”

  “I don’t care if I never see them again.” Mrs. Karras waved at the secretary, who was signaling from the door. “And thank you again for coming down here. It’s going to mean a lot to Luke and the others. I’m sure of it.”

  I stood up. “We thank you. I know a lot of other principals turned the program down, didn’t want ‘college kids’ fooling around in their schools.”

  Mrs. Karras’s upright bearing suddenly became limber and loose and she surprised me with a slide step from an old soft-shoe routine. As we neared the office door, she whacked me softly on the arm. “Be my guest, kiddo. Fool around all you want.”

  I drove back to college smiling all the way.

  That night after dinner, I got out the books from School 23 and spread them on the floor in front of me. There was no doubt they were unappealing. But that was mainly because of the pictures. The words in the first-grade books were first-grade words, the same words as in the newer, more attractive texts. I knew because I was always searching for and reviewing “high interest, low content” books for the children I had taught before. Their academic skills had often been even lower than Luke’s. The language experience stories, such as Luke was writing for his book, worked well with all kinds of kids and I planned to keep on doing them with Luke, but books using a phonetic or linguistic approach, which needed good auditory abilities, didn’t seem right for Luke right now.

  Foster had teased me when I told him I thought Luke remembered what he saw better than what he heard, but I still felt this way, even though I didn’t understand why it was so.

  If Mrs. Karras had learned that a principal had to be a working principal, I had learned that the only way to teach a child who is in trouble is to give him success. I didn’t want to drill where Luke was weak. I needed to use his strong points. Just telling Luke he was smart wouldn’t mean anything. He had to be able to do something he hadn’t been able to do before.

  I sighed and Cal looked up from the yellow pad where he was sketching a design for the return header on an ice mat, one of his many patents in the field of heat exchange.

  “Trouble?” he asked.

  I leaned back against the couch. “It doesn’t come. The right way to teach Luke, I mean. I know it’s there. I can almost touch it, and then it’s gone.”

  Cal nodded. “I know. Strange how the solution to a problem can be so elusive.” He put his pad in his briefcase. “Maybe if you sleep on it.”

  By ten o’clock the next morning, I had it, or at least the beginning. I knew what to do with those books. I’d begin with the first half of first grade, words I was sure Luke knew, and that were in large type. I’d glue each page on a piece of heavy cardboard and then cut them up and Luke could use the words in his stories. That way, there’d be no dippy pictures and no “baby book.” And most important, success was sure. Of course, I could only use one side of a page, but that was okay. There were plenty more books in the storeroom if I needed them. But I didn’t think I would. First-grade sight vocabulary is pretty well controlled and the same words were used over and over.

  I had the box of word chips out on the table when Luke came in, but if he noticed, he gave no sign. In the little black and white notebook I had our “lesson plan” for the day. Six lines long. The date at the top of the page. Then, 1. Best Thing, Worst Thing. (We always started with this. It was an old and loved routine for me and Luke liked it, too. Luke’s telling me the best thing and the worst thing that had happened to him since I last saw him gave me a quick check on where he was and what he needed. It also encouraged his use of language.)

  Dictate Story

  Word Bank

  Addition Problems

  Flash Cards

  Mystery Box

  At the bottom of the day’s page in the notebook was the number 75 – Luke’s leftover points from the day before.

  We read the list together. Luke knew most of the words from other times. He pointed to number 6. “What’s that say?”

  “Mystery Box.”

  “What’s that?”

  I pointed to the box that held the word chips. I’d quickly slapped some red contact paper on it and put a big yellow question mark on the top.

  “Can we do it first?”

  “Not today. Let’s get through this other stuff first Best thing?”

  “I got a hit in baseball. A good one. Whacko. Ole Bobby Ferraro couldn’t even hold onto it and I got to second.”

  “A double. Good, Luke. Give yourself ten points. You know, I never got a hit ever when I was in school.”

  “How come?” Luke asked, interested.

  “I don’t know. I just couldn’t get the bat to connect with the ball. They both seemed so little. I just struck out every time. I hated spring to come because of that.”

  Luke nodded, understanding. “Yeah. Well, a baseball is pretty little, a lot littler than a basketball. But it’s not too hard.” He looked up at me. “Maybe we could play some, sometime.”

  “Maybe. Maybe you could show me. Do you have a worst thing?”

  Luke thought for a minute and then shook his head.

  “Nothing?” I asked, pushing a little, but needing to know. “No bad dreams – not in any trouble –?”

  “Nope.” Luke’s voice was sure. “Well, only thing – I burned my arm a little.” He turned over his right arm and there was a large red welt halfway to his elbow.

  “Ugh! How did you do that?”

  “Cookin’. I was frying the hamburgers for Alice and Frank and Alice began throwing her shoe around in the kitchen. I told her not to, but she just did it anyway, like a dumb ole girl, and then it landed right on the stove and hit the pan and, plop, the ole fat popped up on my arm.”

  “What did you do?”

  Luke looked at me. “What do you think? I put her shoe up high where she couldn’t get it till after supper.”

  I nodded, thinking a hundred things at once. Where was his mother? Why couldn’t I ever get her on the phone? I’d have to see her somehow. Had anybody put anything on his arm? Was it bad enough to send him to the nurse? Would he see that as a betrayal?

  Out loud I said, “I didn’t know you could cook hamburgers.”

  Luke laughed. “That’s nuthin’. I can cook thousands of things. Hot dogs. Beans. Hamburgers. Jelly sandwiches. Chocolate milk. Lots of things. I cook for Alice and Frank and me all the time.”

  I kept the sigh inside, remembering his defensive silence on the mountain when he thought I’d criticized his mother. “You better pay yourself twenty,” I said. “Ten for the burn, worst thing, and another ten for the cooking.”

 
“All right,” Luke said, keeping score on a piece of paper.

  Forget the burn. It doesn’t look that bad. He’d hate to go to the nurse. I checked off 1. “Okay. Two: Dictate story. What’s the story today?”

  Luke settled back. This was old hat to him now. We had at least twenty stories in his book, some long, some short. “Once upon a time,” he said, “there was this baseball team and it was the Bust urn up team.”

  “Bust urn up? How do you spell that?”

  “Just write it any way,” Luke said impatiently. “Like bust urn up. Anyway, they were playing a game against another team called the Killers …”

  Luke’s story was one of blood and violence. Everybody got hit on the head, blood drenched the ballpark. His stories were much more related to his world now. Instead of writing about lions in Africa, he was moving away from fantasy and was beginning to write about the guts of his existence.

  I was always moved by his stories, and now as he finished, I had to clear my throat before I said, “Okay. Let me read it back to you.” Luke made a few small corrections and then read the story to himself. “I’ll get it typed and bring it next time,” I promised. “Now pick your word. Anything but Bust urn up.”

  We kept a word bank of special words Luke wanted to learn.

  “Baseball,” he said without hesitation.

  “Okay.” I was pretty sure he already knew it. He’d used it several times in his story, but his word was his word, and we used the one he chose. “That’s called a compound word.” I printed it onto an index card with a Magic Marker. “A compound word has two real words in it. See? Base and ball.” I handed Luke the card. “Baseball.”

  Luke looked at it carefully and then put it in with the other words in an old wooden recipe box I’d brought in.

  “Baseball, blackboard, sidewalk. All compound words,” I said.

  “And Bust urn up,” Luke said, teasing me.

  “Bust you up,” I said. “Here. Two addition problems. They’re hard. Ones, tens, and hundreds.”

  Luke bent his head over the paper, adding out loud, “Four and three are seven.”

  I watched him as he worked. He made it all worthwhile, all the dumb, dreary courses. All the wasted time memorizing useless facts. It didn’t matter. I could do it because of Luke.

  “There.” Luke pushed the paper back to me. “How’s that?”

  I checked the problems. “Add the ones, add the tens, add the hundreds. Perfect. Give yourself ten points for each. And an extra five for this one. Look. See how neat it is? And your answers are exactly under the right columns. That’s good. It’s important to keep them straight. Okay. Check off addition. What’s next? Ah, flash cards. They’re over on the file cabinet.”

  Luke was already on his way. Good. He needed to stretch his body a little. He had been sitting so still, concentrating so hard.

  He brought the box back, put it on the table, and stood beside me.

  “Thank you, Luke,” I said. “What’ll it be today? Easy or hard?” We had divided up the addition facts from one to twenty into two piles, one easy, one hard, and were gradually moving more to the easy pile as Luke became certain of them. Now he answered.

  “Both. First the easy. Then the hard.”

  I grinned at him. “Pretty sure of yourself.”

  “Gimme the easy ones fast, Mary. I know ’em so good.”

  He was right. He did. He had at least thirty of the cards down cold. Automatic for him now.

  “Thirty more points,” I said. “You’re going to break the bank today.”

  Luke marked the score sheet. “Boy, those ’dition cards are easy. You know what?” Luke put his hand on my arm to get my attention. “Those easy ’dition cards are so easy, I know ’em outside in.”

  Outside in? Maybe that’s the way to get to know a child. Outside in or inside out. What did it matter? We both knew what he meant.

  “And now,” I said, “for the Mystery Box.”

  Luke jumped up on the chair eagerly and my heart clunked downward. What a letdown this was going to be. Why hadn’t I let him open it in the beginning and use the words in his story as I’d planned? Now he would be bored by this and what I had thought was such a good idea wouldn’t work at all. I shook my head at myself. Dumb. What was I going to do now? Luke sure wasn’t going to want to make sentences out of those words now. I knew it.

  Luke was still waiting, looking at me.

  “What is it?” he asked pleasantly. “What’s a mystery box?”

  I looked at him. “To tell the truth, Luke, I don’t really know. I just called it that because I didn’t know a better name. Here. Look.” No use trying to fake it. I pushed the box toward him and waited. He took off the lid and silently stirred the word chips with his finger. “What are we gonna do with them?”

  I shrugged. “Well, I had a plan, but now it doesn’t seem so great. I’m trying to get a new idea.” I piled a few words in front of me, trying to think, but Luke was way ahead of me.

  “Look,” he said. “We can make it like a TV show. I’ll close my eyes and pick a word and then see if I can read it.”

  “Yes,” I said, warming to Luke’s idea. “Listen. We can get the tape recorder and pretend it’s like a microphone.” I was already up, lifting my tape recorder down from the closet shelf.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the –” I snapped the recorder off and turned to Luke. “What are we going to call the show?”

  Luke knew. “The Mystery Show. Today it will be words. Other times we can make it other things.”

  I nodded. “Welcome to the Mystery Show. Our first contestant is Luke Brauer. He will pick words absolutely unknown and never before seen by him, from this box right before your eyes and attempt to read them.”

  Luke tugged at my sleeve. “Pretend I win money for them,” he said. “That’s the way they do it on TV.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “A dollar for every word I get right,” Luke said seriously and then whispered to me, whispered because the audience was getting so real to us. “That’s just pretend, Mary. Not real money, okay?”

  I nodded and turned on the tape again. “We have a fortune waiting here to be won by some lucky someone. A dollar for every correct word. Are you ready, Mr. Brauer?”

  Luke nodded, closed his eyes tight, and reached for a word chip. He held it in the center of his hand, opened his eyes and said triumphantly, “Play. The word is play.”

  “Correct. Absolutely correct. That is one dollar.” I tore off a small piece of paper and handed it to him.

  I picked up my stopwatch and grinned at Luke. “You now have three minutes in which to earn as many dollars as you can. Ready. Go.”

  Luke grabbed a handful of chips. “Ball Said. Ran. It. Blue. One,” shouting out the words, piling them in front of him as the stopwatch ticked away.

  When the three minutes were up, Luke had emptied the box and won eighty-seven dollars, and I knew he knew all the words. Our next show would have the words from the second half of first grade. Maybe they should be worth two dollars.

  One thing was sure. I didn’t have to worry about how to teach as long as I had Luke around. If I couldn’t figure it out, he’d show me how.

  Chapter 15

  I tried to call Luke’s house once more from the office, but again there was no answer. Was his mother home and just not answering? Perhaps she was sleeping. According to Luke, she was now working as a waitress at Joe’s, a roadhouse at the edge of town, and left for work at five o’clock each afternoon.

  The idea of the therapeutic tutorial program at School 23 was good, but there sure were a lot of loose ends. Less than four official weeks left and I hadn’t even met Luke’s mother yet. When I complained about this to Shirley and Hud, I found they were having the same trouble, although Hud had finally met Vernon’s mother one afternoon when she came to pick him up at school.

  I told both Jerry and Norm Foster and they were sympathetic, but we barely saw Jerry now a
nd Foster really did have difficulty finding time to get down to School 23, between classes and the long rows of students waiting to be advised.

  I went back to the music room and took out a pad of lined paper. “Dear Mrs. Brauer,” I wrote, “I am Mary MacCracken, Luke’s tutor here at School 23. I am enjoying working with Luke and would like very much to meet you. When and where would be good for you? Mary MacCracken.”

  I wrote the note five times without getting it much better. I didn’t want it to sound threatening or superior or condescending. Finally, I just folded it up and put it in an envelope and wrote “Mrs. Brauer” on the outside.

  But then I had to figure out how to get it to her. I didn’t want to mail it. Luke could take it, but then he would wonder why I was sending a note to his mother.

  I glanced at my watch. Two-thirty. I would wait for Luke and give it to him after school so I could explain.

  I took out my notes on the reading practicum course, to go over while I waited for three o’clock. We were supposed to be teaching a mentally challenged child to read, only it turned out that we just simulated the child and talked about what we would do if we were teaching an “educable” child. “Educable” was supposed to mean an IQ of fifty to seventy-five; “trainable” was twenty-five to fifty; “custodial”; zero to twenty-five; seventy-five to ninety, “slow learner”; ninety to one hundred and ten, “average”; one hundred and ten to one twenty, “bright”; and on up the scale. Somehow it seemed very artificial when Mrs. Riley lectured about it during reading practicum. Maybe it was because I had the feeling I wouldn’t want to answer her questions if she were testing me, and if I didn’t answer, what label would I get? Slow learner? Educable?