This little challenge worked better than I had anticipated. Within seconds, they were all stomping around the classroom, roaring at each other with their hands up in the air. I let it go on for a few minutes, then got them settled down. There was no more mention of monsters.
By recess, I was completely exhausted. What had once seemed like a simple routine now showed itself to be unfathomably complex and emotionally draining. Most of my kids lived in situations which all but guaranteed failure in life and I could feel their needs like powerful vacuums pulling me in twenty-five directions. They were sad and tired and angry and confused. Some struggled to do well but couldn’t; others possessed capabilities well beyond their grade level but refused to use them. I was able to fall back on training and habits to keep the class on an even keel, but I knew this wasn’t teaching.
While the kids were out on the playground, I decided to take a risk. It was stupid and now I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I was still learning.
I went to the classroom next to mine where a lady with white hair sat marking papers.
“Mrs. Wilson? Excuse me, do you have a minute?”
Mrs. Wilson looked up from her work. “What? Oh . . . you have your own supplies!”
“I don’t want supplies. I’d just like to talk for a minute, if it’s all right.”
She made a kind of snorting sound. “Talk about what?” she said.
“About teaching. That is . . . how did you learn to be such a good teacher?”
“Helps if you’re a human. Why do you ask?”
“Well,” I said, trying to take time to think so I wouldn’t make some serious mistake. “I’d like to be a better teacher.”
“What for?” she said. “You’re not here to teach. You’re here to keep the damn troublemakers away from kids who might be able to learn a few things. Just because they made you able to memorize books and loaded a few lesson plans into your brain, that doesn’t make you a teacher. Now I have work to do.”
My good friend Jamal was the first to return from the playground. I was sitting at my desk.
“What’s the matter, Miss Angela?” he asked, giving me his biggest hug. “Don’t cry . . .”
I saw Sam as I was leaving that day, but he was too far away to speak to. I wondered if people ever told him he was worse than useless. I wondered if he ever felt the way I did.
Just as the bus pulled up, Claudette came skipping past the bus stop. Everybody was playing the little game they always played, trying to shove ahead of me without getting too close. “As if” was very big and strong, but when Claudette saw me, she raised her hands like monster claws and roared. “As if” slithered back into its hole and I laughed all the way home.
That first day at school taught me a lot about what it means to have a soul. When Mrs. Wilson told me the truth about myself, I was so humiliated I wanted to die, but I knew that, if she was right, then I was the only one who cared about my kids. I had to become a good teacher. Bruno would have to help me.
The Language of Monsters
Let’s try it again. Bonjour, Monsieur.”
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle.”
“Tu t’appelles comment?”
“Je m’appelle Bruno. Et tu?”
“Je m’appelle Angela. Tu aimes les . . . les hamburgers?”
“Oui, Madamoiselle. J’aime les hamburgers. Et tu?”
“You know I don’t like hamburgers,” I said. “I mean, um . . . Je n’aime . . . les . . .”
“Je n’aime pas les hamburgers,” said Bruno. “I thought you were supposed to be the teacher.”
“Maybe I should unload ships and you should teach my class,” I said. Actually, the grandfathers had made all their teachers fluent in several European languages, but I had never tried to teach anything not covered by my strictly defined lesson plans. Bruno was my test case; if I could teach him, something he was never meant to learn, it might mean that Mrs. Wilson was wrong.
“Can we stop now?” asked Bruno. “I’m hungry and it’s almost time for How Many Can You Break?”
“Guess I shouldn’t have asked about hamburgers,” I said. I started for the kitchen to make dinner, but stopped.
“Bruno?”
“Yeah?” He was already vanishing into the waves of channels flying across the screen, stopping to check one out, going forward, backing up. It reminded me of the way a cat walks around and around before settling down to purr and sleep.
“Thanks for helping me.”
“Sure.”
It had been two weeks since my visit to the Soul Man. As time went by, I had less and less awareness of before and after. It just seemed like a smooth, slow transition, like growing up must be. An unexpected thing was that Bruno was “growing up” too; not as much and not as fast, but it made me wonder if Sam was right about us being the same thing as they. Could Bruno “catch” a soul from me? If we already have souls, could mine wake his up?
Of course we weren’t always happy but even being mad was different. There was always more to a fight than the immediate irritation. I didn’t just want him to stop doing this or saying that. I wanted us to find out what was right. I wanted us to agree, even if it meant one of us had to admit being wrong . . .
I never stopped thinking about the night I hit him.
Bonjour, mes petites monstres.”
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Angela!”
My “little monsters” were learning French almost as quickly as Bruno. A lot of them resisted at first, but once they saw how it could set them apart from their schoolmates they really applied themselves. I think they were hungry for some identity other than “troublemakers.” My approach was simple. Once a phrase or vocabulary word had been learned, it no longer existed in English. Sometimes we even made a fun little ceremony of destroying the English words. More and more conversations were being conducted in French. They wouldn’t attain anything like fluency since there was so little time left in the school year, but they could be heard speaking their adopted language and singing “Sur le pont D’Avignon” in the hallways. It was a beautiful sound.
When I evaluated my lesson plans in the light of Mrs. Wilson’s explanation, I found plenty of space for French lessons. The curriculum I had been given was clearly meant to keep the kids busy without teaching them much of anything. It could only frustrate them and reinforce whatever indifference or resentment they were finding at home or in the community. In my brief career, I have found that children are bright. It is up to those charged with their care to polish them to the full brightness of their potential, but too often, they are dulled by carelessness, laziness and cynical manipulation. It is the education that fails, not the student.
I knew these things in a vague way even before my visit to the Soul Man, but now I was motivated to do my part as a teacher. My summer would be spent developing a new curriculum just for my kids. Maybe I could improve things little by little until one day, possibly by the end of next year, my kids could do as well as everyone else’s.
Of course, we had no French textbook. I typed each lesson and made copies. I was a little concerned about the reception such a shoestring approach would receive, but my students decided we should take all those lessons and create our own textbook. Claudette even drew a picture of the Eiffel Tower and a loaf of French bread to use for the cover.
“Il est temps pour le Français,” I announced as I passed out the day’s lesson. “Today we will learn how . . .”
“Miss Angela,” crackled the loudspeaker, “please report to Dr. Bauer’s office. Will Miss Angela please report to Dr. Bauer’s office?”
Dr. Bauer was our principal.
“Did you do something bad, Miss Angela?” asked Joseph.
“Not that I know of,” I said. “Maybe a parent wants to speak to me. Listen, mes petites monstres, I’m counting on you to behave yourselves, comprenez-vous?”
Mrs. Wilson was standing at her door as I left the classroom. Usually she never even looked at me, but today she watched me all the way down the hall.
There were no parents waiting outside the principal’s office. Inside were Dr. Bauer and a technician from Ultimate Aim.
“So,” said Dr. Bauer. She was a shapeless gray woman who always dressed like one of the curvy young professionals on stylish TV shows. She did not invite me to have a seat. “You’re teaching them French?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, the public school system is a multi-cultural institution,” she said. “Seventy percent of your class is African American, the rest are Hispanic or Asian. One is Irish. French is a colonial language; it’s foreign to their culture and worthless to them. It’s also not included in your curriculum. Who gave you permission to teach it?”
“No one, Doctor.”
“Then why . . . ?”
“Dr. Bauer,” interrupted the technician, “if I may?”
“Of course,” said Dr. Bauer. She looked like something was about to happen to me and she was glad.
“Angela,” said the technician, “core zEp 7-12 protocol-uncouple-recite.”
“Protocol-prime equal omicron-set 7 . . .” I began without hesitation. I was being debriefed! This form of interrogation was used by the technicians for onsite diagnostics. The “protocol-uncouple” command was supposed to induce a sort of trance which allowed an unimpeded flow of automatic responses, but the command would not work if the subject had been altered in any way.
If I could not mimic the trance state perfectly and give all the right answers, he would know I’d been to the Soul Man.
Fortunately, the technician was in a hurry. A thorough debriefing could take half an hour, but he stopped after five minutes. I think he was satisfied that I hadn’t been tampered with. “There’s nothing wrong with this one,” he told Dr. Bauer.
“Then why did it suddenly start teaching French?”
“She probably got bored with the curriculum. It happens. Anyway, the diagnostic shows no changes to her neural profile. Angela, open your eyes.”
Dr. Bauer had a disappointed look on her face. “Return to your class,” she ordered. I know she wanted to add, “We’ll be watching,” but everybody already knew that.
Mrs. Wilson had the same disappointed look as Dr. Bauer when she saw me. She went into her classroom and slammed the door.
The children were unruly, but they settled down quickly. “All right,” I began, “if you will please turn to page 46, the conversation about directions. Justin, could you please read the part of Henri?”
“Oui, Mademoiselle!”
Ours
It was time to talk to Bruno.
Six weeks had passed since the beginning of my new life. I should say our new life because I treated Bruno differently now. In some ways it was like what was going on with my kids; the way I treated them was changing the way they thought and behaved. Bruno was changing as well, but he was different from my kids. They were supposed to grow and change. For them it was natural, but we were made not to change.
Sometimes I could see the friction and confusion this caused. He tried without knowing why. Did he feel the satisfaction of accomplishment? Could it mean anything to him that he was probably the first man in our brief history to learn a language not given to him by the grandfathers? Of course, I couldn’t help thinking of myself as special because of my visit to the Soul Man, but Bruno was feeling his way behind me with a kind of blind faith. Why? What did it mean to him? What did I mean to him?
Shortly after we met, we made a practical decision to live together. Even we have natural desires and these soon found their natural expression, but love was unknown to us then.
Was it still unknown to him?
I was nervous when I sat down next to him on the sofa. He was watching wrestling again. I still didn’t like TV, but it usually made me happy to be with him when he was doing something he liked.
“Wow,” he said. “There’s Punchy Joe; he’s the worst ref in the league. I mean Slappy Joe. That guy with the green mask is the Salamander . . .”
He stopped and looked at me. “You know I don’t know what I’m talking about!” he said and then he started laughing. I don’t think I’d heard him laugh before. “You sit there,” he said with a snort, trying to catch his breath, “you sit there and listen like . . . like it’s all for real!” He gave me a great big hug, then wiped away a few tears. “You’re too much, Angela. Yeah, you’re too much!”
“Not as much as you,” I said. “Listen, Bruno, is it all right if we talk for a few minutes?”
“Talk all you want,” he said.
“I mean without the TV. Is it okay?” There was that friction; I was pulling him out of habit and asking him for a decision.
“Uh . . . yeah, yeah, sure,” he said. He clicked off the TV, but it took him a few seconds to change focus.
“How do you like learning French?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug.
“Well, I mean does it make you feel good? You know, I don’t think any of us have done anything like it. It makes you extraordinary.”
“I can lift more than anybody on the docks,” he said. “I think it scares people.”
“Do you ever wish it didn’t?”
“If it does, it does.” He shrugged again.
This wasn’t helping me to understand him. Or maybe it was.
“Je t’aime,” I said. “Do you know what that means?”
“I love you.”
“Do you know what that means?”
“Some kind of feeling people get,” he said. “They say it on TV all the time.”
“Don’t you ever get curious about feelings like that?” I said. “Don’t you wonder about things?”
“Why would I?”
I felt like I was standing on a bridge—maybe the one at Avignon—and it was being pulled apart brick by brick. I had to admit that I had created all kinds of hopes for myself and they were turning out not to be real. Maybe souls do that.
There’s another thing souls do. They feed regret. They stroke it and care for it until it’s too big to live inside you anymore and it has to break out. You have no choice.
“Bruno,” I said. My throat was all tight and my eyes were filling up with tears, “do you remember the night I hit you with the iron?”
“Sure,” he said, pulling back a little. There was a wary look on his face, like he thought I might be threatening him.
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done,” I said. “I’m so sorry! Can you forgive me?”
“No,” he said, “I can’t. You wanna get Chinese for dinner?”
The Soul Man was wrong. There was no way to fix it.
Miss Angela
One morning I found a note on my desk. It was from Joseph’s grandfather. It said:
“Dear Miss Angela,
“This is just a note to thank you for your devotion to your students. As you know, Joseph has had his share of trouble at school and at home, but he finds your class to be challenging and satisfying. Learning a foreign language has given him a sense of accomplishment. Thank you again and please keep up the good work. Sincerely, Charles Graham.”
I folded the note and put it in my plan book. At the end of the day, after the kids had gone, I took it out and read it again.
“You’re still teaching them French?” The voice startled me. I looked up and found Dr. Bauer standing at the door.
“Why are you still doing what I told you to stop?”
Her question was hard to understand. I gave what I hoped was the right answer. “You didn’t tell me to stop, Dr. Bauer.”
“I most certainly did! Who do you think you’re t
alking to?”
“I’m talking to the principal. And I’m sorry, Dr. Bauer, but I remember our last conversation. You did not tell me to stop.”
“Well, I’m telling you now! You will stop teaching French and teach only what is in your curriculum. Do you understand that? Will you remember that?”
“Yes, Doctor,” I said. “May I ask why?”
“I don’t answer to you,” she said. “You answer to me! Don’t fool yourself, Miss Angela. Just because the tech couldn’t find anything wrong with you doesn’t mean I can’t! You will learn your place or you will be dismissed. I will not be dissed by some subhuman science project! Don’t forget that!”
“Yes, Doctor.”
The next day, when my students arrived I greeted them in the usual way.
“Bonjour, mes enfants aimés.”
“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Angela!”
They all had today’s French homework on their desks in front of them.
“If you will please take out your math books and turn to page 107 . . .”
“But, Miss Angela,” said Jamal, raising his hand after he’d spoken, “il est temps pour le Français.”
“Oui!” agreed the rest of the class.
And now I learned how having a soul must always lead to a broken heart. There would be no more French and for them there could be no reason why this should be so. How could I tell them that Miss Angela was nothing but a creature into which people were meant to pour scorn and derision? Was this not ultimately my purpose in this school? Was I not here to keep the “troublemakers” out of the way while boring them, ignoring them and adding fuel to their tiny sparks of resentment? If I did my job properly, how could they not hate me and all others like me?
I couldn’t tell them that one more French lesson would not merely get me fired; it would get me sent to the laboratory. There was so much in this little situation that they could never understand, but eventually they would understand the most important thing; Miss Angela had abandoned them.
Of course, for the moment they were simply disappointed. I didn’t tell them there would never be any more French. I just said we were changing things a little. So now, I was a liar as well as a poor teacher.
Writers of the Future, Volume 28 Page 28