Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies

by Nick Fonda

  Just as improbable, as unexpected, was the manner in which they had found their home a few weeks later. They had driven to Sherbrooke with the day’s editions of La Tribune and The Record, and with a city map that still felt crisp and new. It was their second or third scouting expedition but they didn’t feel in any rush. They were confident—especially Val—that they were going to find the perfect apartment in the perfect neighbourhood. They might even find a house to rent. With luck, Val said, maybe in Lennoxville. She had done her university at Bishop’s and Lennoxville was something of a second home. That morning however, Val had toured him around the shaded streets of le Vieux Nord and they had stopped at Howard Park to stretch their legs for a few minutes. It was there the dominoes started to fall.

  For, if they hadn’t stopped at Howard Park, they wouldn’t have met Barbara, who was one of Val’s old room-mates. They wouldn’t have gone to Barb’s for lunch and so they wouldn’t have met Kevin St. Pierre, the carpenter who was working on Barb’s front veranda. Nor would they have met his sister, Solange, who needed a ride to Saint-François de Cushing, which was only a very slight detour on their way home to Val’s parents’ place. And if they hadn’t struck up such a friendship with Solange on the way home, they wouldn’t have stopped at her house, just for a minute. They wouldn’t have met Solange’s neighbour, Mrs. McGiven, who heard their story and said, “My, it’s too bad you didn’t get a job here because there’d be the perfect house for you just down the street. I was just talking to Jim Lefebvre. He wants to sell his place.”

  They weren’t looking for a house to buy. They had never even talked, in any kind of serious way, about buying a house, so there was no explicitly logical reason for them to walk to the end of the block with Solange and Mrs. McGiven to look at a century-old, two-storey, clapboard house painted white and pink, sitting on an unexpectedly large lot. Jim Lefebvre, as chance would have it, was standing outside his front door and was very glad to give them a tour of his house and yard. There were trees and hedges, and ample room for a serious vegetable garden. The back door opened onto an enclosure that had long before been a dog run and which, in all ways, was a perfect outdoor playpen for the child they were expecting. The house was full of light. The hardwood floors occasionally creaked. They walked from one room to another until they found themselves in an attic that seemed to have come out of a long-ago storybook.

  They had left home that morning with the intention of looking at rental properties. They returned home almost certain that they were going to buy a house.

  “C’est une vieille maison,” his father-in-law had said. Since then, he had come to understand what those laconic words actually meant. The windows were drafty and—for them—prohibitively expensive to replace. The walls were poorly insulated and kept a superannuated furnace running from early fall to late spring. The wiring was old; in the summer the radiator valves were sometimes leaky. Under multiple layers of fading wallpaper, the plaster was cracked and fragile.

  “C’est pas l’ouvrage qui manque,” Marcel had warned, looking at the house with his experienced carpenter’s eye, “mais ‘est ben faite.” Meredith too, had given her guarded encouragement. By the time they made that second, formal visit, they were both in love with the house, in love with the promise it held, in love with the sudden, unexpected course their life had taken.

  Not that many things went exactly as they’d envisioned them. The child they were expecting turned out to be twins and parenthood brought an extensive and varied set of new demands for which they were in no way prepared. The house seemed always to need something repaired or replaced, and it was depressingly expensive to heat. Their single salary never managed to stretch as far as they would have expected and sometimes needed. The hardest thing though, for him, had been the shock of his new school. The students he faced in his classes—compared to those he’d been teaching for the last decade—were like an alien species. It was as if he had somehow stepped half a century back in time. He didn’t want to call them slow, or simple, because he recognized intelligence and sensitivity in them. But they weren’t what he was used to. Often, his students gave him answers, or asked questions, which made him wonder if they’d ever had any formal education at all. His days of receiving occasional letters expressing thanks from former students who’d gone on to Cambridge or Princeton were over.

  That first year, when he wasn’t being woken by one of the twins, he was waking up from strange and disturbing dreams. In one he was on a race horse, an animal which moved as effortlessly and smoothly as a flying carpet. It was an important race and he was well ahead. Then, in the dream, he had to mount another horse. This second animal was a huge work horse, and even though he was kicking it with his heels and slapping its neck, the lumbering animal seemed content to amble along heedless of its rider. At the finish line, he found that the race was long over and everyone was gone. He was all alone.

  At the end of that first year, he applied for a posting for a Grade 6 class at Abenaki Elementary. When he got the job, it was as much a cause for celebration as the job at the high school had been. Abenaki was less than a ten-minute walk from the pink and white house instead of an hour’s drive. It represented savings in time and money, both of which were in short supply.

  He’d always imagined that at some point he’d settle in one school and finish out his career. He’d just never expected it would be a small primary school in a rural backwater in an unknown corner of Quebec. Academically speaking, Abenaki represented a very modest, very humble calling. Strangely enough, much as this had bothered him that first year at the high school, at Abenaki it didn’t bother him in the least. He quite welcomed it, as if he were a medieval monk devoting his life through humble labour to a greater cause.

  The corollary was the surprising part, and that was how much he enjoyed small-town life and how happy he was with family life. He was aware that he had somehow acquired not just children, but a set of grandparents that went with them. He was conscious that for the first time since early adolescence, he was part of a family; not a small nuclear unit, but a vast network that seemed to spread endlessly beyond his reach through both time and space. Val’s parents and siblings and cousins had all somehow also become his.

  And now, staring at the downpour that faced him beyond the open door, he wondered what he was going to do. He couldn’t put any of this into words. He couldn’t imagine how he could ever explain it to Val but he saw that everything, inevitably, was going to collapse. He marvelled at how quickly it had happened, at how unsuspecting and unprepared he had been for what now faced him.

  She had called him over the intercom as he was about to dash home for a quick bite to eat and a short moment to see Val and the twins, and the baby if he was awake.

  “I wanted to see you, just for a minute,” she had said, when he knocked at her door. “Have a seat. I’ll go get the files.”

  She had left him sitting in her office, a small room which was much changed since Fred had left at the end of June. Fred’s old oak desk had been replaced by a new one made of some hard, plastic laminate, and of an L-shaped design to accommodate a screen and keyboard. Where Fred’s desk was inevitably hidden beneath an avalanche of papers, this one had not a single sheet. On its imitation-wood surface there was an upscale pen holder in black and gold, a small box of tissues and a framed photograph of a dog.

  At that moment, he had been unsuspecting. He wasn’t even curious as to why Maureen wanted to see him. He had only been anxious to get home. It was a short ten-minute walk home and a short ten-minute walk back. That didn’t leave much time to see Val and the kids and have a quick supper. Still, if he was very lucky, he might even have five minutes to sit with The Record before getting back to school, enough to refresh him for the evening ahead.

  Maureen had barely laid a dozen manila folders on the corner of the desk when there was a rap on the door. When he heard Janet’s voice, his heart sank. Janet was the Union rep. Whatever she’d come for would take forever, and the
more trivial the matter, the longer Janet would make it take. He crossed his fingers that Maureen would send her away so that he could get home as soon as possible.

  Yet, he guessed that wouldn’t be likely. The previous spring, after Fred had announced his retirement, the staff room buzzed quietly for weeks with speculation on his replacement. When Maureen had been named as the new principal, her name had meant nothing to him. Janet however was full of stories predicting woe. We would be Maureen’s third school in three years. In that time, her people skills and administrative zeal had earned her a nickname: the Rottweiler. If you were called into her office, Janet had warned, as likely as not, you could expect to leave in tears. He had taken Janet’s stories with a good grain of salt. It was ironic, he now thought, how, of all the teachers on the staff, it was Janet who had become chummiest with the new principal.

  He looked at the folders on the desk and a faint suspicion grew that they were not a good omen. He half-heard the voices of the two women at the door and he willed Janet to go away. It was to no avail. After a minute, Maureen pulled the door closed behind her and left him alone to stare at the framed photo of a singularly unattractive dog. As his impatience gnawed at him, the dog in the picture seemed to grow increasingly ugly. When Maureen finally returned, he stole a glance at the clock above the door and his heart sank.

  “I wanted to see you about some of your students,” she said as she slid behind her desk. “This first reporting session is the best time to warn parents if their children are at risk, and I think there are several in your class. As I hope you know, in this country, we don’t fail children in Grade 6. I know you’ve taught somewhere overseas, where they probably do that. In this country, only in an exceptional case will a child be held back. We want to focus on success. Now, as I was saying, a lot of your students are at risk. If a child’s going to be going to the Learning Centre next year, or follow the Modified Program at the high school, I always think it’s best to let parents know right from the beginning of the year.”

  The surprise must have shown on his face.

  “You’re not in the habit of doing this?” she asked. “I started doing this when I was still teaching, and I made sure my Grade 6 teachers did it in my other schools. It makes it much easier for everyone later on, believe me.”

  It was a foreign idea to him and one that raised all sorts of questions, but he nodded. He just wanted to get home.

  “There’s something else I want to mention to you first,” she continued, her hands loosely clasped together on the desk in front of her.

  She paused for a long second before continuing. “The other week, you went to a workshop …”

  He had. It was over an hour’s drive there and an hour’s drive back. He—and how many others?—had listened to a couple of criminally dull speakers from the ministry and attended an afternoon workshop which, in the end, proved more confusing than anything else. He had come home angry and resentful. It had felt like a wasted day; he had returned from the workshop with nothing tangible and, of course, he’d done none of the many things that had to be done in his own classroom.

  “I understand that you made a comment at one point?”

  “A comment?”

  “It wasn’t you? Didn’t you attend the Cycle Three workshop last Friday?”

  “Yes.” He was trying to get his bearings. He was distracted by the framed picture on her desk. He could hardly remember last Friday. What comment had he made? And to whom?

  “What I want to tell you,” she said, “is that your words were…regrettable. They were very hurtful to your fellow teachers, in particular to Jennifer and Ellen who teach Grade 5…”

  “What?” he protested, “I’ve never said anything about anyone.”

  Maureen made a show of taking a breath, as if to say to a young child, “I know you’re lying, but I’m going to be patient.”

  He suddenly knew what this was about. He knew what comment she was referring to.

  “What I said was, the kids who came into my class this year were a lot weaker than they were last year. They have problems reading even…”

  Maureen raised her hand to cut him off. “So you admit it. At least that. No, you’ve said more than enough already. Just listen. What’s done is done. It’s unfortunate but that’s the way it is. I hope that next time you’ll think before you speak. We all want to work together as a team and you can’t go off like a loose cannon making irresponsible comments about your fellow teachers. No. No. There’s no need for you to say any more. I think you’ve already said more than enough. We’ll end that conversation. We have parents arriving soon and I want to review your ‘at risk’ students, so we know what to say to parents tonight.”

  He turned his eyes to the photo of the snarling mongrel. The most resonant words he’d heard were “coming soon” and he thought that maybe, just maybe, if he could keep it short, he still might have time to jog home, even if it meant taking the car back to school.

  He didn’t want to think about the rest of his principal’s words. There was something very wrong about them. But there had been things wrong with the workshop itself, which was really a long session selling the ministry’s educational reform. (He had tried reading the four-hundred page document outlining the reform which the ministry had prepared and which had been nicknamed the Brick. It had been a failed attempt. The document was the antithesis of what writing was supposed to be—longwinded and full of obfuscation instead of being clear and to the point.) The idea was that, after the ministerial mandarin’s presentation, the teachers in Grade 6 would be ready to implement the Reform—as they were required to do by law. The Reform was being implemented gradually, year by year.

  At one point, the mandarin had stopped to take yet another sip of water, and casually asked if there were questions.

  That was the comment Maureen had referred to. He had raised his hand and said that he had concerns. He explained that the students he had this year—students introduced to the Reform last year—had come to him with unexpectedly poor writing skills, were much weaker in math, and had far less general knowledge than the kids he had had the year before. The mandarin had put down his water bottle and waited a very long time before finally saying—untruthfully as it turned out—that he’d address the point later on.

  Maureen was ploughing ahead with something else. She had pulled the pile of folders in front of her so they acted almost as a barricade between the two of them. She was listing off names of pupils in his class, instructing him to advise the parents of one that their child would be placed in the Learning Center next year, or the parents of another that their child would be a candidate for the Modified Learning Program at the regional high school.

  He nodded. He nodded and willed her to go faster. He would say nothing. He wanted to get out of her office and go home. Even if it meant his supper would be no more than an apple eaten in the car on the way back to school, he wanted to get home.

  He nodded perfunctorily and watched the original pile shrink while a new pile grew to block the framed photo. He nodded again as she moved the penultimate folder to its new pile. He was ready to nod once more and leap out of his chair. He’d say, very politely, “Thank you. If you don’t mind, I’m going to rush home now and get a bite to eat.”

  The next thing he heard was Martin Thompson.

  “Martin Thompson!” The exclamation was out of his mouth before he realized he’d spoken.

  “Oh?” she said, looking not at him but at the papers she was slowly turning in the fat file folder on her desk. “Do you think he could handle the Modified Learning Program? You don’t think he would fit better at the Learning Centre?”

  “Martin Thompson is one of the smartest kids in the class. He’s…” he started.

  “Looks like he’s got behaviour problems as well,” she cut him off, her nose still in the folder. “Let’s see, how old is he? No, he’s right with his cohort. Most of this is behaviour-related, but, no, no, he has always been placed and not promoted. No
w, what did you say about being bright?”

  “He is. He’s a very bright boy.”

  “Well,” she plunged back into the folder. “I’m surprised to hear you say that. As I look at this file—see here: placed, promoted, that was Grade 2, placed, placed, placed. He’s only passed once in five years of schooling. Would you say that’s the mark of a bright student?”

  “No,” he said, and almost right away he realized that the question had been rhetorical, but he continued on. “No, but he’s much brighter than average. He’s not working maybe, but he’s a very smart kid. He’s very good at math, and he’s got the vocabulary of someone finishing high school.”

  “You haven’t seen his file, have you? You should have taken the time to look at it. I believe it was at the first staff meeting in August that I reminded teachers to check the files of all their students, but particularly the code red and code orange students. What was that, six, seven weeks ago? Didn’t you know this boy is coded orange?”

  He stared at her. He’d seen some of the other eleven folders, kids with problems of one sort of another that marked them as special needs children, but Martin Thompson? He knew that Martin Thompson was an angry child, and it was easy to imagine teachers labelling him as a discipline problem. Yet, the boy was so obviously full of potential, so quick-thinking that it was impossible to equate him with the folder lying open on the desk. What mattered now, though, was that she had scored a serious body blow and both of them knew it. She let the silence sit much longer than necessary and then swung at him again, a blow which he saw too late and only partially deflected.

  “You say he’s not working? What do you mean by that?”

  “It’s hard to get work out of him. He doesn’t hand in his homework…that is, not the complete homework assignment. He won’t do all his work. At least not always.”