Nary, Nary, Quite Contrary

by David J. Wighton

  It was in the second week of school that Mr. Smithman fell back into his old habits. An experienced teacher, Mr. Smithman would tell new teachers that it was very important that they establish tight discipline early in the year. He himself believed in that practice. Which is why on that first day, he made sure that the students walked quietly and properly to their homeroom. But Mr. Smithman was lazy. So after the students had demonstrated that they knew how to walk quietly, he didn't care how they walked to the other rooms. Nor did he want to turn around and find out.

  In the classroom, Mr. Smithman believed in keeping the students busy. He knew that one of the first signs of a teacher in trouble was a noisy classroom. Mr. Smithman made sure that he kept a quiet class; therefore everybody would know that he was a good teacher. So in a typical class, Mr. Smithman would instruct for about ten minutes and then hand out stacks of paper drills for the students to complete. These had been copied from old bots. In some cases, the drill sheets referred to content that wasn't actually in the bot the students had been given for that class. Students would be unable to answer questions on that content, but they soon learned to keep that information to themselves.

  Mr. Smithman checked that all students had completed their assignments and homework by standing at the front of the room and instructing every student who had completed their assignment to hold up their workbook. So long as everybody had a hand up in the air holding a workbook that had writing on it, Mr. Smithman assumed they had finished the assignment.

  In terms of keeping discipline during the assignment portion of the lesson, Mr. Smithman didn't believe in walking up and down the aisles answering questions, checking if anybody was having difficulty, or doing other things associated with being a teacher. Instead, he believed that students should be encouraged to work out their own difficulties, either on their own, or through peer teaching where a classmate would provide the necessary help. Peer teaching was a recognized form of good teaching because the youngsters could talk to each other at their own level. Plus the student who was teaching would receive the empowerment of having helped one of her classmates learn. I use the word her deliberately. Girls tried to explain. Boys were notoriously bad teachers. They just told the other student what the answer was. They'd even write the answer on their student's paper in case the student they were helping was busy doing something non-classwork related, like pulling on the hair of the girl in front of them.

  Mr. Smithman was sure that if his instructional model weren't working efficiently, the results on their tests would reveal any students who had not kept up. In theory, that would be true. If Mr. Smithman had marked the tests. But marking tests took a lot of time. And it was boring. Instead, he believed in encouraging students to have a sense of honesty and responsibility – so important these days for youngsters. After each test, he'd tell the students to exchange tests with other students and then he'd read out the answers from his teacher's manual. Although these manuals were notoriously bad for having mistakes in their answer sheets, none of Mr. Smithman's students ever raised a question about not being able to understand, for example, how option E could be the right answer when there were only four options in the question.

  The students in Mr. Smithman's classes had their own educational philosophy. It was called Cooperative Learning. This is indeed a recognized educational philosophy. However the students created their own form of cooperative learning by asking each other, What mark would you like to have at the end of the year? By cooperating in the assessment process, students learned the value of finding the best person to mark their work. In some cases, one student in Mr. Smithman's room could be marking three tests simultaneously. In case you believe that this would be difficult, it wasn't. Knowing in advance what mark they were going to give their friends, these markers just ignored Mr. Smithman's droning voice and made the necessary number of checkmarks. At the end of the dronation, he'd say, "Add up the right answers." Since the markers already knew what the total was, they could complete that task quickly.

  By having students announce the totals on their own exams to the class, Mr. Smithman knew that some students might be tempted to fudge their mark. So he read out each student's name and the person who marked that exam would call out the score. For the student who was marking three tests, he'd simply pass two completed tests to two students who hadn't had any test to mark. Since Mr. Smithman's eyes were down while he recorded the scores, he never noticed.

  To ensure that nobody dared to cheat on his exams, Mr. Smithman would scan the test results. He'd be looking for the case where one of the dummies in the room had scored higher than he should have. In this way, Mr. Smithman was unwittingly teaching his students the concept of clustering, which is something found in statistics. In statistical theory, a student's test scores should fall in a cluster around a mid-point score, and by golly, the students in Mr. Smithman's class had mastered that theory. The markers never gave their friends the same mark as the previous test; instead, they gave them marks that clustered around what the final mark in the course would be months later. Even the dummies in Mr. Smithman's room knew that nobody would believe they had earned a 90%. They'd be quite happy to earn 65%. It was a sign of Mr. Smithman's excellent teaching that no student in his many years of teaching ever earned a final grade of less than 65%.

  Mr. Smithman would record the marks in his computer and post the results of the test on the bulletin board for all to see. For the first couple of weeks, he noticed that one student in his class was consistently earning 100%. Then, that student's success tailed off. He started earning marks in the 65%-70% range. Obviously home schooling wasn't all that it was cracked up to be.

  # # # # # # # #

  Mr. Smithman had another bad habit. Since he only worked in the first ten minutes of class, he had nothing to do after he had completed reading the morning paper. So, each period he would take a little break from the rigors of teaching. He'd disappear from class for about ten minutes so that he could do teacher business, such as conferring with another teacher, or if nobody else was in in the staff room, drinking coffee. Since it would set a bad example for him to be drinking coffee in front of the class when they were working so diligently, he drank it in the staffroom while checking his emails.

  The one difficulty with this kind of conferring was that an unattended classroom could become a noisy classroom. That just wouldn't do. It might undermine the stringent discipline that he employed otherwise. To give his class the opportunity to show responsibility, he'd plop a seating plan on a responsible student's desk and instruct him to put a check mark next to the name of any student talking while he was out of the room. Anybody caught talking would have a detention.

  The most mature student in the 6B classroom, in Mr. Smithman's estimation, was the new kid in the back seat who always had his head down reading. Mr. Smithman didn't know that this new kid was reading something other than the assignment he had just given the class. He didn't know that this new kid was reading something different because he already knew the content of the assignment. He didn't know that this kid was finding grade 6 so easy that he was downloading non-fiction books from the school library and working his way through them in alphabetical order to keep himself awake. Mr. Smithman didn't know any of this because it was such a long walk from his teacher's desk to that student's desk in the back of the room. But that wouldn't have made any difference to his decision. The back row was an excellent place to have the classroom monitor because he could see everybody in the room without having to turn around. The new kid, what's his name, would be this year's classroom monitor.

  Reese looked at the seating plan on his desk and at the departing backside of his teacher. Because he had always done what he had been told to do in his former school, he started making check marks.

  Back to the Table of Contents

  Chapter 18

  By mid-September, both Lucas and Reese were in difficulty. Theo – less so. All three kept quiet – their desire to be responsible and to
make their parents proud was uppermost in their minds. Let's look at Theo and Lucas first.

  The Chocoholic Shop was doing well on Mondays through to Fridays. It was continually busy. Theo and Lucas had quickly learned how to respond to customer questions, to collect orders, and to fill them efficiently. Theo had made a few minor changes in how the different chocolates were placed around the shop, but otherwise, they filled orders and collected money for eight hours a day. Saturday was a bust. "Nobody is in the streets down here, let alone in the shop," Lucas messaged Dreamer. She told them to close the shop on Saturdays and both of them should take their days off on the weekends.

  Theo did not enjoy the work in the store, but he didn't complain because his evenings were enjoyable. He had found two schools that had an evening drop-in basketball program. One ran on Mondays and Wednesdays; the other was on Tuesdays and Thursdays. From 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. on those nights, he was sweating in a gym and enjoying it. On the weekends, he and Dreamer would play on an outdoor court for hours on end. They were still doing the practice drills that Granny had given them. When other players came onto the court, Dreamer and Theo would challenge them to two-on-two games. Dreamer would spend the weekend on the ship, and at least once a day, Lucas and/or Theo would help her with her problem.

  Theo now, he could handle the monotony of the store. I should also point out that since he was at basketball in the evening, he didn't have the foggiest idea what Lucas was doing during his evenings. Nor did he think it was his place to ask.

  Lucas was finding the store routine mind-numbingly boring. Remember now that Lucas was a very active, competitive young man. He needed action of some kind to catch his interest. Selling mint chocolates at two cents a pop wasn't going to do that. With Theo in the gyms, and with Lucas having no real desire to join him, he needed something to do at night. He found his answer in the topless bars that populated the streets only a few blocks away from the shop.

  First, a little explanation about what constituted topless. Toronto's police chief was very firm that the local bars should not become a source of disruption and rowdiness in the downtown core. He insisted that the beat cop show a presence. However, just as Mr. Smithman was unlikely to walk down to the end of his classroom unless it was absolutely necessary, so the beat cops were loath to check the bars after 8 p.m. Their shift ended at 9:00, and if they were stupid enough to arrest somebody in a bar, that could result in paperwork that would consume more than an hour.

  Knowing this, the managers of the bars changed their interpretation of the topless laws after 8 p.m. Before 8, a dancer would be permissibly topless if she had no clothes on above her waist. No police constable would object. After 8, the bar managers decided that their dancers would be legally topless if they had nothing on above their ankles. But for the sake of abiding by the law, the bar owners insisted that everything below the ankles had to be covered. And for that reason, just in case a beat cop did show up, every girl on the stage would be wearing high-heeled shoes. And if the cop tried to insist on the traditional definition of what constituted a girl's top and a girl's bottom, the owner would point out that the city's regulations didn't actually define the waist as the point of departure from legal toplessness to illegal toplessness.

  Before you jump to a faulty conclusion: Lucas was not sitting in the topless bars to looked at nekid wim'n. He had no interest and took no pleasure at even glancing at the dancers. It may be difficult for you to believe this, given that Lucas was a healthy teenager approaching his 14th birthday. But his experience with Candi had been so traumatic that he was not interested in any woman whatsoever, clothed or unclothed. Any sight of rounded bits of flesh only reminded him of his court case; that experience would put the brakes on most young men's desires to see more of the same.

  Lucas had decided to go to the topless bars because he had heard the essentials of what his father had done in his early days with the RCMP. Although Lucas was not officially an undercover agent for the Toronto constabulary, in his mind, he was there to collect information on the seedier males that populated that area of Toronto. The pimps, the drug pushers, and the chemical suppliers were his targets. He had a good memory that allowed him to watch and memorize so that he could jot down notes later that evening. Plus he had an invisible camera. Lucas was in the topless bars to collect data, and at some point, he might offer it to some police organization. However there was one major difference between what Hank had done and what Lucas was doing. Back in Hank's day, the bars would allow a patron to nurse a drink. Hank would buy a drink when he walked in a bar and gradually empty it onto the floor throughout the night. In Toronto, the bar maids would insist that customers order refills regularly. This was particularly hard on Lucas because he'd make friends with the bar maids easily enough, and when they told him that they'd get in trouble if they didn't keep Lucas' glass topped up, he caved.

  By the third week, Lucas was a regular customer at the seediest bars in Toronto. He'd order the necessary number of glasses during the evening; he wouldn't drink them. Then the barkeeps told him that he was giving other customers the impression that the bar's liquor wasn't good, perhaps even watered down. If he was going to sit in their bar, he'd have to drink. By the end of the third week, Lucas was waking up with headaches. Nobody had ever told him what a hangover was because the family didn't tolerate any liquor in the compound at all. They had never talked about it. Lucas knew, in theory, that liquor could be a problem for aboriginals; but these headaches weren't an alcohol problem. They were just stress from his boring work.

  I should reveal one other incident in Lucas' life. A man in a suit had come into the Chocoholic Shop in the second week and had tried to sell him some insurance. To cover instances of glass breakages, for example. Lucas told him that he was hired to sell the candies; if the man wanted to sell insurance, he'd have to contact the shop's owner. The man replied that they liked to work with the shopkeeper instead and left. Lucas mentioned it to Dreamer but she said that Wizard had purchased all the insurance they needed.

  # # # # # # # #

  Reese had two problems. The first time that he had been the class monitor, the other students had been reasonably well behaved. But they did spend a lot of time looking at Reese wondering about him. If Smithman had given the seating chart to somebody from the "old class," it wouldn't have been a problem. They were all friends. But this new guy? What was he going to do?

  Reese did what he was told to do. He made check marks. He knew that his classmates were unhappy with him, but if that were the case, why didn't they just shut up and get to work? Which the students mostly did. But Reese was disrupting their free time. Smithman's class was when they talked quietly among themselves, pulled out game bots, passed notes, tried to look up girls' skirts or down their blouses, and so on. The lookout at the door gave them plenty of warning when Smithman was on his way back. Reese wasn't telling Smithman anything about the not working part, or the passing notes part, or even the lookout at the door part. His job was to put a check mark next to a student's name if she or he had been talking. Why couldn't they understand that?

  News of his unconventional behaviour spread to the other grade 6 classes. Girls would glare at him in the hallway. They'd walk right through him if he didn't dodge first. The boys were more physical. It became difficult for Reese to walk down the hallway without being bumped into lockers or "accidentally" tripped.

  In gym class, if they were playing a team sport, nobody would pass to him. Reese would run up and down the soccer pitch wide open, but he would never touch the ball. By the third week, he wasn't even running. He'd sit against a tree and wait for gym period to be over. The teacher would be in the staff room with his coffee by this time and wouldn't see what was happening. In labs where partners were formed, nobody would volunteer to be his partner. If they were assigned to partner up with Reese, the student would complain to the teacher that Reese smelled. It would have been insensitive for the teacher to go over and check, so Reese worked alone. r />
  Reese's situation wasn't helped by a second problem. The courses were too easy for him and so he always earned 100% on his tests. The girl in front would mark his test and he'd mark her test. She'd also receive good marks, but the students were used to her kind being smart. Reese was an aboriginal, and for some students in some families, aboriginals weren't ever considered smart. With Smithman posting the test marks on a bulletin board, everybody in the class knew that he was earning 100%. Since they were all cheating, they figured he was too. However they were being smart about it; he wasn't. Nobody earned 100% all the time. What was he thinking? He'd be caught and Smithman wouldn't let them mark their own tests any longer. Verbal abuse started to accompany the physical abuse.

  The unduly high marks were something that Reese learned to handle. He knew what each question on the test was worth and he figured out where his mark should be to avoid abuse from his classmates. When a blank test was distributed, Reese had a simple solution. Start at the back of the test where at least a few of the question were slightly challenging and work his way to the front. He'd stop answering questions when he had earned about 70%, turn over his paper, and go back to reading the non-fiction bots in the school library. After a while, the girl in front of him wrote him a note. "Why don't I just give you something between 65%-70% and then you won't have to pretend to mess up on the test?"

  He wrote Thanks and passed the note back to her. He would have offered to do the same for her but he could see that she was intent on doing the test properly. She actually became upset when she made a mistake on a question. Reese had yet to have that experience in anything that he did in the academic classes. Art class was different. He was hopelessly inept.

  The next week, after the girl in front of him saw him struggling through the onslaught of accidental collisions in the hallway and heard the comments, she wrote another note and passed it back. "Why don't you ask your parents to write a note to Smithman telling him that they don't want you to be class monitor any longer. That's why he doesn't call on me. My mom wrote a note after I told her what you were going through."