Learning Lessons 3 of 8: Caught in the Act // Chapter 1

Jess's classroom was neat and organized. Some of the other teachers kidded her that it was obsessively so. Keeping the room like a tidy home became discipline for her kids. If there was a place for everything and everything was in its place then there were no distractions. And when there were no distractions there was only function.

Every morning when they all came into her classroom there was no confusion, no time for any one to get lost in any extraneous activity. It took a couple of days before they all learned the routine, how to come in, where to put your things and find your seats, and these days she never had to intervene and remind anyone what they should be doing.

Some teachers would just wait it out, let them burn off that steam that built up. It could be a tough transition to come from your home and then into this cinderblock institution, it could create a tense anticipation, a pent up energy especially in the first weeks of a new school year. But Jess had her room very warm and inviting, she hoped it was very much like their own homes.  

She used table lamps instead of keeping the fluorescents on, and a few floor lamps. A whole corner of the classroom really almost looked like a living room. It had a bookshelf full of great books, a comfortable chair, a throw rug and a side table. It attracted everyone—when it was reading time, or free time, everyone was drawn to that part of the room.

Right now all her little kids had their heads down, working through a very short list of questions she had given them. Some addition and subtraction to solve, and then a division doozy at the end. The classroom was quiet, everyone knowing they had just a brief time to concentrate, a few minutes to come up with their answers. Jess was moving down the rows of desks watching them work but she’d stopped at Kevin Campbell. She could see that he’d got himself stuck on the last question. She scooped her long skirt and tucked it behind her knees and kneeled next to his desk.

“You can do it, Kevin,” Jess said.

Kevin looked down at the paper, his face sullen and resistant. He twisted a lock of his hair around one finger, fiddled with his Number Two pencil with the other.

She smiled at him, trying to put him at ease. He’d been having trouble but he was making progress these last two weeks. However, this was a tough one and she knew it. But she was pushing him, she knew he’d earned the skills to figure this one out.

“You can draw it out,” she reminded him quietly. It was twenty-seven divided by three. Big intimidating numbers but he could do this. He had the concept now he just had to apply it broadly. He drew three circles on a spare sheet of paper, then drew little stars in them one at a time, turning division into addition which he was already good at.

Last year Kevin was in Sara Bridge’s class. Jess took her out to coffee when she first noticed that Kevin was having trouble with the grades he was getting. Sara told her that Kevin had coasted through on his enormous charm. He was a good-looking kid, tremendously cute and he’d learned a lot of behaviors that helped move things his way. He was one of those kids that could make an adorable expression that would reach out to you and make you smile, make you want to scoop him up and hug him too tight. This year he had to face quite a few more challenges and he’d been struggling. He might smile his way through English or Art, but math was math. It was right or it wasn’t. Poor kid was getting anxious about it. Where did his good grades go?

He wasn’t doing poorly, he was just facing the first time in his life where his abilities were really being tested and measured. His grades weren’t even terrible but they had dipped from where he was last year. His parents had grown concerned and that was now putting a lot of pressure on his eight year old endocrine system. He was stressing.

She called Kevin’s parents before they were the ones to call her. Some parents found it easier to fight with the school. Put the blame on the teacher or on the administration, maybe the curriculum. That was an easy way out. It was much harder to put the responsibility on your kid. You can call the school and fight. Hang up and it’s like the problem is gone. But if you have to put the responsibility on your kid, the accountability, then it was in your face every day. Something you had to do, to make better, and it was right there every single day, looking up at you from the breakfast table over a bowl of Cheerios, playing tag in the yard, being tucked in at night. School was a big change in that dynamic—that parent-child relationship. It was hard for some people to make the switch and gear their kids up for all the chores of life. Let go of that sweet baby and push them gently on the back and watch where they succeed and where they fail. You have to take the failures, examine them, make them better, help your little baby find a solution. Blaming everyone else was the worst thing some people could do. The worst thing for their kid.

Kevin’s parents were making an investment in him. Sending notes three times a week, letting her know how he’s been progressing with his homework, their opinions on what he might be missing. How could you ask for better input? It was as simple as that, they worked him at home, let her know how it went, she did the same here, and then wrote them a little email twice a week.

“Nine?” Kevin whispered to her.

She pat the back of his little hand. “You’re a smart one, Kevin,” she said. She looked at the LED stopwatch she’d fixed to the wall. Another seven minutes had passed.

“Okay Kevin, let’s take a break here.”

She stood up and walked over to her whiteboard. Three smiley faces drawn in a row. She stopped the timer. Everyone’s eyes were on her as she drew the fourth smiley face, squeaking the marker across the board, then two dramatic taps to complete it with its eyes.

“That’s four, everyone.”

Someone at the back said, “Body Break.”

“That’s right.” For every seven minutes of work she drew them a smiley face, then after they’d earned four of them, they took a physical break, getting up and moving around, dancing, singing, whatever the consensus was. It broke the work up into segments for them, smaller chunks that were easier to tackle when they could see them getting closer to the reward. Two twenty-eight minute chunks, plus body breaks, covered a whole subject group. It compartmentalized their learning and she’d had great success with it since she started it last year. Pinterest had brought her so many great ideas. She had huge boards with all sorts of things she wanted to try.

“Who wants to peel the banana?” she asked. Faces lit up. It was a solid go-to after math. Shake them out, get them moving and singing. Plus the big finale kept all their little brains invested, waiting to go crazy at the end. It was a great release for them.

“Who loves bananas?” she sang to them, getting low, singing in a hushed whisper.

“We love bananas!” they shout-sang back at her.

“Peel banana, peel, peel, banana,” she sang, pretending she had a big banana in one hand, peeling it with the other. They sang back the same, mimicking her movements, shaking their hips.

She took them through the actions of the song. She would call the action, dance it, act it out, and they would repeat it. Chopping the banana, slicing, mushing, eating. Then the kid’s favourites: barfing the banana, bending and retching, and pooping, sticking her butt out. 

Then real quiet, barely a whisper, “Shh, banana, shh, shh, banana.”

“Shh banana, shh, shh, banana,” everyone whispering, fingers pressed to their lips. A giggle, the tension was palpable.

“Go bananas! Go, go, bananas!” she screamed to them now.

“Go bananas! Go, go, bananas!” she lost them, they all went crazy. She watched them as they all came up with their own crazy dance, running, hip-shaking, jumping. They were all laughing.

She let them go on for a minute watching them be crazy kids. She said, “Class, class, class!”

It was a call and response. When she called they knew to respond and they found it fun, and it always got their attention. They stopped their movements, turned, each at their own pace, but they did turn. They answered, “Yes, yes, yes!”  

She put her hands up to her mouth, poised like she was going to say something loud through them, like a megaphone. She whispered, “Recess.”

11AM had snuck up on them. They all looked at the clock, surprised.

“Go on,” she urged them.

They lost their little minds as they left the room. That was still a work in progress. They burst into the halls, mingling with more kids coming out of the other classrooms. Jess grabbed an apple from her desk drawer and her water container and went out, looking to catch up with them out in the field.

Sara was coming out of the break room with two paper cups of coffee.

“Some morning,” she said, handing one of the cups to Jess. Jess put her water into the pocket of her long dark cardigan and took the coffee with cream. Sara just turned twenty-nine, had a young boy the same age as Andy. She was divorced, trying to do it all alone. She didn’t always have a great, positive attitude but Jess loved her, and she really appreciated having another friend near her own age at the school.

“God,” she said, “we’ve got that MEC meeting after school tonight.”

“Yeah, it’s supposed to be short,” Jess said. The Music Education Coalition was organizing a Music Monday, two weeks away, a State-wide day of recognizing music and the importance of it in the lives of children, emphasizing the need to teach it in the schools.

They walked out into the bright Fall day, over to the edge of the playground. Sara said, “Bunch of music teachers trying to save their jobs.”

“Always the cynic,” Jess laughed.

There were about one hundred and fifty kids in the yard, half the school going for recess at ten-thirty the rest going at eleven. Jess and Sara mingled with a group of teachers, watching out over the chaos. They stood in the sunlight just at the very edge of a blue shadow cast by the building behind them.

Jaden Van Public School was a twelve room elementary school that taught Grades one to four. A long, low, red-brick building that could do with a facelift. It was a smooth transition over to Alexander Heights for grades five to eight then on to Brady Byron High for most of the kids. The town’s population kept growing faster than the schools could keep up. Twenty years ago Jaden Van served the whole town for Grades one through eight. The school board had already been displaying the blueprints for a new Senior Elementary planned for about five years off.

Carol O’Neal was smoking and talking around her cigarette. She was small and mousy with brown hair that had really gone quite dark grey over the last two years. “I just hope people realize how important it is. I always try and imagine where my Becca would be if she hadn’t learned piano…” she inhaled on her cigarette watching the kids play, her huge magnified eyes blinking behind her enormous coke bottle glasses. Carol’s husband was the music teacher at Brady Byron.

Jess could see Sara leaning back at the waist to catch her eye behind Carol’s back. She didn’t want to look, felt a laugh coming on already. She couldn’t help it, darted her eyes over to Sara, who put on an outrageous cartoonish expression of skepticism, then closed her eyes and nodded.

Jess blurted out a laugh, turned it into a cough, put her fist up over her mouth. She thought she got away with it.

Out past the chain link fence that ran the length of the grass field where the kids would play football, that separated it from the rather busy tree covered roadway, a young well-built kid on a loud low motorcycle roared past. The intense insect-whine of the bike made her insides rumble, and her heart swelled. She felt like a high school girl with a crush. Was it him?

On cue, Sara said, “Oh, is that Tyler?” to the group of girl teachers, all of them following along now.

She felt her face blush even though she could see now that it wasn’t him. His build wasn’t quite right, the motorcycle was the wrong color. Good looking guy whoever he was but his back wasn’t wide enough, waist not small enough. She’d had her hands all over Tyler’s back, she knew it very well she figured.

Dawn Tilley, who taught first grade, said, “He’s the only thing that makes me wish I taught High School,” as her head swiveled to the right following the rider. Others nodded and someone snickered.

“My brother’s friend lifts weights at the same gym as him, he said he has the biggest dick you’ll ever see,” Sara told them all.

“I know. Gross. You already told us,” Jess said, turning up her nose.

Sara rolled her eyes, said, “Jess, you’re such a prude.”