Among School Children

“Children get dealt grossly unequal hands, but that is all the more reason to treat them equally in school[.] […] Treating children equally often means treating them very differently. But it also means bringing the same moral force to bear on all of them, saying, in effect, to Clarence that you matter as much as Alice and won't get away with not working, and to Alice that you won't be allowed to stay where you are either.” 

This quote highlights the themes of perspective and social class throughout the book. Mrs. Zajac notes that fairness often means treating students very differently to get them the same message: they are worthy and capable of learning. Social class plays a large role in how teachers see and treat students right from the start of school. Mrs. Zajac considers social class, worrying about Judith because of how many girls growing up in her neighborhood are pregnant by high school. However, with this quote, Mrs. Zajac also shows that she tries to demand the same level of effort from her students, even if the outcome is not the same for all students. This idea of demanding the same effort is all about perspective. Mrs. Zajac wants to see her students try to learn and care about learning, even if they miss the mark on the content. She is not looking for them to have the same outcomes right away. She knows they will understand the material eventually if they regularly put in the required effort.

“Chris felt them waiting around her. She thought how much fun it would be to sit for a long time with Judith and discuss her novel. She glanced at the clock, up on the wall above the closets. […] She absolutely had to help poor Pedro. ‘Slow learner’ was the kindly term for many of these children. It implied what she knew to be true, that they could learn, but she also knew that in this time-bound world, a slow learner might not learn at all if she didn’t hurry up.” 

This quote highlights the theme of time. While teachers have a lot of freedom in their own classrooms, they are subject to time constraints. They have to fit certain topics in the school year, and they have to fit their lessons into each school day. If they find that their students need more time with one lesson, it means finding a time to make up the skipped lesson later. They always need more time to help the students. Even if a student isn’t a “slow learner” as Mrs. Zajac mentions here about Pedro, the class may have to move on before they have fully grasped a concept. We see this theme at the end of the book as well, when Mrs. Zajac wishes there had been more time to help a few of the students a bit more. She feels that, with more time, she could have accomplished all of her goals, but even as this quote shows, that may not be true. There are always students waiting for her. 

“Like everyone else, teachers learn through experience, but they learn without much guidance. One problem, of course, is that experience, especially the kind that is both repetitious and disappointing, can easily harden into narrow pedagogical theories. Most schools have a teacher with a theory built on grudges. This teacher knows that there is just one way to conduct a lesson; she blames the children and their parents if the children don’t catch on; she has a list of types and makes her students fit them; and she prides herself on her realism—most children come to school, she knows, to give her a hard time.” 

This quote is from the author’s description of how teachers train and gain experience. After detailing that teachers do not have extensive training opportunities, unlike many other professions, this quote illustrates what can happen when the limited training is largely based on the teacher’s early experiences. Instead of having a considerable repertoire of experiences and feedback to draw from when first teaching, most teachers only have a few weeks in a real classroom. They do not know what they will face with their own students, and they have to learn as they go. This process can go well or very poorly, with repeated negative interactions that don’t have a good solution producing a negative view of students, teaching, and the future.

“Most teachers have little control over school policy or curriculum or choice of texts or special placement of students, but most have a great deal of autonomy inside their classrooms. To a degree shared by only a few other occupations, such as police work, public education rests precariously on the skill and virtue of the people at the bottom of the institutional pyramid.”

This quote highlights a unique and key aspect of teaching. Teachers are the “boots on the ground” for the education system, and they hold almost complete control over what occurs in their classroom. This autonomy is a double-edged sword because it allows them to handle difficult students outside the institutional hierarchy, often in ways better suited to each student’s individual needs. However, it also means they can handle situations inappropriately or have significant negative impacts on students without much intervention from the outside. A teacher who wished his or her students ill could easily do damage. 

“As a teacher, Chris always worried about children being mean to each other. Maybe the job itself keeps a teacher’s childhood in view. Occasionally, Chris ran into one of that faction of former tormentors. Chris still couldn’t muster more than mere civility toward her.” 

This quote is one example of how Mrs. Zajac’s past affected her approach to her students and her teaching. Mrs. Zajac’s classmates bullied her during school because she did not want to make out with boys when other girls were starting to be interested in boys. This experience made Mrs. Zajac sensitive to bullying and highlights the cyclical theme of history. Throughout the book, we see how history has shaped Holyoke, Mrs. Zajac, teaching, and Kelly School. The theme of history also plays out in the importance of early experiences. Mrs. Zajac still remembers her tormentors and doesn’t like them, even after these many years. Her students, who are even younger, will have experiences in her classroom that could stay with them forever. She wants to make them positive and motivational if she can.

“Finally, Robert’s mother called Chris on the phone at school. The woman sounded angry. She demanded to know why Robert was being kept after school. Chris said it was because Robert hadn’t done his homework for a long time. His mother said that surprised her. Robert did his homework. Chris said she never saw it. Then Robert’s mother said that if her son wasn’t doing his homework, maybe it was because the work was too boring for him. Chris held her tongue. Then the woman said she wanted Chris to keep Robert after school every day. Chris said she couldn’t do that, and the mother soon hung up.”

This quote highlights the theme of parenting in the book. Working with parents is difficult as a teacher. Often, parents have their own goals for their children at home. Sometimes these goals are compatible with school and the teacher’s goals for them at school, but sometimes they’re not. These situations are often confusing for the student and difficult for the teacher to handle. In this case, Mrs. Zajac is dealing with a parent who may not know how to handle her child. She may want her child to do well in school and behave himself, but she is unable to enforce rules, such as doing homework. She is mad he is staying after school and then wants him kept after school more often. Mrs. Zajac doesn’t know the full story about a child’s home often, and as she states throughout the book, she can’t intervene in their home lives unless she suspects serious neglect or abuse. With Robert, there is clearly a lot going on at home, and this quote is the culmination of Mrs. Zajac attempting to get his mother involved in his homework. Since Mrs. Zajac can’t do much about Robert’s home situation, she is left to try, knowing she may not make any progress.

“‘I guess,’ said Pam. ‘He’s not really bad. He just wants to move around.’

‘I know what you mean, Pam,’ Chris replied. “But this is what there is. There is no other place for Clarence.’ And because that was, or seemed, true, and Chris and Pam weren’t going anywhere else either, Chris settled uneasily for an equilibrium dictated by Clarence as much as by herself.” 

This quote offers a different view of the situation with their most difficult student, Clarence, and the different perspectives a teacher could have about a misbehaving student. A teacher might view Clarence as a “bad” student who purposefully misbehaves and specifically wants to sow chaos. However, a lot of his violence towards other students was in response to punishment, and much of his actions are somewhat random. Earlier in the book, in Mrs. Zajac’s first time keeping Clarence after school, he said he hated her. Mrs. Zajac interpreted this expression to mean he had already attached himself to her rather strongly, only a few days into school. She remembered stories from other teachers about his apparent need for love and attention. A teacher could, therefore, construe his behavior as simply seeking attention and not knowing how to express it. Similarly, Pam wonders if Clarence would do better in a different environment, one that allowed him more movement and expression of his emotions.

“One sociobiologist of teaching describes the situation as ‘dual captivity’: the children have to be there, and the teacher has to take the children sent to her. The problem is fundamental. Put twenty or more children of roughly the same age in a little room, confine them to desks, make them wait in lines, make them behave. It is as if a secret committee, now lost to history, had made a study of children and, having figured out what the greatest number were least disposed to do, declared that all of them should do it.”

This quote describes an interesting problem in teaching. Students must adhere to a rigid set of rules in a regimented environment, regardless of their age. There are no known ways to make all children thrive in this kind of environment, and there seems to be resistance to changing the environment to better match the students’ ages and abilities. Instead, the teacher has to take a classroom of 20+ randomly selected students and teach them in this environment, figuring out as they go how to make it work. Despite centuries of this system, little progress has been made in training teachers to handle this unique environment or in tweaking the environment to better support the teachers and students.

“Don’t let yourself imagine that you are a cause of a troubled student’s misbehavior. If you do, you become entangled in the child’s problems. You must cultivate some detachment. You have to feel for troubled children, but you can’t feel too much, or else you may end up hating children who don’t improve.”

This quote is a piece of advice from Mrs. Zajac to Pam, her student teacher. It gives some insight into how Mrs. Zajac maintains hope about difficult students while not getting too involved in their problems. She balances caring about them with viewing their problems from a distance. It is easier to see potential solutions or the full scope of the problem if you take a step back, and she protects herself from becoming resentful if she tries but fails to improve the student’s situation. This quote also highlights the difficulties of teaching that appear throughout the book. Teachers stand on a thin line where they balance their own abilities, mental state, and options with the abilities, mental state, and behaviors of their students.

“Judith was the smartest in the class, Claude announced one time, and Mrs. Zajac said, ‘Thank you, Claude, for deciding that for me.’ She asked Claude, if he did his work and studied for tests, wouldn’t he be as smart as Judith? Claude said he guessed so.” 

This quote shows how Mrs. Zajac can redirect a student’s statements to constantly drive home that they are capable of learning and worth teaching. They only need to put in the effort. She does not like to praise students for something “innate,” like intelligence. Instead, she wants the students to see that trying is the key to being smart and capable. She may not always succeed in convincing students of their abilities, but the more they hear it, the more likely it is to get through to them.

“She was different in her room. There, she had great physicality. […] Whether scolding or comforting or merely making sure that a piece of work was understood, Chris got very close to children. Sometimes, leaning over them, she’d almost touch her wide, changeable eyes to theirs.” 

This quote describes how Mrs. Zajac is different in her classroom compared to at home or with friends outside school. She is quiet and timid outside her classroom, but in her classroom, she is a force of nature, with the students revolving around her. She would not move into the personal space of another adult, but with children, she gets into their personal space to show that she is paying attention, she cares, and she knows if they are doing their work. Many of her students live in houses where they receive minimal attention from adults, and she changes that dynamic by getting close to them and paying them very close attention. This quote highlights the unique environment that is a school classroom. It is one in which even the teacher can be a completely different person, using whatever persona gets the most from her students.

“For about the first half hour in the room, Juanita would not look at Mrs. Zajac. But after Chris began to tell Juanita in that emphatic, no-nonsense voice, that this was a place where she was entirely welcome, the girl’s eyes followed Chris everywhere around the room. It seemed as if Juanita were afraid Mrs. Zajac would disappear. Two days later, Juanita wrote this in the rough draft of an essay: ‘remember if you have a new teacher just give her a chance she might be the nices teacher you ever had. And if you have a teacher and you’re a girl you could try to wear some of the clothes she wears.’” 

This quote shows just what Mrs. Zajac’s approach can do. She quickly changes Juanita’s perspective on teachers and being in a classroom. Juanita was a new student who was very shy. Juanita clearly did not think her teacher would pay attention to her or that her new classroom would welcome her, but Mrs. Zajac quickly changes that view. Within two days, Juanita already thinks that Mrs. Zajac is “the nices teacher” she ever had. Mrs. Zajac’s approach of simply opening students up to the possibility that they are wanted and capable makes them better learners. Later in the book, we learn that Juanita flourishes in Mrs. Zajac’s classroom.

“Judith had watched Blanca leave. ‘Blanca was scared!’ Judith said. She added, ‘Adults never do think about children.’” 

This quote shows just how much the students notice and their perspective on the events around them. Judith, rather intelligently, notices that Blanca was scared but the adults around her didn’t or couldn’t do much to help. They made decisions regardless of what was best for the children in their lives. It is true that children often don’t know all the reason parents may make them move or change some other aspect of their lives. However, adults rarely think that explaining their decisions to children is worth it, and that means children are free to think the worst of what may happen. This issue manifests itself in teaching, where a teacher is constantly explaining how things work and why for a lesson, but they may not explain things such as why a student is being moved to a new classroom or why they have to do some of the lessons they do. Students can be left to think the worst, that teachers just don’t care, and that contributes to distrust.

“In retrospect, sending Clarence to Alpha seemed like a decision to accomplish something that was probably right by doing something that was probably wrong.” 

This quote summarizes Mrs. Zajac’s conflicting feelings over the core meeting that resulted in Clarence going to an Alpha class. This class is for difficult students, and Mrs. Zajac worries that just putting all the difficult students together probably won’t solve their problems. They may feed off of each other. Few, if any, students came back from Alpha classes into mainstream classes. However, Clarence wasn’t doing well in the mainstream classroom, and the Alpha class may help him develop the discipline he needs. He was so disruptive to other students, Mrs. Zajac worried that he was making it difficult for other children to learn and grow. In the end, sending him to a separate classroom is probably the correct decision, it’s an effort to help Clarence, but it is simultaneously unlikely to help.

“It would be unprofessional to get very upset about Clarence’s leaving. Unprofessional. Sometimes that term seemed to apply best to teachers who used it most often. And yet it would apply to her in this case if she let her feelings show. Everyone involved had tried to do the best thing for the boy and for her class.”

This quote highlights one of the challenges of teaching. While in their own classrooms, teachers enjoy unparalleled freedom, they have little say in higher level policy decisions. Once those decisions have been made, they are not supposed to express displeasure or argue. Mrs. Zajac clearly views unprofessional behavior differently, arguing that teachers who stick to the idea that expressing frustration with a school decision or policy is unprofessional are themselves even more unprofessional in their own behavior. She is supposed to agree that everyone making a higher-level decision has the student’s best interests at heart, and yet it’s clear she doesn’t think that is always the case. For Mrs. Zajac, teachers who ignore some students or make decisions out of convenience are the ones behaving unprofessionally. 

“Most [students] had made normal progress. Normal measures would carry them along. But was it just her imagination or had the problems of the ones with big problems gotten bigger suddenly? With Clarence gone, she did see the others’ needs more clearly. She felt sure of that.”

This quote highlights how much a single difficult student can take up the energy and time of a teacher. Clarence had taken up more space than Mrs. Zajac had realized. Given that not having enough time is a theme in this book, it is clear that having one student who is particularly difficult and disruptive can eat up most of the precious time teachers have. With Clarence gone, regardless of her conflicting feelings about the change, Mrs. Zajac has more time to devote to children with other problems and hopefully to make progress.

“She said what she usually did when announcing an informal art lesson. They could make anything they liked, but if they wanted, they could make an Easter bunny. This one of hers might give them some ideas. But they shouldn’t make one just like hers. Mrs. Zajac was a terrible artist. They were much better artists than she. Felipe cheered, and then Chris said, ‘But art is only for people who don’t owe me any work.’”

This quote shows the turning point for Mrs. Zajac and her classroom after Clarence left. Many children stopped doing their work after Clarence left, likely because they picked up on Mrs. Zajac’s struggle with him leaving. To start fresh and to get all the old homework completed, Mrs. Zajac had them create new art for the room as long as they completed their old homework assignments. It was an excellent way to get the class back on track. She used her usual tactic of making the students feel that they were capable (better artists), and then she held them accountable for their work before they got to do the fun activity. This plan worked, and her class moved to a more normal state.

“‘This week I feel like, the harder I work, the deeper the hole,’ she thought. Claude’s problem was much worse than she’d imagined. ‘I’m disgusted with myself for letting it go on this long Maybe I should just give up on Claude.’ Having imagined surrender, she perked up a little. She’d keep after him. Strategies rarely worked at once, and no strategy worked all the time.”

This quote shows an interesting insight into Mrs. Zajac’s ability to stay motivated in the face of difficult student problems. It highlights how easy it is to give up and how necessary it is to pick yourself up from those feelings and continue trying. Mrs. Zajac is actually spurred to try again when she considers giving up. She is motivated by simply not giving up on her students. This attitude seems necessary in teaching because often that is all a teacher can do. When the core of the problem is at home or somewhere else, teachers can’t usually make changes in just a year. All they can do is not give up and hope that by not giving up, the child goes on to think that not everyone will give up on them.

“Every now and then in uptown Holyoke, Chris got into an argument that went something like this: Some white acquaintance would say, ‘Goddamn Puerto Ricans.’ Chris would answer, ‘Look, I teach them There are no more goddamn Puerto Ricans than goddamn anyone else.’ She’d describe radiant Puerto Rican children, such as Judith and Arabella, and the usual response was: ‘Yeah, but she’s an exception. She’s a good one.’ Chris felt uncomfortable in those arguments.”

This quote illustrates the theme of race and nationality seen throughout the book. Many white people in Holyoke assumed that the recent influx of Puerto Ricans was the source of all their problems. They blamed them for there not being jobs and for graffiti and for children not doing well in school. However, just a century before, the community blamed the Irish for the same issues. In this example, Mrs. Zajac tries to confront their racism with real examples of wonderful Puerto Rican children she teaches. She is frustrated because in her experience, race is not the defining factor in a person’s behavior or abilities. However, she finds it difficult to make progress changing anyone’s opinion. 

“The academic objective of this expedition was, of course, to have the class glimpse a time that seemed primitive compared to their own. But no nineteenth-century village could ever have looked so thoroughly kempt, serene, and civilized as this one. The mud and blood of everyday life were not displayed. In Sturbridge Village on that sunny day, the past looked like a vast improvement on the present that most of the class came from. Then again, even a more accurately harsh version of this village might have looked like an improvement.”

This quote describes the irony of taking students from poor, industrial areas to tourist villages designed to depict centuries in the past. These villages were supposed to show the children how primitive and difficult life was. However, because they were clean and organized for the tourists, they were often more pleasant than the places the children lived every day. The students’ homes are often chaotic and dirty, with Mrs. Zajac describing children who live in houses filled with dog excrement and children raised by very sick grandparents. Sturbridge Village was a different experience for these children. They learned some things about life in the 1800s, but they did not marvel at the advances of today or leave thinking they were glad they lived in modern times the way students from wealthier backgrounds may have felt. They may even have felt that it would have been better to have been born in the 1800s.

“Chris once heard a veteran colleague say, ‘I’m not interested in impossible cases anymore. I’ll teach the kids who want to learn.’ The strategy had an allure. ‘But,’ Chris told herself, ‘some kids don’t know they want to learn until you put it in their heads that they do.’ I’ll teach the ones who want to learn. She would turn those words over in her mind and answer back that her own son might not get taught if his teachers followed that strategy. And still, it was alluring. You can’t fail if you don’t try.” 

This quote emphasizes the theme of perspective. Many teachers assume that students who don’t do their work or who misbehave are actively choosing not to learn and to cause problems. However, as Mrs. Zajac points out, many students may not know they want to learn and pay attention and do their work. They may misbehave for reasons completely unknown to the teacher. Given the age of her students, it is more reasonable to assume they don’t know everything and aren’t always acting purposefully, as if they were an adult who can make correct choices. It can be dangerous for a teacher to assume a child has adult-level cognitive abilities.

“How much of Julius Lester’s book did the children understand? Did they know that Mrs. Zajac was reading to them about the ultimate rigged life? And that they lived in a rigged world, too, where it was still difficult to overcome the accidents of birth?”

This quote describes Mrs. Zajac’s thoughts while she is reading a book about slavery to her students. She feels that some of her students can already see that the circumstances of their birth, their skin color and their parents’ accents affect how other people view them. Even though these students all find themselves in the same classroom in the same town, because of their parents and address, they already have different likely trajectories in life. There isn’t much that Mrs. Zajac can do for them besides offer them a good education, the one route that may help some who have a worse projected life course overcome the inherent bias in society and chart their own course.

“But for children who are used to thinking of themselves as stupid or not worth talking to or deserving rape or beatings, a good teacher can provide an astonishing revelation. A good teacher can give a child at least a chance to feel, ‘She thinks I’m worth something. Maybe I am.’ Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives. Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.” 

This quote highlight one of the most challenging aspects of teaching. The teachers rarely know if their efforts changed anything for their students. They rarely know if they did the right thing, missed an opportunity, or had a profound and positive effect. It can be difficult to maintain hope in an environment where you never know if you had a positive effect, and teachers often look for little indicators or resign themselves to thinking that they don’t have any real effect on their students.