41 pages • 1 hour read
Among School Children
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Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 109-142 Summary: “Discipline”
This section discusses the music class and how it is much more chaotic than Mrs. Zajac’s normal classroom environment. The music teacher doesn’t command the same attention from the students, but the class is supposed to involve more exploration and freedom. It is a good opening to a chapter on school discipline practices. Physical punishment was the standard in schools dating back to Ancient Greece, and even in the 1980s, there were States in the United States that allowed corporal punishment. Managing a classroom is more of an art than a science, and it is more difficult than most people imagine.
Mrs. Zajac has developed skills in paying attention to multiple areas of the classroom at once; she knows which students are doing their work, and which are out of their seats or not behaving appropriately. She can discipline a child or end a distracting behavior without pausing in her lesson. Pam, the student-teacher, often struggles with classroom management, and the students take advantage of her lack of experience.
Pam’s story examines the process of becoming a teacher. Pam teaches some lessons in the fall, and at the end of the semester, she teaches for three days straight. This time in a real classroom is the only on-the-ground training Pam will receive before finishing her degree and getting a classroom of her own. Mrs. Zajac tries to impart as much advice from her years of teaching as she can. She watches Pam’s lessons at first and gives her advice. Pam is good at teaching, but she tries to cover too much ground and struggles to control the students. Mrs. Zajac remembers her own student-teaching. She could always discipline students well and control her classroom. She has the confidence needed to keep the students in check.
Mrs. Zajac tries to make lessons into games and competitions to keep the students motivated. She uses a book about the war written from a boy’s perspective, and she connects the history lesson to things happening in the children’s own lives (e.g., getting in fights with their siblings). She avoids comparing students during class as much as possible, as many other teachers would have asked “why can’t you be as smart as Judith” (135) to students who aren’t performing as well. Mrs. Zajac feels it is better to point out that they can be just as smart if they study as much and do their homework. Mrs. Zajac also holds parent-teacher meetings and encourages all parents to attend. Her meetings often have good attendance because many of the students like her.
Pages 143-193 Summary: “Sent Away”
This section describes the core meeting process and reveals that Clarence is leaving Mrs. Zajac’s classroom for the Alpha classroom. We start by learning how Kelly School handles students with learning and behavior problems. The first step is the Resource Room, and students go there for an hour a day, supposedly to work on behavioral issues they have. The next level is the Alpha classroom, which is a classroom in some schools that is exclusively for students who had trouble in mainstream classrooms. Finally, there is the Church School, which is an entire school for students who continue to have behavior problems. At each step, the hope is that the student will return to a mainstream classroom. Mrs. Zajac doesn’t believe this process will help Clarence, and she notes that students rarely come back to mainstream classes once they are on this path.
It is March of the school year, and students are restless and unmotivated because it is cold, and recess is often indoors due to mud. This backdrop is not helpful for Clarence’s core. When Mrs. Zajac attends the core meeting for Clarence, she argues that Clarence should remain her in classroom but is ultimately convinced it would be best for him to go to Alpha. There is no Alpha classroom at Kelly School, so he must go to another school.
After Clarence’s core evaluation, and even though he does not know what happened, he can sense that the meeting about him was important. He behaves better than he has all year and even does his homework. Mrs. Zajac goes through a range of emotions after the core meeting. She wonders if deep down she wanted him to leave and didn’t fight enough to keep him. She wonders if the decision has doomed him to remain a troublemaker and to perform poorly in school. She has so much trouble with it that she equates the situation to the year her father died. She felt she hated teaching after her father passed away and that she could not focus and was unmotivated when working with her students. She felt that her father would not have wanted her to give up on Clarence. When she had struggled in the beginning as a teacher and wanted to quit, her father had told her, “Oh, come on Christine. You can’t give up that easily” (175). Clarence is making her feel similarly, and similar to most teachers, Mrs. Zajac is always worried that one day she will fully burn out.
Mrs. Zajac does not want to have to tell Clarence about the new school, but ultimately, she has to provide some details after his mother tells him very little. Clarence immediately does not want to go to the new classroom, and he even writes in his journal asking why Mrs. Zajac is making him leave and that he will refuse to go. Mrs. Zajac visits the new classroom with him, and some of the behavior she sees confirms her concerns about the students. However, the classroom environment is very structured, and Clarence is better behaved than many students. She is somewhat hopeful that he will be a star student and get to come back to a mainstream classroom. When the class says goodbye to Clarence, the people he fought with most forgive him and wish him well.
Pages 195-228 Summary: “Recovery”
Clarence’s absence effects the classroom. It is not yet spring. The school feels old and dirty, and the decorations in the room have become worn. The section starts with the principal talking to the teachers about the results of the most recent state-wide Basic Skills Test. The 6th students in Holyoke had some of the lowest scores in the state, with 30% of Kelly School 6th graders failing the test. Mrs. Zajac begins to think about her students and how they will fare. With Clarence gone, there is more space for Mrs. Zajac to consider other students’ problems and come up with solutions.
One student, Claude, has endless excuses for not doing homework, and another, Robert, shows a complete lack of effort, despite some signs of ability. Mrs. Zajac has the students create new artwork for the classroom, but only for the students who have completed all their homework. This motivation helps clear the names on the board and get a fresh look for the classroom, which Mrs. Zajac feels she needs because of Clarence leaving.
Mrs. Zajac begins working with several students at once. She tries working with Claude’s parents to keep track of homework, and she gives him a day to organize his work at his desk and in his backpack. She speaks with Robert’s mother, who wants him to see a psychiatrist, but Mrs. Zajac feels that Robert’s home life isn’t going to be a way to help him. She tries isolating Robert, since he seems to crave attention of any kind. He uses his fingernail to make himself bleed so he can go to the nurse. However, he comes back and does his work for 3 days in a row, even acing math and reading tests. Mrs. Zajac praises his good behavior, hoping it will stick.
The weather starts to improve, and the kids look forward to Spring Break. Mrs. Zajac plans to go to Puerto Rico. Her students are making progress in math and motivation for school. Generally, as the effects of Clarence’s absence fade and the weather gets warmer, everyone becomes more optimistic and thinks about the future.
Part 2 Analysis
These sections, titled “Discipline,” “Sent Away,” and “Recovery,” detail the middle of the school year, a defining event, and several themes. Clarence goes to Alpha class, and Mrs. Zajac and her students must handle the new environment without Clarence. It is not completely positive when he leaves. Even though many students like that the classroom is quieter and less chaotic, and Mrs. Zajac has more time to spend with other students, Clarence’s absence seems to leave a hole. Many students stop doing their work, and even Mrs Zajac, partially because of her conflicting feelings over Clarence going to Alpha class, is less motivated to teach after his departure.
Discipline is a defining feature of teaching and a theme in this book. Discipline needs to accomplish a goal, such a stopping a negative behavior or encouraging more positive behaviors. Teachers arguably spend more time on discipline than teaching content, and appropriate discipline is a key to classroom management. Mrs. Zajac is most worried about Pam teaching because Pam doesn’t show as much skill in discipline and classroom management as she will likely need. Keeping the students focused allows them to learn the material, so learning and discipline go hand-in-hand.
In these sections, and throughout the book, it becomes evident that the same discipline strategies don’t work for every student. Harsh discipline isn’t always effective and sometimes backfires. For many students, simply removing attention is a form of discipline. Yelling or calling out a specific student sometimes gives them exactly what they want, attention, and feeds their poor behavior instead of improving it. These issues mean that teachers have to be creative and know their students to know what discipline will work best.
These sections are also about contradictions and the oddly contradictory world of teaching. Even though Mrs. Zajac agrees that sending Clarence to the Alpha class is the best decision, she does not think it will help. As she phrases it, “sending Clarence to Alpha seemed like a decision to accomplish something that was probably right by doing something that was probably wrong” (167). This contradiction makes the reader wonder what the point is and why they stick to this system that doesn’t seem to produce any improvement. Teaching maintains many historical conditions that don’t entirely make sense.
The author points out that school is set up to be incredibly challenging, requiring students to behave and be quiet for many hours. For young children, they don’t have that skill-set yet, but educators insist on maintaining the rigid school environment. There are decades of evidence that they system doesn’t work, with one corporate leader in 1987 noting, “Public education has put this country at a terrible competitive disadvantage. They’re the suppliers of our workforce, but they’re suppliers with a 50% defect rate” (301). This contradiction likely adds unnecessary challenges to teaching, and it’s unclear why the United States maintains such adherence to the system.
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