Monday, October 10, 2011

Valentine's Day

  Alicia comes into my first period Learning Center with an assignment she needs help on.   The Learning Center is there to support special education students who are mainstreamed.  It is a deeply flawed model in that at this very minute, Alicia is missing whatever is going on in her class, causing her to fall further behind.   The assignment is to read the first act of Macbeth straight up - no modern translation, no comic book, no text messaged Macbeth.  No doubt some English teacher’s fervent desire to impart flowery imagery.  We sit at the round table (formica, hard as nails to resist graffiti and gouging), shit-brown, pleated plastic curtain behind us and she opens to the first page of the play.
“Shakespeare,” I say.  “Bueno.  Where’s the comic book?”
I think of the eons that have passed since the play was written; the many technological innovations, language evolutions, language impairments later.  Is it really such a good idea to mainstream all these special education students?
“Let’s see,”  I scan the first page and read out loud.  “‘When the hurley burley’s done, when the battle’s lost and won’....those are the three witches.  And it is a dark and stormy night.”
“‘Fair is foul and foul is fair.’  You really can’t understand those witches, that’s spooky too”
  I skip a few pages.  And now someone is talking about Macbeth.....‘For brave Macbeth - well he deserves that name - disdaining fortune - with is brandish’d steel, which smoked bloody execution’.....etc. etc. etc., so he got his sword out........’till he unseam’d him from nave to chaps’.....so he cut his enemy from here to here.”  I show her and her eyes widen.
  “And fix’d his head upon battlements’......yeah, and then he cuts the head off his enemy and puts it on....” I search for a good word for “battlements”....”on the fence to scare everyone else off.”
“Wow,” she says.  This story is better than she thought.
“He was a bad dude, you’d want to stay away from him.”
Alicia nods solemnly.  She knows all about bad dudes.  
I look up at the clock, determined to get her back to class in five minutes.
“Let’s see, now Macbeth meets the three witches who are sitting around in that spooky forest by their witches’ pot.  They tell him he is going to be king but he doesn’t believe them.  And then he goes home and, oh wow, here comes Lady Macbeth.  Now, she is a piece of work, a really awful woman.  You’d want to stay away from her.”
Alicia nods solemnly.  She knows all about bad chicks.
I read, “‘Glamis thou art, Cawdor; shalt be.  What thou art promised, yet I do fear thy nature; it is too full of the milk of human kindess.’  She is telling him that he is too nice and won’t be able to kill the king.”  
I skip to the end and read the last line of Act I.  “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.’  Okay, that’s it.  She has convinced him to kill the king.  Here’s a pass back to class.”
      Danielle bumps into Alicia at the doorway.  Danielle is a mountain of a girl with a ready smile, always carrying a pile of books and notebooks that precede her into a room.  And just when I think I’ll have to call her grandmother again about the combined smoke and sweat smell that makes me gag, she comes in wearing a new cranberry skirt, a nice pressed shirt and clean hair tied back with a red ribbon.
“Valentine’s Day,” I say, “All dressed up for someone?”
She blushes and sits at the round desk, taking out the novel she has to read.  She perches it on her stomach and I watch from the sidelines, her sloping double chin, glasses pushed down her nose, ankes crossed.  She is wearing shiny Mary Jane shoes with little bows.  I wait for awhile but don’t hear any pages turning.  
“How’s it going?”  I ask.
Her voice is a little leaden.  “It’s going all right.”
“What book?”  I ask.
“Catcher in the Rye.”
“Where’s the comic book?”  
I have to keep myself amused here or I will go nuts. 
“There’s a comic book?”  she asks.
“Just joking,” I say.
Danielle stares at the book some more.
After a few minutes, I ask, “How’s it going now?”
“Have you read this?”  she asks timidly.
“Old JD?  Yeah,” I say.  
How big are the academic leaps I have to take here?  The Learning Center presents the challenge that the teacher in charge has to explain every subject area at every grade level in a way that every learning disabled student can comprehend.  From Shakespeare, the raffish wordsmith, writing for an unruly mob at the Globe Theatre to JD Salinger, morosely staring out the window of his Upper West Side pied-a-terre onto Central Park, all before nine in the morning.  I take another swig of my coffee and sit at the round table next to Danielle.
Her assignment is to write a summary of what amounts to the first half of the book.  I grab a piece of paper and begin to write the translation which she will then copy and turn in.  It is a shortcut, but the novel is so dense that I can’t think of any other way to get the assignment completed.  In theory, special education teachers are supposed to “differentiate” instruction, a phrase that one theorist called “an elegant intervention”.  I look around the classroom at the shit-brown curtains, the beat up desks, the boarded up window, the heater that is barely cranking out enough heat and think about the elegant office at the elegant ivy league school where this theory originated.   In a class of thirty unruly students, a mainstream teacher is supposed to mount as many differentiated lessons as suits the learning needs of as many special education students that are mainstreamed into the room five times a day, five days a week.  Where are the comic books?
“Let’s see,” I say, “it starts off with this kid talking.  Holden (not a name anyone here would have) is jealous of his brother in Hollywood and then he tells us he hates school (who doesn’t?) and then he tells us he hates football (not like here) and that he is the captain of the fencing team.”  
I look at Danielle.  “Do you know what fencing is?”
She hesitates.  “Like swords?”
“Very good!”  I say, turning the page quickly to get it done with.        A lot of swords in high school curriculum.  “Oh no!  Then it says that he actually gets kicked out of school because he failed all his classes (although his rich parents will just find another fancy boarding school so it is really no big deal).   Then he goes to say goodbye to his history teacher.  The teacher is really old and has a cold and gives Holden a hard time about failing all his classes. Holden tells us he hates the teacher even though he knows the teacher really cares about him.  There.  All done.”
I finish writing the summary on a piece of paper and Danielle starts to copy it.  I am not going to let JD Salinger, screwing barely legal age ingenues, ruin Danielle’s chance of graduation.  Not let him spoil the walking down the aisle to get her diploma, the turning of the tassel on the cap, the throwing it in the air.  Not let master class bastard JD, ruin her graduation party with her grandma, aunties, kissing cousins taking her graduation picture with their cell phones, hanging the diploma in a frame from CVS.  Danielle spends the rest of the period dutifully copying.
Sandra is weeping at her desk when I walk into another Special Ed classroom for my second period.  Voluptuous, moist, heartrending sobs, the rose bouquet flung down beside her.  I imagine a broken heart, unrequited love.  
Instead, the teacher who is leaving says, “I’m keeping her in for break, she threw a piece of candy and it hit me in the eye.”  
He’s a new teacher, old but new, a talker, a gesturer, who encourages a lot of discussion.  “Luckily, I was wearing my glasses.”  
Sandra weeps - head downon her desk, long, dark hair covering her face.  Her faithful friend, K.K., by her side.
Ronnie comes in and refuses to sit in his assigned seat, preferring one seat over today.  I tell him where to sit.  He refuses.  It is all very scientific, my seating arrangement, designed to discourage the chattering, isolate the lewd, the smelly, the jokers, the players, the masturbators.  Ronnie is one who occupies a corner seat in my mind.  He looks like the missing link.  Creationists need only look to see the falsity of their claims.  He has Neanderthal arms, two chipmunk front teeth, beady eyes and a slanting forehead.  He is wearing a black ski cap, the one favored by all thieves and thugs.  I weigh the battle with Ronnie.  I envision him in the seat he has chosen.  I let go of my seating chart but not the cap.  It’s one thing to have those beady eyes looking at me, another to have them framed in that cap.
“Take it off,” I say.
He won’t.
“Take it off.”
He won’t.
I go to my desk to get the referral.  He takes it off and throws it on his desk.
“But I’m not working today,” he threatens.
As if I care.  He pulls out black gloves and puts them on.
I look over to Sandra.  All tears dried up, she is happily chatting with K.K.  Then David stumbles in, shoes laces untied, he lurches towards me, holding an apple covered in goo.
“I bought you an apple!”  he exclaims.
“Oh how nice, for Valentine’s Day?”
David is the one that Mexican mammas pray for in church.  Their eyes full of tears, in their solemn rebozos, gazing up at Jesus on the cross.  David, a Latin American birth, no oxygen, a poor lamb transported through a veil of tears, a living reminder of our Lord’s suffering.
“I bought you an apple,” he repeats and holds it out to me and I see it is not goo but frosting as he is trying to walk, hold the apple and eat a bun all at the same time.  He walks on a forward slant, his torso simultaneously moving side to side like a windmill.  I am backing away as he is crazily advancing.  I feel slightly nauseous, remembering the time he vomited projectiles of sour spit in my path.
“Slow down.  Slow down,” I say and he comes to a stop like a jalopy, all the parts quivering.
“How about putting the apple on my desk?”  I suggest.
He tries to set it down and it jerks around on the desk a few times.
“Here comes Sargent Shaky,”  says Ronnie.
“Shut up, Stupid Face,” says David in his garbled voice.
I watch until he makes it to his desk in the back of the room.  He occupies another corner in my mind.  I hold my breath as he turns and somehow flings himself into his seat.  David likes me even though I basically ignore him.  He can’t hold a pencil, he can’t read, I can’t understand him most of the time and when I can, he annoys me.
We begin Silent Reading, a time when most of them have a little siesta behind their propped up books and I take a break.  Ronnie starts off with the comic book opened, forgetting his claim that he won’t do any work, but soon, with slightly agape mouth, his head lolls back, exposing ugly acne welts boiling under his chin, then his head falls to the side, he readjusts with a start and finally, his head goes down on the comic book.  Soon, he is snoring.  Usually, I let sleeping dogs lie, but not when they snore.  I go to his desk, with the whole class watching, and do what just a few years ago I wouldn’t imagine doing.  I lift up the front of the desk, just a bit and drop it back down.  I note how my moral fiber is fraying after the accretion over the years of special ed vomit, farts, belches, coughs, curses.  I lift the desk a bit higher, pause for effect, a warning to all, and drop it.  Ronnie bolts up.
“We’re reading,”  I say, an activity he has probably never awoken to before. 
Sandra giggles.  K.K. chortles.
“Stupid Face,”  David intones from the back.  

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