City Kid

“Telker? Terrific if you need an easy B. Never gives anything lower.”

I wondered if the teachers knew their reputations were graven into oral history and available to anyone who listened.

Still, registration was always tedious, sometimes traumatic. We were classified like so many potatoes. With us, the identifying characteristic was the first initial of our last names. On the first day of registration names beginning with A through F were admitted; on the second day, G through L; on the third, M through R; and on the fourth, S through Z. The following semester the order would be reversed. Patiently we lined the walks and stairs and halls of the student union, where various rooms and floors had been partitioned into cubicles representing different courses. The faculty took turns at the adviser’s desk.

To actually get in the front door, an hour process in itself, took two things, your student identification card and your social security number. Nobody cared what your name was, only what letter it began with, to make sure you were with the right potatoes. After that you were known by your social security number. I wondered, as I stood waiting in boredom, if I could find my numerical relatives by adding up my digits and matching the total results. If I was a 46, who were the other members of my clan? Were there 42’s and 48’s around me? I contemplated the girl ahead of me, her hair combed into a high Afro; maybe she was a generic 40.

Behind me a red-haired woman in her twenties shifted from foot to foot. “What’s taking so long? Christ! If Statistics is filled by the time I get there, I’ll kill myself. I only need six more credits, but that one’s required. I’ll have to come back to this hole again next semester if I can’t get that course.” I understood. I had some required courses myself. If I didn’t get them I could quit, I told myself. I could stop taking these inane courses … but what about teaching? What about the children?

Inside, we raced frantically from booth to booth, checking our catalogs against our schedules.

Working with schedule sheets and catalog in hand, I was trying to keep to my plan of double certification (in both elementary and special ed), which meant I had a lot of courses to fit in. Trouble came when the course planned for 10:40 or 11:40 turned out to be filled; then there was a scramble for the catalog. What else have they got at that hour that’s required? Teaching math. Great. Nope – turned out it wasn’t allowed.

“You don’t have the prerequisite. You have to complete Background of Math Two first. Sorry, it’s the rule,” said the graduate student manning the booth.

The rules! I was beginning to understand the frustrations of some of my natural-born children and their friends. It had been different in a small private college like Wellesley, where students were honestly seen as individuals, or at least they had been twenty years ago. But in a state college like the one I was attending, there were no exceptions. As long as it came out right on the computer, it was okay. (Computers don’t make exceptions.)

Well, Statistics and Orientation to Psychological Testing didn’t have a prerequisite – and what’s more, it was required and met only once a week, on Thursdays from 4:00 to 6:30. I signed up. Finally, my spring schedule was complete: Counseling and Guidance for the Handicapped; Current Methods of Teaching Mentally Challenged Adolescents; History of Education in the United States; Background of Mathematics II; Statistics and Orientation to Psychological Testing; and a Practicum in Teaching Reading to the Mentally Chalenged. All required courses.

Schedule and course sheet in hand, I headed for Professor Foster’s office. I had discovered at registration that he had been assigned as my adviser and his signature was required on my completed course schedule. A stroke of luck to get him, I was told. He was considered one of the best.

Foster’s office door stood open and he sat with his feet on the desk, chair tipped back against the wall.

“Professor Foster?” I asked from the hall. “I’m Mary MacCracken. Could I see you for a minute about signing my course schedule?”

“Mary MacCracken? Where the hell do you keep yourself? I’ve been trying to locate you for weeks. Ever since I discovered you’d been a teacher at Doris Fleming’s school and have over six years’ experience with emotionally disturbed kids. Is that right?”

I nodded.

“Well, come in. Sit down.” He lifted a pile of journals from a chair beside the desk. “Do you ever hear from Doris? I’ve been out to that school several times. Damn good reputation, even before it got state approval. Those are tough kids. When did you teach there?”

“Until last year.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Trying to get certified.”

“Ah, I get it. Last year is when the state approval came in, right? No tickee, no job, eh?”

I nodded.

“Well, Doris is a tough old war-horse, but she kept that school alive when no one else could.”

“Yes, she taught me a great deal.” Glad that I could say it. That the hurt of having to leave was easing.

“Okay now,” Foster said, “let’s get down to business. We have come up with a terrific idea.”

“We?”

“Yeah. Bernie Serino and me and the Falls City Mental Health Clinic. You know Bernie?”

“Yes. He was supervisor of special ed when I was teaching and helped me get one of my kids back into a regular class in junior high.”

“Yeah. Well, Bernie and I have lunch every Wednesday. A little business, a little pleasure. We’ve known each other a long time.

“In some of the districts they’re having a hell of a time with the younger kids. Not just truancy, you expect that, but stealing, setting fires, drugs – you name it. So what happens, they call the school social worker or psychologist, she adds a name to her list. Then the truant officer, they call him something fancier, but I don’t remember what it is, checks in. Nine times out of ten he comes back and says it’s a ‘broken home,’ either the father’s skipped or nobody knew who he was. All they got is uncles, Uncle This and Uncle That. Every time Mom gets a new boyfriend, the kids get a new uncle. Convenient, but unstable.

“So they have a conference and call up Bernie and tell him they need ‘special services.’ Well, about the only ‘special services’ Bernie’s got any connection to where he might get help for these kids is the Mental Health Clinic. They’re a good bunch, working hard in the community, but they got an even longer waiting list than the school social worker.”

He paused and I asked what he knew I would ask.

“What happens?”

“What happens?” Professor Foster banged his feet to the floor and leaned toward me.

“Same damn thing happens every time. By June the kid has moved up to number thirty on the waiting list. He’s been picked up by the police, taken to court, warned and fined, and released. The school year ends and the whole thing begins all over again the next fall.”

I said nothing. I sat looking at my hands, feeling the old familiar sadness as I heard about the children. What sense did it make? Any satisfaction I had felt at completing registration faded. What was I doing here in this college memorizing the commutative, associative, distributive mathematical properties and the content and study skills of reading?

I was so deep in my own thoughts that I missed the first few words or sentences of Professor Foster’s next statement, tuning in when he got to “… the Mental Health Clinic has gotten a grant to put ‘therapeutic tutors’ into one of the schools in Falls City on a trial basis. Bernie’s agreed and picked the school and I’ve offered to supply the therapeutic tutors.”

“What’s a therapeutic tutor?” I interrupted.

“Somebody who’s good with kids. What else? You can hear it in fancy words later. So what do you say?”

“It sounds like a good idea from what you’ve told me.”

“No. Not that. Will you do it? Be a tutor?”

“Me?” I couldn’t believe it. I answered instantly before he could change his mind. “I’d love to. Where do I go?”

Professor Foster smiled at me. “Don’t you want to know about credits – hours?”

I looked down, embarrassed and immediately shy. I had been too eager, revealed too much. I nodded.

“Well, first there’ll be training sessions at the clinic. Then you’ll see your child three times a week for about fifty minutes each session. Eventually you’ll have three children.”

In my mind’s eye, I could see the schedule of courses that I had just completed. Falls City was about twenty minutes from the campus; that would mean another forty minutes each time I went down. There wasn’t a day when there was a block of time long enough. Wordlessly I handed Professor Foster my schedule.

He studied it briefly, then whacked it down on the table.

“What the hell is this? How could you sign up for classes before you checked with me? Am I your adviser or not? Why didn’t you ask for advice?

“Never mind,” Foster said after a minute, picking up my schedule. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to yell. Let’s see what we can do.” He studied it closely and then grinned at me. “At least you’ve got good taste, picking ‘Counseling and Guidance for the Handicapped’ – that’s mine. Unfortunately, it’s only a two-credit course, but at least that gives us a couple of hours to play with. Mmm-de-dum-dum.”

Professor Foster hummed to himself as he flipped through catalog pages, checking them against course requirements and my own schedule. Finally, he looked up at me and said, “That’ll do it. Drop History of Ed and take Independent Study in its place and spend the time of my course at School Twenty-three and you’ll be all set.”

“What’s Independent Study? And what do I do about History?”