The test

They were scribbling away--actually scribbling in some cases, and I wanted to kill myself--when I saw one of them pause, and breathe out gently, as though something had come to mind. This boy, who drives me crazy--but whom I have a great affection for--swung on his chair a little, stretched out his right arm--and then deliberately, carefully, rapt in it, brought his fourpen up to meet his crossing eyes, and balanced it across the bridge of his nose. 

He slipped at first, and the fourpen dropped. But he caught it and replaced it and this time he made it stick. He was completely oblivious to the rest of us. How could he know we were watching? His eyes were occupied. No one was speaking. Most were writing; the rest looked with a slow curiosity. The pen swayed a little, a short see-saw on its fulcrum. 

I've never seen him concentrate like that before. I couldn't do it. I know: I tried later, instead of correcting his essay. (Well--role modeling works both ways.)

Time passed. I crossed the quarter hours off on the board and their essays lengthened from a half, to one, to two pages, to three. Then, at no special moment, he dropped his head. The biro fell away from proboscis to palm; he started to write again.

I knew that this student hadn't prepared adequately for the task, and he wasn't really breaking any rules, and he wasn't really disturbing anyone, either. I had glanced at his work, and he had written about as much as I had expected. So I didn't feel the need to interrupt the project. But here's the lesson for me--he wrote for another twenty minutes. My expectations were totally wrong. Whatever he was doing, it worked. And I-- I was ready to let him be! Shame on me! Getting soft.

The bell tolled as it inevitably does. I let them out, save for one, who was still looking from bicep to bicep with his sleeves rolled up. 

Later in the evening, after dark, when all the parents had gone home from the information evening and the displays had been taken down, the pizza boxes thrown away, the doors shut and lights turned out, gates padlocked and bags packed--seven of us found ourselves locked inside the school. "See you bright and early guys!" called J-- from the other side of the wire, and none of us had the wit to do anything but stand there dumbly--dim and dimlit. We wandered through the school like a posse at Timezone interactive laser, fumbling at doorhandles. One of them opened, then another, then eventually we fell out into the carpark--refuse from a trap in the side of a ship, a clump that then drifts apart on the black.