McFarlane Elementary School, Redstone, Westsylvania, Year 5
“Looking forward to the new term, Lou?”
Louisa bristled inwardly at Gemma’s shortening of her name. As the blinds she had been peering through snapped shut at the removal of her fingers, she allowed herself a moment of resentment, but when she turned from the window it was with a bright smile. Gemma was the Vice-Principal now; it might only have been a few years since Louisa had trained her, but Gemma was nothing if not ambitious.
She had told herself very firmly this morning not to get off on the wrong foot with Gemma at the very start of the school year. “Definitely,” she said. “I think the curriculum changes are going to go very smoothly with my first graders.”
“Anything going on out there?” Gemma nodded towards the window.
“Not that I could see,” Louisa said. “I think folks round here get it.”
“On the TV this morning there were huge protests in some of the big cities,” Gemma said. “They had footage of people in New York who claimed to be parents and teachers stopping people getting to work.”
“You would think New York, of all places …” The horror of the Times Square Incident was still burned into Louisa’s brain: the famous photograph of broken bodies, twisted into impossible shapes, beneath the advertising hoarding which had been changed to say “Repent Now”, somehow still illuminated despite the electricity having been cut early on in the hours-long ordeal. The accounts of the survivors invariably made death, even as grisly and gruesome a death as the victims suffered, seem the preferable option.
Even then it had taken three copycat attacks in Paris, Moscow and Nairobi before the world had taken action against the emerging threat.
“It will be quite an adjustment for some of the older students,” Gemma said. Louisa remembered when Gemma had called them “kids” like everybody else. “But then I suppose that’s not–“
Louisa was grateful when the bell went, giving her the excuse to escape whatever Gemma had been about to say next, and the conversation in general. She headed out to collect her new class, the first ones she’d ever taught who hadn’t had their minds polluted even a tiny little bit.
The new first graders were the usual mixture of eager beavers and nervous wrecks. She’d seen them around last year when they were kindergarteners, and spent a couple of transition days with them at the end of the last academic year. But this was different, they would all be spending the bulk of their waking hours together for the next ten months. It was important to set expectations early.
Louisa clapped her hands briskly and was pleased to see a line of faces turn her way. She harrumphed loudly and the one boy at the back who was still looking to where his mother was waiting outside the gates turned round, shame-faced. It was much easier when the parents made a quick exit after dropping their offspring off, but given that it was the first day Louisa decided it wasn’t too big a deal.
“Well then, class,” she said, projecting her voice out across the yard, “as most of you know, I’m Miss Kendrick. I hope you’re all as excited to start first grade as I am. Let’s head inside.”
The rest of the time until recess proceeded in the usual blur of helping the kids figure out the seating plan, issuing books, checking that they’d brought the right equipment with them from home — there were the usual handful that she could already tell she’d have to be signposting assistance programs to their parents, a much larger proportion whose parents just weren’t organised, and a few who actually had got everything the letter they’d had over the summer told them to.
“My mom took me shopping and I picked them all myself,” one girl said, laying out an array of pencils in every colour of the rainbow and a few more besides, each sparkling with the glitter attached to their shafts.
“That’s lovely …”–Louisa glanced down at her I always take it desk to consult the seating plan–“… Sophia.”
“I’m Soph,” the girl said primly. “Sophia Grimshaw is Sophia.” She smiled. “We got that figured out the first week of kindergarten.” Some of the other kids were nodding along, as though this were a matter of great importance.
Louisa looked at the seating plan again, crossing out the “ia” at the end of her name with mock solemnity. “Duly noted.”
By lunchtime, Louisa was well on her way with getting their names straight in her head. Her usual tactic of assigning alliterative nicknames was not letting her down so far — so far there was Sparkly-pencils Soph, her alter ego who turned out to have a cold and so became Sniffy Sophia, Brave Billy from the back of the line who was still very obviously wishing he was back home but trying his best, Clever Charlie who had already recited at least a dozen dinosaur facts, and Princess Patty with the huge pink bow in her hair.
When they came back from lunch, it was time for the first actual lessons to begin. Nothing too strenuous for the first day, it was about getting into routines as much as anything else. First came English, which mostly consisted of her reading them a story and then asking them to draw how they’d imagined the main character. That netted her another nickname, Eloquent Eloise who had gone into huge detail in explaining her particular vision.
Then it was time for Essential Numeracy. Unlike some of her colleagues, Louisa was genuinely open to the new curriculum, not just as an important public safety measure but because it was so much better structured and easier to teach. She started as the materials described, by writing the numbers 1 to 10 on the board.
“Please, Miss Kendrick,” said Clever Charlie, “I can count to a hundred and two.”
“That’s lovely dear,” she said, “but we’re focusing on the first ten today. Can you copy these down and write their names underneath?”
“If you can count to a hundred and two you can count to nine hundred and ninety nine,” Sparkly-pencils Soph said, “and then if you know about a thousand, you could go all the way to nine hundred and ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine.”
Alarm bells were starting to go off. The training had been very specific about the importance during the transition of not letting the kids with prior knowledge affect the rest of the class. “That’s very advanced for first grade,” she said. “Well done.” Leaning down to speak in a whisper, she said, “But please don’t confuse the others, OK?”
Soph nodded, but Louisa could see that she wasn’t convinced. “I was just trying to help Charlie.”
“I don’t think he needs any help. Up to a hundred is plenty for first grade.”
Soph looked mutinous but nodded her assent.
The class continued without further issues as they practised counting and measuring. Right at the end, though, as she was summing up, all of a sudden, Brave Billy’s hand went high into the air. Louisa was thrilled to see him actually interacting, and turned her biggest smile on him. “Yes dear?”
“So, miss, is ten the Biggest Number?”
“Oh no,” Louisa said. “By the end of this year you’ll be able to count all the way to one hundred.”
Billy looked suitably impressed, but now Sparkly-pencils put her hand up too. Without waiting to be called on, she put in, “Please, Miss Kendrick, my brother says numbers go on forever.”
“Really? And how old is your brother?”
“He’s in fifth grade,” she said with a mixture of pride and envy. “He says you can always add one more.”
Before Louisa could respond, Soph went on, “And he says that this subject used to be called Math and the way they’re changing it is dumb and and–” The words were tumbling out of her quicker than either Louisa or, apparently, Soph herself could keep up with. This was presumably everything she’d not been saying when she had nodded along earlier.
“That’s quite enough, thank you, young lady.” She looked back to Billy, who had, quite predictably, gone all the way back into his shell after the girl’s little outburst. “Anyway, that’s enough for today. By the time you’ve got everything packed away it will be time to go home.” She clapped her hands twice. “Come on, then, let’s get to it.”
She was still fuming as the kids filed out, the smile plastered on her face entirely fake. Just when she thought she could drop it, Gemma walked in. “So how was the first day?”
“Good, overall,” Louisa said guardedly.
“Overall?”
Louisa considered how much to tell her. “I should have realised there’d be older siblings.”
Gemma’s brow furrowed for a moment. “Oh, you’re talking about EN, aren’t you?”
“I was so ready for it to be a fresh start for this class, none of the ideas from the old ways of doing things. The first cohort not to have had any exposure to all that, or so I thought. I did the lesson exactly according to the plan in the pack. But by the end of it we were this close to them talking about …”–she dropped her voice to a whisper–“Infinity.”
Gemma nodded. “They’ll get there. They’re too young to really understand why it has to be changed.”
Show them the Times Square footage and that would change quickly, Louisa thought grimly. But that was a route to a mob of parents beating down her door to complain about traumatising their kids. “I suppose so,” she said. “I’ll just stick to the program.”
“Good for you,” Gemma said. “Go home and have a rest, Lou; I’ll see you in the morning.”
“See you then,” Louisa said with forced jollity. She packed away her own equipment then headed for the door. As she looked back at the classroom one more time, reciting nicknames to herself to see how much of the seating plan she already had memorised, she realised that she’d mentally reassigned one of them already.
The girl at the front with the oh-so-clever older brother wasn’t Sparkly-pencils Soph any longer, she was Smug Soph.