Among School Children by Tracy Kidder Page A

She tried to guard against continuing at home the mannerisms of her school life. Sometimes, though, she'd enter the house and start giving Billy step-by-step instructions about some household chore, or she'd start wagging an index finger at him—her "teacher finger," as she said—and she wouldn't realize what she was doing until Billy said, "Chris? I'm not one of your students, Chris."
    But if she could not always get completely untangled from her teacher self, she always felt relieved to get back to the kind of visible order in which she had been raised. Her neighborhood was just a few minutes from the Flats but a world away. People here pruned their shrubbery, mowed small front lawns and larger back yards, and kept up modest houses like her own. Her brick house, built in the 1950s, had previously belonged to a pediatrician. Not long ago a Puerto Rican family had moved in a few blocks away, and they had told Chris that an anonymous caller had welcomed them to the neighborhood by asking, "Can I get you to burn down some buildings for me?" But in general, serenity reigned on her street, and inside her house. Chris often said that her house was a mess. Her standards were high. She and her once-a-week cleaning woman kept it very neat. Last year cockroaches had invaded classrooms at Kelly School, and Billy had made her leave her bookbag outside the front door of their house, just in case she had brought home more than a few worries and mannerisms.

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    The year was in full swing now, days going by like a blurred landscape out the windows of a train. It was dark outside when she started her homework around seven o'clock, after washing the dishes and helping Billy put their children to bed. The beige carpeting in the dining room was soft under her stockinged feet. The wallpaper was of a calm pattern and cool colors, dark blue flowers against a white background. She sat at a round table made of blond oak, her grandmother's table. She remembered sliding around on her bottom under it, playing cowboys and Indians as a child.
    Chris would spread her texts, planning and grading books, and yellow legal pad on the table. First she would plan for about an hour. Then she would begin to correct papers, and, one by one, her class would file into this quiet, orderly room. Here many problems seemed manageable, or at least she could imagine that she had time to work on every child's problems. As the evening wore on and she felt the first wave of sleepiness, she would lift her eyes from a student's paper and the child's face would rise, too. She could see the face of the child whose paper she corrected, the child's face framed against the blackened panes of the small, many-mullioned windows of the dining room.
    A stack of social studies tests lay before her on the table, slippery sheets of ditto paper, the questions in purple ink—fill-in-the-blanks questions that asked for definitions of terms such as "Tory." The test closed, as always, with an essay question; the children had to describe briefly a Famous Patriot. She stared at the stack of tests for a moment. "Do I want to?" she murmured to herself, and took the first test, Arabella's, off the pile. Chris's pen made a one-part scratching sound, inscribing red C's down most of the page, and she began to smile.
    "84 = B," Chris wrote across the top of Arabella's test. Sturdy, big-boned Arabella. Happy Arabella. Arabella's mother had told Chris that the girl was born smiling and hadn't stopped since. Arabella lived in the Flats. At Kingdom Hall, Arabella had acquired the habit of thanking God—for her parents, who always knew what was best for her; for her family's duplex and its two kitchens; for making her pretty; for the boy she saw at church, who, Arabella felt sure, liked her. As soon as she learned something, she was disposed to feel thankful for it. Arabella had made a lot of progress this fall. She had begun to learn to write coherently, and Chris had been able to promote her