Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder Mrs. Zajac wasn’t born yesterday. She knows you didn’t do your best work on this paper, Clarence. Don’t you remember Mrs. Zajac saying that if you didn’t do your best, she’d make you do it over? As for you, Claude, God forbid that you should ever need brain surgery. But Mrs. Zajac hopes that if you do, the doctor won’t open up your head and walk off saying he’s almost done, as you just said when Mrs. Zajac asked you for your penmanship, which, by the way, looks like you did it and ran. Mrs. Zajac means business, Robert. The sooner you realize she never said everybody in the room has to do the work except for Robert, the sooner you’ll get along with her. Mrs. Zajac’s been teaching an awful lot of years. She didn’t fall off the turnip cart yesterday. She told you she was an old-lady teacher.
She was thirty-four. She wore a white skirt and yellow sweater and a thin gold necklace, which she held in her fingers, as if holding her own reins, while waiting for children to answer. Her hair was black with a hint of Irish red. Although her voice sounded conversational, it had projection. She had never acted. She had found this voice in the classrooms.
Mrs. Zajac seemed to have a frightening amount of energy. She strode across the room, her arms swinging high and her hands in small fists. Taking her stand in front of the green chalkboard, discussing the rules with her new class, she repeated sentences, and her lips held the shapes of certain words, such as “homework,” after she had said them. Her hands kept very busy. They sliced the air and made karate chops to mark off boundaries. They extended straight out like a traffic cop’s, halting illegal maneuvers yet to be perpetrated. She told the children, “One thing Mrs. Zajac expects from each of you is that you do your best.” She said, “Mrs. Zajac gives homework. I’m sure you’ve all heard. The old meanie gives homework.” Mrs. Zajac. It was in part a role. She worked her way into it every September.
At home on late summer days, Christine Zajac wore shorts or blue jeans. Although there was no dress code for teachers at Kelly School, she always went to work in skirts or dresses. She dressed as if she were applying for a job, and hoped in the back of her mind that someday, heading for job interviews, her students would remember her example. Outside school, she wept easily over small and large catastrophes and at sentimental movies, but never cried in front of students, except once a few years ago when the news came over the intercom that the Space Shuttle had exploded and Christa McAuliffe had died—and then she saw in her students’ faces that the sight of Mrs. Zajac crying had frightened them, and she made herself stop and then explained.
At home, Christine laughed at the antics of her infant daughter and egged the child on. But especially on the first few days of school, she didn’t let her students get away with much. She was not amused when, for instance, on the first day, two of the boys started dueling with their rulers.
On nights before the school year started, Christine used to have bad dreams: her principal would come to observe her, and her students would choose that moment to climb up on their desks . . . or they would simply wander out the door. But a child in her classroom would never know that Mrs. Zajac had the slightest doubt that students would obey her. The first day, after going over all the school rules, Christine spoke to them about effort. “If you put your name on a paper, you should be proud of it,” she said. “You should think, ‘This is the best I can do and I’m proud of it and I want to hand this in.’” Then she asked, “If it isn’t your best, what’s Mrs. Zajac going to do?” Many voices, most of them female, answered softly in unison, “Make us do it over.” “Make you do it over,” Christine repeated. It sounded like a chant.