What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [96]
Even in this prosaic terrain she remained a study of constant animation. Her red-nail-polished fingers—one with a ring set with a chunk of coral—danced in the air, as she searched this way and that to recast the lesson until certain her students had hold of it.
“I have so much fun with the kids,” she said. “I’ll put something forty ways until they get it.”
Admittedly, her methods can be unorthodox and much of her success depends on her students—and their parents—“getting her.” At Banyan, these days, that can mean bridging numerous cultural and language barriers. At the start of the school year, for instance, she watched for two weeks as a short, neatly dressed Bangladeshi woman who spoke little English followed her son, Nasra, into the classroom each morning. “Momma was happy, happy, happy,” Nancy trilled. “Every day, she’d come into the classroom and hang up Nasra’s jacket and book bag. Then, Momma would put his homework paper and pencils on his desk for him. She was sweet. She meant well, but I realized I had to step in. I said, ‘Momma, Nasra must do it himself.’ She looked at me, puzzled. I said to her, “If you do it, in third grade, children will laugh, Ha ha ha, at Nasra!” I hated to say it, but I had to. The next day, Momma started to walk into the classroom and stopped at the door. She looked at me, and I knew it was hard for her. I put my arm around her and said, ‘Good, Momma, good.’ Now, I knew we had only dealt with part of the problem. Nasra is a big boy, but still he sat at his desk, hunched over and cowering.
“Then one day, when one of the other kids answered something easy incorrectly, I did one of my dumb brick things, something that will probably get me in trouble one day. I said, ‘I’m going to throw a brick at you for that,’ and I hurled an imaginary brick. And all of a sudden, this big belly laugh came out of Nasra, ‘Ho, ho, ho.’ I didn’t even know he was capable of laughing like that. But the brick thing did it. It opened him up. One day, he said, ‘Mrs. G, maybe two bricks.’ I said, ‘You’re right, Nasra, maybe two.’ I made him my cohort. ‘Bam! Bam!’ Lots of laughter.”
A little while passed, and then one day, Nasra pulled his teacher aside when he came into class: “Mrs. G, I made something for you.”
“Oh, yeah, what’d you make me?”
“It shoots three bricks!” he said, offering only his imagination as evidence.
“How does it work?” Nancy asked.
“Put a brick and a brick and a brick, like this, pull back the lever, and let go,” he said, conjuring his contraption in the air and flashing a collusive smile at his teacher.
“When the kids said something really dumb that day, I turned to Nasra and I said, ‘Now?’ He nodded. ‘One, two, three,’ I said. No one else knew what I was doing, but he was dying with laughter. And from then on, he just opened up. When his parents dropped him off today, they told me how much Nasra loves me and how happy he is and how much he has changed. You know, those are the things. You do nine things wrong and then you do one good and right. These things don’t show up in the curriculum, but they’re often what matters most.”
The first day I visited, Nancy was not about to let the opportunity of having a writer in her class go unused. With a persuasiveness that was impossible to resist, she asked me to tell her class how I became a writer. I first became interested in writing, I told them, when I was eight, in third grade, and lived just thirty minutes away from Tamarac, in Hollywood. In 1958, my older brother Geoff and his best friend Buddy Nevins started a newspaper and enlisted me as their reporter. I wrote one story that got a lot of attention. It was about a boy who leaped from a dresser onto his parents’ bed while playing Zorro. The