Crossing The Border #21
San Miguel #21
I finish the assignments in my Daily Planner at about 2:30pm, half an hour before we are to be dismissed. I look up and raise my hand. Some snickers. Augusta is at her desk, leaning toward a student sitting in the seat next to her; this is the chair all students use while being evaluated. She looks up and directly at me and I wonder how she knows I had my arm raised. From my desk across the room she looks like a tiny person. She holds her hand up, palm out, like she’s directing traffic, and looks back down at the student’s work. Five minutes later, the student walks away and she looks at me and waves her hand holding the red pen toward herself. I gather my Daily Planner and five sheets of paper and stop on the way to pick up the thick song book she has instructed each of us to bring to the final Work Review of the day on Tuesdays.
She looks through my work, the math addition and subtraction, the Spanish sentences I wrote in cursive between two solid red lines and through the middle black dashed one, the multiple choice answers at the end of a reading about a boy who completes chores around the house with his mother, the true false questions at the end of a passage taken from the Constitution of the United States of America where I came from. She marks a red check at the top of each of these, then checks off the correct boxes in the Daily Planner, looks at the assignment entries one more time, and scribbles AIdeR next to the words “Plan Completo” at the bottom. She closes the Daily Planner and looks at me.
Now we will sing stanza four of Battle Hymn of the Republic.
She opens the song book to the correct page on her first try and points to stanza four, the beginning of which reads:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of…
She sings the first word very slowly and I look around the room but only Eden is looking at me.
I begin singing with her, my voice a whisper at first, slightly delayed, mimicking hers as it rises and falls and then we are done.
I look up again and no one is looking at me, not even Eden. Augusta closes the book and looks at me.
Good work today, Misha. You have earned a silver star.
I have no idea what a silver star is, but it sounds OK.
A silver star is earned when a student finishes all of his or her work within the day in which that work was assigned. Do you understand?
If you collect fifty of these silver stars, then I will award you a gold star which means you will be allowed to leave early one day. Would you like that?
Allright then. You are now free to read anything you like until the bell rings at 3 o’clock. Dismissed.
Dismissed means you are to leave my desk now.
Never apologize for a lack of knowledge. Just gain the knowledge. Dismissed.
I gather my work and place the Daily Planner carefully on top of the pile and return the song volume to the empty space in the bookshelf where it had come from and walk to the back corner of the room to my desk. I open the drawer, place the pile of work inside, straighten the Daily Planner on top of the pile, close the drawer, sit down and look up at the clock.
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